When Krafton's highly anticipated life simulation game, InZOI landed on Steam Early Access on March 28, its peak online number of 87,377 people on the first day was shocking. This new game, called The Sims 4 challenger by players, caused heated discussions before its release due to its exquisite character customization system and unique narrative mechanism. However, the latest data shows that InZOI is now experiencing a worrying problem of player loss.
It is normal for a game to have a certain degree of player churn after release, but is a precipitous drop like InZOI common in similar games? The conclusion drawn by comparison is no. Admittedly, among the popular games on Steam in the past, there are some games that started high and ended low like InZOI, and some games even lost players faster than it, such as Palworld, but in more cases, the player loss rate of most games is much milder than InZOI.
In Steam comment area, the frequent appearance of the comment of lack of deep content may explain this abnormal performance. Although it has received mostly positive reviews, players have said that a lack of content currently available is an important reason for their disappointment. This is true, because all the core content of the current version of InZOI is obviously not enough for a life simulation game.
But then again, the developer should have expected this situation a long time ago. As an early access version, InZOI may only show the tip of the iceberg of its complete game. They plan to launch more content in the coming months to meet the needs of players.
It is worth pondering that this phenomenon of players' backlash due to high expectations is not uncommon in the gaming industry. Looking back at the painful lessons of the past, the real test for InZOI is still to come. If subsequent updates do not receive good reviews from players, the continuous loss of players will put the game in a bigger predicament.
When The Sims series failed to meet the needs of players in a timely manner, causing them to be dissatisfied, InZOI proved its potential as a substitute for The Sims 4 with amazing art performance and innovative social systems, but there is still a lot to be improved in the future, and we look forward to it doing better.