An MMO on Steam seems almost deserted, but then thousands of players return

The war MMO Foxhole recently fell into a sort of slumber and had only a few hundred players on Steam as of April 3rd. However, War 112 and an update that brought submarines caused player numbers to surge back into the thousands.

What kind of game is Foxhole?

• Foxhole is a cooperative sandbox MMO that feels like a real-time strategy game. Players join factions of soldiers and participate in a never-ending war.
• Foxhole was released in September 2022 on Steam, but has been playable in various pre-release versions since July 2017. It costs €25 and has “very positive reviews” on Steam – 82% of the 31,931 reviews are positive.
• Recently, though, the game had gone quiet until the start of a new cycle changed that.

Foxhole is a cyclical MMO on Steam

Here’s how player numbers developed recently: Foxhole has consistently fluctuating player numbers, peaking at the end of the year, particularly in October/November over the last 2 years, with up to 10,000 players online at the same time.

The game also experiences periods of slumber, dropping to about 1,500 average players.

In the first week of April, over Easter, however, the slumber was particularly deep and even at peak times of the day, there were only 500 simultaneous players online.

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Player numbers rise by 600% within hours

This was the leap: On April 3rd, the number of concurrently active players in Foxhole jumped from about 700 to 5,300.

The number of viewing hours on Twitch also saw a sharp increase this week, quadrupling over the last 7 days compared to the previous week.

What was going on? The war continued: “With War 112,” the next episode in the war of Foxhole started.

The wars in Foxhole sometimes last only 14 days, and sometimes nearly 2 months.

A new update, 56, was released, bringing new frigates and submarines to Foxhole.

The cycle of MMOs and its effects

This is what’s behind it: This is a similar phenomenon to Escape from Tarkov or Diablo: The start of a new war in Foxhole, an “item reset” in Escape from Tarkov, or a season start in Diablo creates a cyclical game where player numbers surge at the beginning of a new cycle, while they fall at the end of a cycle when there’s nothing more to do and everyone just waits for the start of the next cycle.

Escape from Tarkov is probably the most well-known game with this strong “cycle” effect:

Hardcore shooter without mercy leaves everything behind on Twitch – Where does the hype around Escape from Tarkov come from?