COH2 sold 4 million units in 2014

so only 11.2% of owners have completed the campaign? that's pretty crappy.

I wouldn't say so.

- plenty of people switching from COH1 to COH2, mainly for PvP or AI bash mp.
- standalone expansions that don't require the main game, nor offer a campaign.
- OKW was in humble bundle (also no campaign)
- and last but not least, the majority of players never ever finish their game (or play it in the first place). And when i look at my Steam library i kinda have to admit there's some truth in it.

Neat article about the last part:
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/TECH/gaming.gadgets/08/17/finishing.videogames.snow/

So 11.2% finishing the campaign is actually quite good (in theory)

Aside from some of the other points established in this thread, I feel like the steep learning curve and unforgiving gameplay of RTS', especially those made by Relic are the main reason most people won't stay and play.

I definitely was turned off of vCoH after only a few online matches and resigned myself to compstomps and the fantastic campaigns the first game offered. The same thing happened when DoW2 first launched, and until Chaos Rising came out and I forced myself to play through loss after loss I never fully enjoyed the online scene in RTS'.

These games take a substantial amount of trial and error to find out the nuances and techniques that are required to gain competency and confidence in your play. Your average gamer is not going to jump into multiplayer and suffer harsh losses and still have the desire to sit through 20-40minutes of games and replays, or go online to read about how to improve on their mistakes.

Having said all this, while this game has it's flaws(in design and application) I'm still happy to see it receive success both financially and in terms of increased playerbase. Most games lose players over time, but a jump of 2000 average players in it's second year is somewhat impressive considering the massive amount of flak it has received for (unfounded imo) pay to win allegations and the Russian boycott for the campaign.

True. Had this problem both with vcoh and dow2, started playing, thought that I don't like it, then came back more than year after and started playing for real. CoH2 was different as I bought pre-order (couse I already knew vcoh pretty well) so I played campaign once and then moved to multiplayer.

As for those new 2000 avarage plateyers it was possible basically because of wfa, they opened up on new market of us players who cannot identify with any of basic factions who are still considered as foes in usa. Only the possibility to play usf gave them a chance to play a game for a while and discover what it really is. Then, with some abilities and treating factions as game factions not real life factions they could move to playing soviets or okw. On the other hand lots of them are still playing usf exclusively...

1,686 sales per average player increase vs. 40 players per average player increase is a massive difference - if CoH2 had that rate, it would have 103,100 average daily players right now and be the third-most-popular game on Steam - and it shows that CSGO is much better at retaining its sales as active players than CoH2 is. The reason for that is no doubt complex and not easily summarized, but it's still an interesting fact to consider.

It is interesting and it would be cool to know why. I guess because coh require higher specs and I'm pretty positive alot of the people who bought it realised just afterwards that they couldn't actually play it with their computer. Also, coh is complex and has a Learning curve. CSGO is an instant headshot-gratification no-brain small sized FPS game. And we know people like first person shooters. Like Losttruppen writes:

These games take a substantial amount of trial and error to find out the nuances and techniques that are required to gain competency and confidence in your play. Your average gamer is not going to jump into multiplayer and suffer harsh losses and still have the desire to sit through 20-40minutes of games and replays, or go online to read about how to improve on their mistakes.

(continued...)
I DON'T Believe they didn't play (aka "left") because "omg where is US Heavy tank!?". People knowing stuff discussed on these boards, even finding their way here, are deeply invested in the game, and most gamers aren't. We are the fanatics and our frustrations are likely not felt by most others, because they haven't played enough to notice.

You've never played CS if you think it has less of a learning curve than CoH2 does. Sure, you can just jump in and deathmatch easily, but competitive play is very difficult to get into and excel at. In spite of that, CSGO regularly has 100,000+ people searching for and playing competitive games simultaneously. These are exactly the sorts of people who would be willing to analyze their play for improvement and read online about it in their spare time.

