I was perusing some new free to play games on Steam the other day and I ended up trying this new shooter from Neowiz Games called Black Squad. It’s a very traditional Korean lobby based tactical shooter that plays almost exactly like Combat Arms or Alliance of Valiant Arms. Everything from the game’s interface to to core gameplay mechanics reminds me of other Korean tactical shooters. Despite not offering anything new the game had over 13,000 concurrent users. Those numbers came down a bit of the last week, but it still gets 7,000 – 10,000 concurrent players. Compare that to the recent open beta of Lawbreakers, an innovative new arena shooter from Boss Key Studios / Nexon which only got 4,500 or so concurrent users and quickly fell off each day of the open beta. How is it that this buy to play FPS that had a significant budget got so outperformed by a run of the mill lobby based shooter? Argo performed equally poorly on Steam despite offering an innovative new experience with an emphasis on realism. I think it’s because despite “generic” being a negative adjective for games it’s what people actually want. Continue reading →