It’s difficult to avoid the ongoing discourse surrounding concurrent player numbers on Steam. Hell, we’re guilty of it ourselves. It’s understandable why so many people are so fixated on this metric; it’s one of the only numerical ways to identify how successful a game launch has been, after all. For indie developer Minh ‘Gooseman’ Le, the discussions surrounding his game, Alpha Response, feel like they’re mostly being held in bad faith.
Alpha Response was released into Steam Early Access back in October 2024, and while the player count numbers may paint a bleak picture for any prospective buyers, there’s more to the story than what the stats say. In a recent interview with Hellcase, Le explains why he isn’t concerned about these debates. “For our game, I think it’s important to not worry too much about other people’s thoughts, because the people who really bring those topics up are never going to play your game,” says Le.
Le goes on to clarify, “When people criticize our player numbers, one part of it is the fact that we’re not doing any marketing because we don’t want people to come to the game and get a bad impression of it at this stage.” In the year and a half that Alpha Response has been on Steam, the developers have pushed large content updates every few months to help shape the FPS game as it approaches its 1.0 launch later this year. “We want to make sure the game is in a polished state, and once we’re ready, we’ll do more marketing.”
“A lot of developers don’t have that luxury,” Le explains. “…When they release, they expect the game to have a lot of players, and if they don’t reach that point, then maybe they’re not able to survive financially. But for us, we’ve been able to take it slow and not worry about player counts too much.”
As for Alpha Response, it looks like we can expect to hear more of a buzz about the shooter in the coming months. “Once we’re closer to 1.0, we’d like to do more marketing and bring more awareness. Right now, we’re just kind of hiding in the dark and slowly polishing the game.” Speaking on his expectations for Alpha Response, Le hopes to “get similar success to a game like Payday. I wouldn’t say Payday is a much higher level of game. We’re not as polished as Payday in some areas, but maybe half the success of Payday would be nice.”
Le is best known for his work as the co-creator of Counter-Strike. You can learn more about his relationship with the multiplayer game following the recent re-release of Cache in CS2.
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