Difficulty has nothing to do with it; as someone who has played both, CSGO is just a more gratifying experience. It involves a high degree of mechanical skill and a number of layers of strategic play that aren't immediately apparent, and even when you lose you feel a strong sense of accomplishment if you played well personally. CoH2 doesn't really have any of those (mechanical skill, layers of strategy, or accomplishment when you lose), some of which is the fault of the RTS genre while others are faults of the game's design.

You've never played CS if you think it has less of a learning curve than CoH2 does. Sure, you can just jump in and deathmatch easily, but competitive play is very difficult to get into and excel at. In spite of that, CSGO regularly has 100,000+ people searching for and playing competitive games simultaneously. These are exactly the sorts of people who would be willing to analyze their play for improvement and read online about it in their spare time.

Difficulty has nothing to do with it; as someone who has played both, CSGO is just a more gratifying experience. It involves a high degree of mechanical skill and a number of layers of strategic play that aren't immediately apparent, and even when you lose you feel a strong sense of accomplishment if you played well personally. CoH2 doesn't really have any of those (mechanical skill, layers of strategy, or accomplishment when you lose), some of which is the fault of the RTS genre while others are faults of the game's design.

I can agree on this. CS:GO took me longer to get good. After playing a 1000+ hours, I'm only managed DMG and currently MGE. +111111111111

I started playing CSGO a week ago after watching a lot of streams and it is extremely difficult, I agree. Even the basics.

Back to the topic:
I wonder if they count all the expansions into the 4 million (basic game, western front, ardennes assault etc). Because then a lot of people bought 3 copies of the game. They probably did.
I also wonder where all the people went. CS got 2 million more copies, but has around 300k people playing it most of the time, compared to CoH2s 5k.
Somebody may have said that before, I refuse to read 8 pages of forum posts

Summerized: Don't ever trust statistics that you haven't falsified yourself

Read back a few pages, I explained how they likely collected the stats. Summary is if you already owned CoH2 before you bought one of the expansions, the expansion wouldn't count as a sale, but if you didn't own CoH2 before you bought one of the expansions it would.

Anyways, for the people who think it's all about multiplayer http://www.gamesradar.com/why-are-multiplayer-only-games-such-hard-sell-just-ask-titanfall/

multiplayer-only, fully-priced games

Dota 2 and League of Legends have the massive character roster to allow for virtually endless strategic combinations, and their built-in eSports communities keep players talking about and dissecting the game.

It's almost like multiplayer games have to be deep and interesting if they want to attract large numbers of players. This article isn't saying anything about multiplayer not being important, it's saying if you're going to rely on multiplayer only, you better make it damn good.

That's what's always confused me about CoH2. Their microtransaction business model relies on a strong multiplayer community because all of their DLC is targeted at the multiplayer crowd, yet they've gone to great lengths to simplify multiplayer and remove a great deal of depth, and they've actively marginalized dedicated members of their multiplayer community that are instrumental to creating hype and attention for the game. In my eyes, the success of games like Dota 2 and LoL and CSGO is proof that people want deep, complex multiplayer games that they can sink their time into, yet Relic has taken CoH2 in the complete opposite direction.

Yet Titanfall is a FPS there are million of FPS games to play in multiplayer and most of them are cheap or free (blacklight retribution)so it is hard to break that market. Most of the time players will chose free games with microtransactions over full-priced games, because you get 100% of the game and the transactions consider mainly cosmetic stuff (yet some games can be P2W).

Anyways, for the people who think it's all about multiplayer http://www.gamesradar.com/why-are-multiplayer-only-games-such-hard-sell-just-ask-titanfall/

I'm with Inverse on this one. If Titanfall failed, it's not because it's multiplayer only, and full-priced. It's because the gameplay lacks depth and complexity.

As a side-note, I think Evolve is about to follow the same path as well unless they augment their gameplay somehow.

CoH2 carries a lot more of the depth and complexity of its predecessor than most veterans give credit but it does lack in deep strategic decision making and mind-games compared to vCoH.

