On The Current Situation of Cubic Castles
Cubic
Member
I was looking at the cubic castles steam charts and there were an average of 19.8 players online. Compare this to 1 year ago and it was over 50% more, at 32. 2 years ago and it was over double, at 41. 3 years ago it was triple that, at 62 (bare in mind COVID). 9 years ago it was at 286 (also bare in mind steam was the only platform when cc released)
I know that this does not reflect the whole game because the majority of players play on mobile, but I think these numbers can at least approximately represent the decline of players on mobile too. This is just speculation of course and Kewb is the only one who knows for sure. But if this decline continues as it has, the cc player count will continue to decrease until it can barely support the game. Do I think this game is dying? No, there is still a community and devs actively updating the game, and there will always be players who continue playing. The game will survive. Not thrive, not become increasingly popular, but survive.
What caused this decline?
At the beginning, cubic castles peaked at over 1300 players online at once on steam. I’m guessing this is because of SirKewberth and the team’s marketing and promoting the game during 2014. Throughout the past 8 years, old players have become bored of the game, got scammed or just decided it was time to quit the game, and there haven’t been enough new players to replace them because of a lack of promotion. CC is not like a normal game where you advertise at the beginning and make money from selling the game, before most devs move onto their next project. It relies on active players rather than sales. The player count has just trickled down without any more advertising of the game, and the devs have focused so much on updates that they turned a blind eye to advertising and promoting.
I do not know the game’s situation. I do not know how much advertising the team has been doing since 2014. But I do have some ideas to help promote the game.
Social Media
Social media has like, an insane reach to people. The CC pages aren’t very active and they don’t even have accounts on some social media’s like Instagram and TikTok, which I would think the majority of CC’s playerbase (kids) would be on. The devs could make promotional short form content, comment on relevant Twitter threads, upload more YouTube videos (like the dev diaries they previously made, which would also help with communication), post on Reddit, etc.
YouTubers and Streamers playing the game could also give it a boost. Imagine the devs emailed loads of relevant youtubers and streamers (Minecraft, Roblox, growtopia, pixelworlds) and offered, say, 100k cubits to mess around with in a video/stream, as well as some cubit codes for the viewers’ audience to give them a reason to play. Even if some of them played, their audiences could give lots of traction to the game.
Could even reach out to bloggers, gaming press and other decently popular social media users.
Collabs
Remember the traction cc got when it collabed with shell shockers? And that game wasn’t even very relevant to CC. Maybe kewb can pull some strings for another BWD game, especially since there was a whole cc badegg pack.
Communication
The last time SirKewberth commented on the forums was 3 months ago, and that was just to acknowledge some badegg.io bugs. Before that was 7 months ago. The reverse vends update has been in the making for ages and we still haven’t got a single update from it. We didn’t get an april fools pack. For summer we got a pack about eggs and a mouldy chicken spawner (ok that one was a joke, I get that cc is working with blue wizard digital). But it does come off lazy even though I’m sure it isn’t and the game is getting stale and people are leaving without any updates of what to look forward too.
The forums is also completely desolate and the most active place for the community is the cc discord. New players don’t even know the forums or discord server exists and imo it needs some more promotion, even just a sign in new Eden or something. I know the discord server isn’t official but it is run by mods and may as well be.
This post is ironic, I doubt SirKewberth or many players will even see this post. But @SirKewberth , if you see this, give us something, anything, on where the game is right now, the situation of the future, or what you are currently working on. And I hope you consider some of the promotional methods, or any other way to increase CC’s popularity.
If anyone has any other ideas or thoughts feel free to comment.
I know that this does not reflect the whole game because the majority of players play on mobile, but I think these numbers can at least approximately represent the decline of players on mobile too. This is just speculation of course and Kewb is the only one who knows for sure. But if this decline continues as it has, the cc player count will continue to decrease until it can barely support the game. Do I think this game is dying? No, there is still a community and devs actively updating the game, and there will always be players who continue playing. The game will survive. Not thrive, not become increasingly popular, but survive.
What caused this decline?
At the beginning, cubic castles peaked at over 1300 players online at once on steam. I’m guessing this is because of SirKewberth and the team’s marketing and promoting the game during 2014. Throughout the past 8 years, old players have become bored of the game, got scammed or just decided it was time to quit the game, and there haven’t been enough new players to replace them because of a lack of promotion. CC is not like a normal game where you advertise at the beginning and make money from selling the game, before most devs move onto their next project. It relies on active players rather than sales. The player count has just trickled down without any more advertising of the game, and the devs have focused so much on updates that they turned a blind eye to advertising and promoting.
I do not know the game’s situation. I do not know how much advertising the team has been doing since 2014. But I do have some ideas to help promote the game.
Social Media
Social media has like, an insane reach to people. The CC pages aren’t very active and they don’t even have accounts on some social media’s like Instagram and TikTok, which I would think the majority of CC’s playerbase (kids) would be on. The devs could make promotional short form content, comment on relevant Twitter threads, upload more YouTube videos (like the dev diaries they previously made, which would also help with communication), post on Reddit, etc.
YouTubers and Streamers playing the game could also give it a boost. Imagine the devs emailed loads of relevant youtubers and streamers (Minecraft, Roblox, growtopia, pixelworlds) and offered, say, 100k cubits to mess around with in a video/stream, as well as some cubit codes for the viewers’ audience to give them a reason to play. Even if some of them played, their audiences could give lots of traction to the game.
Could even reach out to bloggers, gaming press and other decently popular social media users.
Collabs
Remember the traction cc got when it collabed with shell shockers? And that game wasn’t even very relevant to CC. Maybe kewb can pull some strings for another BWD game, especially since there was a whole cc badegg pack.
Communication
The last time SirKewberth commented on the forums was 3 months ago, and that was just to acknowledge some badegg.io bugs. Before that was 7 months ago. The reverse vends update has been in the making for ages and we still haven’t got a single update from it. We didn’t get an april fools pack. For summer we got a pack about eggs and a mouldy chicken spawner (ok that one was a joke, I get that cc is working with blue wizard digital). But it does come off lazy even though I’m sure it isn’t and the game is getting stale and people are leaving without any updates of what to look forward too.
The forums is also completely desolate and the most active place for the community is the cc discord. New players don’t even know the forums or discord server exists and imo it needs some more promotion, even just a sign in new Eden or something. I know the discord server isn’t official but it is run by mods and may as well be.
This post is ironic, I doubt SirKewberth or many players will even see this post. But @SirKewberth , if you see this, give us something, anything, on where the game is right now, the situation of the future, or what you are currently working on. And I hope you consider some of the promotional methods, or any other way to increase CC’s popularity.
If anyone has any other ideas or thoughts feel free to comment.
Comments
also: this is a major +1 (+2 if I say so myself) - there is literally no good hope for cc's future; nothing good was anticipated, except for, as stated, reversed vending machines, which we waited at least a year for now... these might be the main hopes for cc to regenerate its popularity and to become more fun and interesting
they make cool games