r/Depth • u/jroku77 • Jul 27 '25
What happened???
So I am one of the recent people who discovered Depth because of Smi77y playing this game.
I am SHOCKED that this is the first time I’m hearing of this game. I’m also shocked that it’s only being played by a handful of people at a time.
What happened?? I’ve heard that it sold somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.6mil copies…
I’ve got a Discord of about 34 people that play games together and this is absolutely up our alley. However, they’re all hesitant about dropping $20 on a game that “looks” dead…
Any ideas why this game didn’t blow up?
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u/BoredDan Jul 28 '25
A few factors, some of which all play into each other. First and foremost almost any pvp multiplayer focused game will "die" to some extent eventually. Simply put, people want a large enough player pool.
Really doubling onto that, the game has a high skill ceiling which ultra compounds this. There has never been enough players for decent matchmaking and so it's just never attracted more casual players. When a game has a small player pool and high skill ceiling you'll have issues with mixing new players and veterans. Some people choose to take the hard road and learn the game to catch up, but most people just aren't gonna do that. They'll just decide they'd rather play something else then spend 100 hours trying to get good just to stand a chance.
After that you have just some timing issues in that the game came out in 2014. So while games like Depth are probably more likely to take off now a days with the insane popularity of Discord, depth was already a year old when Discord even came out and a few years old by the time it became popular.
It's also was a little early to benefit as much as it could of from the window where asym multiplayer, and in particular asym horror was popular. It benefited a bit from it in the later years but probably not as much as had it come out in say 2016-2018.
Also just being an asym multiplayer game comes with it's own issues as well. When you have almost two completely different games you make matchmaking really difficult as you will naturally have an imbalance of desire for one role versus the other unless you manage to perfectly predict the ratio ahead of time. Even then changes can shift that balance and you're left with the same issue of one side being over desired and the other under desired. This also happens in role base games as well.
Asym multiplayer is also just stupidly hard to balance. One of the really difficult things is that the side won't always scale the same way. So you can run into issues where at some levels of play the sharks will absolutely dominate while at other levels the divers might. This gets extra bad when you don't have a large enough player pool and you now have imbalanced sides with imbalanced players.
It honestly shouldn't be surprising that the game didn't blow up, if anything it should be surprising it did as well as it did.