Planetside 2 has a lot of potential. The collaboration when working with others is like no other. I get the same feeling in Dota 2 as well as other games but nothing compares to this and Dota 2. The reason why Planetside 2 doesn't have more people is not because it underperforms compared to the other popular FPS games, it's because people don't know it exist. Maybe after bringing back PhysX, implementing Ray Tracing and DLSS3, include some sort of AI prompting to make players lives easier such as GPS in the game, have top gaming media review companies review the game again instead of the review being of 2012?
I think the problem lies more in the general design choices of the game. If you look up top F2P shooter lists on Google and Youtube Planetside will nearly always show up. In 2020 the player count peaked at roughly 10.000 players due to the Covid lockdowns. Besides it's the only free class-arcade shooter since Heroes and Generals will shut down this month. From a marketing perspective there is one cruical data, and that is the loss of 60% of the players within 6 months after reaching the 10.000 player mark and being back at the overall average player count. That means that the game wasn't able to convince people to stick around and worse probably created a lot of bad mouth advertising on top. We can go deeper into the issue by looking at it from a game design perspecitve: It heavily leans into the Battlefield / Battlefront genre but has the gunplay of a Halo, Quake or Unreal Tournament - short distance, low damage duel focused fire fights requiring precise aiming skill (4 headshots for maximal damage output). Not to mention the well known balance issues. In short, new people expected a shooter that follows established design choices, got into a game with contradictive gameplay and died a lot to random stuff they couldn't do anything about resulting in frustration right from the beginning. ____________ The best marketing campaign does nothing if the product can't convince the customers through quality. With Battlefield titles and Battlefront regulary on sale for less than 10 bucks there are cheap alternatives available