Honestly, CoH1 didn't have enough depth to be a proper competitive multiplayer game with a large community like we see popping up around the most popular multiplayer games today either. But it was still deeper than CoH2 is right now, and it's unfortunate that Relic has gone in the opposite direction relative to today's market.

COH2 failed in that it was DLC focused - which in turn drove the design to be "friendly" to all players - players read as "DLC customers".

So by trying to cater to everybody - it ended up satisfying nobody.

To this day I still laugh when you see the mention of "e-sports" yet there still isn't even a competitive based Ladder in game....

COH2 hasn't failed.

I'm sure Relic would like many more such failures

COH2 hasn't failed.

I'm sure Relic would like many more such failures

\

It depends.

Number of sold copies - coh2 has not failed.

Bugs, e-sport - pure fail.

about Valve and Steam, but...

http://www.engadget.com/2015/03/13/valve-steam/

...
For a taste of what that number can mean, we turn to Sega's lawsuit with THQ over the pre-order profits from Company of Heroes 2 on Steam.

As Eurogamer reported in 2013, "There were 20,755 pre-orders for CoH2 registered through Steam from September 2012 to 24th January 2013. That generated revenue of $1,345,301.29, but, as is standard, Valve takes a 30 percent cut of Steam sales, leaving publishers and developers with 70 percent -- in this case $941k."

Approximately four months of pre-orders, totaling approximately 21K copies, brought Valve over $350K in revenue at the cost of running servers and consuming bandwidth. That's not even sales of the game, but pre-orders. And that's a single game among thousands


...

These are exactly the sorts of people who would be willing to analyze their play for improvement and read online about it in their spare time.

Some of them. There are still a lot of honest to god proper definition scrubs in all the big competitive games.

that doesnt mean 4 million will all be playing at once.

if the steam charts says theres 5k people online- it doesnt mean theres been the same 5k people online all day. people sign off and on throughout the day.

You've never played CS if you think it has less of a learning curve than CoH2 does. Sure, you can just jump in and deathmatch easily, but competitive play is very difficult to get into and excel at.

Try to beat the best guy in the world in boule. It's really hard! You have to practice endlessly at your "mechanics" and mind games and be fit and focused and lots of other stuff to beat the best guy. Really hard I tell ya! CS remains a piss easy game compared to CoH. It doesn't matter that it's hard to beat the best.

In spite of that, CSGO regularly has 100,000+ people searching for and playing competitive games simultaneously. These are exactly the sorts of people who would be willing to analyze their play for improvement and read online about it in their spare time.

CoH2 also have these people, only less. Regular players does not equate how serious players are. Some people simply enjoy shooters. Numbers reflect popularity. Popularity can be a reflection of lots of things but have a look at the most popular stuff in the world and you'll find that they all must be easy to digest and pleasing enough to recieve a large crowd. The more niche and specialised something becomes, the less audience it will have. CS is point and shoot and doesn't require a high end computer. Might have something to do with it.

CoH2 doesn't really have any of those (mechanical skill, layers of strategy, or accomplishment when you lose), some of which is the fault of the RTS genre while others are faults of the game's design.

CoH doesn't require mechanical (Micro) skill or have strategy? Sigh. So mechanical skill is of higher importance in CS. What does that tell us? That it is an entirely different game.

I was responding to your comment that CoH2 is more difficult than CSGO. I agree, for the casual player who doesn't want to play competitively, it's easier to pick up and play a shooter than an RTS. But my point was that in my opinion, competitive CSGO is more challenging both mechanically and strategically than competitive CoH2 is, yet CSGO regularly has 100,000 players searching for or playing competitive games concurrently. I would be surprised if CoH2 ever has 1,000 players searching for or playing automatch games concurrently.

Shooters are easier to get into casually, no doubt about that. But as someone who's played and watched a lot of both games, CSGO is easily more complex in terms of competitive play in my opinion, and it's still wildly more popular in spite of that. There are a lot of reasons for CoH2's lack of success, but relative difficulty isn't one of them.