State of the Fandom
“Top management reports everything’s gonna be fine! … Uh-huh.”
Happy belated new year! Now that the Enahnced Edition of Soulstorm had been released, it’s a bit of a slow-season when it comes to Oddworld-content. With that in mind, I’d like to take the opportunity to make a small tally about how each individual community of the fanbase is holding up.
Social Media
Of course first and foremost we should take a look at the OWI’s main social media sites. While I’ll comment individually on the changes, you can regardless see my last set of measurements here. Remember to click on the images to see them in full-size.
Consistent like-bleeding.
The Facebook-page has long been the sick man of OWI’s platforms. Despite its occasional resurgences, long-term projections have shown time and time again that it’ll always begin bleeding followers and likes rapidly.
Compared to last time, when the page had 155.096 likes, 168.101 is a far nicer number, however, as the trendline shows, it is unlikely to stay this high if things continue similarly.
Despite the many negative days, the net sum is still in the positives.
As can be seen from the graphs below, the Twitter has basically stabilized. There have been no outlying gains nor losses in the last few months, causing the page to hover at around 43.000 followers for close to half a year now.
At the previous measurement the site had 37.375 followers. Now it has 43.042. As mentioned before, things seem to have completely stabilized.
The positives and negatives largely balance themselves out.
Arguably the Instagram’s situation is almost exactly the same as the Twitter’s as its follower-count has been floating around 19.000 for the last six months. Unlike the Twitter, however, the Instagram does display an extremely slow growth (10-20 additional followers / month.)
Previously the page had 18.910 followers, now it has 19.029. It can be considered an absolutely miniscule growth considering the timeframe.
YouTube
Not much to see…
Just like previously, I don’t have much to say about the Youtube page. It seems to be gaining about 30.000 views / month, which is about ten thousand views more than the last time I measured, and experiences a very slow growth.
Last time it had 25.500 subscribers, now it has 25.600.
Communities
Next let’s have a look at the more discussion-oriented platforms.
While of course the click-count since initial spike has greatly diminished, it can still be said that the average monthly viewing rate of /r/Oddworld has increased from about 5.000 to just below 10.000.
Interestingly, unlike most of the official platforms, the release of the Extended Edition seemed to affect the site somewhat, as there is a slight bump in the click-count at around November.
Of course I don’t have any hard data, but from personal experience, posts seem to either gather 1-2 or up to 30-70 comments on them, depending on the topic’s divisiveness. Upvote counts generally move on the below-100 scale.
Discord
Daily census, blue = #soulstorm, green = #chat, purple = every other channel combined.
As can be seen from both graphs, the server faced an unprecedented slow-season around August, which lasted until the middle of November, when the Enhanced Edition was released, which brought in some new members and reignited discussions for a while.
Five day running average.
Whether this activity will stay remains to be seen, however, the short term trend seems to be downwards pointing. One thing’s clear, however, conversations seem to have almost entirely moved away from discussing Soulstorm and rather focus either on the art posted in the server’s related channel, off-topic discussions, or what if-s.
Miscellaneous
Some other stuff that doesn’t belong anywhere else.
The Acoustic Panels
The number sold is still only 24 out of 500, as was half a year ago. Seems like they aren’t as popular as OWI might have thought they’ll be. On the other hand, I guess this makes that two-dozens all the rarer.
Preferences based on OWI’s query
Before we wraps thing up I’d like to present one more interesting statistic, namely which game people named as their favorite on OWI’s Twitter. At the time of writing the tweet received about 165 replies, some of which couldn’t be counted due to not containing clear answers. In instances where someone named multiple games, I counted each as a vote for that particular game to avoid introducing my own bias.
Without further ado, here are the results:
| Nr. | Game | Number of votes | Percentage of Votes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. | Abe’s Exoddus | 77 | 45% |
| 2. | Abe’s Oddysee | 25 | 14.8% |
| 3. | Stranger’s Wrath | 24 | 14.2% |
| 4. | Munch’s Oddysee | 22 | 13% |
| 5. | New ‘n’ Tasty | 15 | 8.9% |
| 6. | Soulstorm | 6 | 3.6% |
| - | In total | 169 | 100% |
(Oddworld Adventures, Oddworld Adventures II, The Hand of Odd, and Sligstorm have received one vote each as well.)
As one can see time and time (and time) again, Exoddus still reigns supreme, followed by the others in almost always the same order. Soulstorm seems to have failed to budge the original’s status as the most beloved installation in the series.
The All-in-All
As one can see 2022 is off to a somewhat perilous start for OWI, at least when it comes to social media engagement. While few platforms are outright bleeding users, (looking at the Facebook,) they are regardless either stagnating or experiencing almost insignificant growth.
The question arises: What next? The Enchanced Edition’s release, while probably great for sales, did little to bring in many new people. This can be heavily felt in just how slow the communities feel.
And considering the speed at which OWI releases games, it seems like we might be looking forward to another couple years of little content and a hibernating fanbase. That is, of course, if OWI is even capable of (or willing to) release another game.
Either way, things seem to be slowly petering out.