Over four years after entering early access, Deadside appears stuck in the past, while the rest of the genre has moved on to bigger and better things.
Co-op Multiplayer.
PvP Multiplayer.
There is much we could say to say about Deadside, but we have already said it here.
Instead, let's focus on how many people are playing Deadside in 2024, and more importantly, does it have a future, and if so, what does that future look like?
Deadside currently peaks at around 1k concurrent players during weekends and holidays, with a monthly high of 1,107 concurrent players and a 24-hour peak of just 649 active players as of October 2024.
Deadside is developing at too slow a pace to hope to catch up with titles such as DayZ.
With new survival games incorporating exciting new mechanics and stunning visuals, a visually dated, mechanically inferior game such as Deadside, especially one without a sustainable community, is doomed to failure sooner or later.
If Bad Pixel does not find a way to improve Deadside within one year and make it a game people want to invest their time and money in, it will never be sustainable. Acquiring the capital needed to fund ongoing development will be difficult (if not impossible) for the Indie developer, especially when Deadside is already showing its age in a market that is ever-moving forward.
As someone who loves survival games and happily sinks hundreds of hours a year into them, I find Deadside unable to hold my attention for more than a few hours at a time, as frankly, it does not offer much in the way of engaging PvP or PvE content, and with its daily peaks of around 1k players and a monthly average of just 434 concurrent players, investing time or money in Deadside feels like a waste of both, despite the developers doing their best to see it through to launch, even as the player base stagnates, and sales dwindle.
Ultimately, Deadside will complete its early access journey, but whether it is a game worth playing at that time has yet to be decided.
