Released on the 6th February — and available day one through PS Plus Essential — Foamstars has, reportedly, seen its player numbers completely fall off a cliff over the last couple of months. As researched by TrueTrophies, using PSN gameplay data, the stylised PS5 and PS4 shooter has now lost around 95% of its player count since launch.
Thank you for playing FOAMSTARS.
Foamstars is now officially available as a free to play title. Not only does this mean players can experience it, plus all the content added across various seasons, it no longer requires PlayStation Plus to experience. - IS
FOAMSTARS, currently available on PlayStation®5 and PlayStation®4, will change from its current regional pricing to a free-to-play title starting from October 4th 2024 at 1:00AM.
When I saw this on X, all that followed were comments that Concord should do the same.
Game is very fun. The right choice to do since the game already has a live service structure.
Man. I feel bad for this game. I would have played it on PC.
Why would you restrict this to only the Playstation?
Sony is absolutely horrendous at handling multiplayer games.
Between this, Destiny 2 and charging 40 dollars for the average at best Concord.
They're literally sending out their multiplayer games out to die.
Putting it also on PC and XB with cross platform play would be a pretty nice move to boost players.
To be fair, Square Enix absolutely set Foamstars up to die regardless of platforms.
First they had the brilliant idea to release Final Fantasy Rebirth's demo on the same day as Foamstars. This essentially took all of the attention off of it in a way that is entirely avoidable.
From there it was a rather lacking experience. I don't just mean in terms of modes/maps, though it was there as well, I distinctly remember there being nothing to really chase besides season pass levels. Everything else was just time served by playing as X character, or Y number of matches. Some of the choices were also so unfathomably bad I legitimately don't understand the logic.
This was something I initially mentioned in my review. The main free reward players could chase after was a solid silver skin for playing 333 matches, and a gold version for 777 matches. I followed up when another update hit with a separate article because they added a pink metallic skin for 1,500 matches. I don't think I did it for the last one, but they also added a black metallic skin for 3,000 matches. Mind you, each are per character, so you'd need 33,000 Foamstars matches to have every skill. You'd also have to play another 3,000 matches each time a new character releases, and a match only counts if it's as a player you don't have the skin for in question.
Even the paid side was set up to fail. They did FOMO costumes, which can be a motivator for some, but then they made later costumes palette swaps. I could get the trench coat, and top hat skin for one of the characters anytime in red/black, white was only offered for the first season, purple is "limited," black with gold flourishes was also in season one, with black/silver being a standard product. I also remember from my follow up post some of the details were deceptive. Seasons would add "over 20 skins," but things like the aforementioned Pink Metallic skin was among them. This meant every season after the first would have 8/2X of the skins simply be those versions.
Finally, the seasonal set up is designed to churn players. Players were given I want to say five weeks to finish a season, and I think the highest I ever made it was 30 out of 40 ranks, and even that took something crazy like 20 hours. I remember calling it a subscription, because it essentially was. And given the high expectations, and extreme FOMO, it makes sense most players walked away.
Wonder if helldivers did that. One thing about live service gotta put in work to keep people on and it makes it harder when there competition.
Who would have thought
The cheap Splatoon knockoff failed? Shocking.
Gee...it's almost like a terrible business model would be to have a bunch of devs you own only focus on making GAAS because, by nature, they are going to cannibalize each other. Farwell, Mr. Ryan, we hardly knew ye (as CEO).
The game was pretty meh, but those Microtransactions were pretty bad if I remember right.