Last week, I was doing some digging into a couple of the newer survivalboxes we’ve been covering this year, and I was kind of surprised to see how much they’ve shrunk. Lynked and Towers of Aghasba average under 100 players; Aloft is under 200. Lost Skies, also under 100, is struggling so much its devs won’t commit to post-launch content. IfSunSets, which was apparently terrible, is slight bigger than those. Bellwright is around 1K. Even RuneScape Dragonwilds, which so impressed Jagex with sales, is under 500, as is Nightingale, which just makes us sad.

That’s not to say survivalboxes are dead – not at all. The big ones are still big. They’re just not growing anymore, at least on Steam where we can see numbers. Dune Awakening (19K) has fallen to 20% of its average first-month concurrency too, though it’s still bigger than Enshrouded (8K) and Valheim (17K), two that have dominated in recent years. Palworld perks back up for patches but is under 30K right now. OG Ark is now under 20K, a hair more than New Ark, and V Rising and Conan Exiles dipped under 6K. ASKA held on to more than its players than I expected, but it’s still dropped. Terraria is a fixture but still slowly shrinking. We could go on and on, and I expect you all to!

I would be tempted to blame this all on the incredible moment No Man’s Sky is having right now, but the truth is, many of these games were struggling or at least shrinking before that. We could delete NMS from the equation and the patterns would remain.

So for this week’s Massively Overthinking, let’s talk about survival sandboxes and the current glut in the market. Are we at saturation now – is that what we’re seeing, or is it something else? What do we think is going on here? Is the era of the survivalbox already over?

Brianna Royce (@nbrianna.bsky.social, blog): Short answer: No. It was helpful to me to go through all of those survival sandboxes, mentally add up their average playerbases, and realize that all the MMOs out there are still bigger than all those smaller-scale multiplayer games. It’s good perspective. Neither genre is dying, and the games ebb and flow, and that’s normal.

Buuuuuut I do think that other genres eat into MMOs and survivalboxes, the same way MOBAs and shooters tend to trade players over time. In the case of survivalboxes, I think we’re mostly seeing fatigue with the same gameplay loops over and over. And it’s not just the repetition of those loops; it’s the fact that most of these sandboxes don’t have anything new at the end of the loops, or the loops are too short, or they just don’t get enough development, especially the early access ones, to make “staying” in them worth it. So people buy them, squeeze out the novelty in them, and move on. The handful that stay big either keep pumping out novel content (No Man’s Sky) or benefited from the founder’s effect to grow communities back when the genre was just blowing up (Valheim, ARK).

I also think that the rise of the cozy game and especially cozy sandboxes that focus on constructive rather than destructive gameplay are eating into some of the traditional survivalbox playerbase – Stardew, Palia, etc. – as do MMOs that offer similar sandboxy gameplay loops but with additional content types, consistent development, and people.

The survival games that came out this year didn’t really add enough new to the formula to compete, and that makes me sad because I liked some of them (especially Aloft) more than the games that are still holding their population. And I don’t think enough of them are trying particularly hard to recruit kids aging out of Minecraft and Roblox, which is a mistake.

Chris Neal (@wolfyseyes.bsky.social, blog): I think one of the big things that’s made survivalboxes sort of peter out is pure oversaturation. It seems a bit like most of these kinds of games cranked out at around the same time, each one a little too derivative of one another, which is a bit of a shame considering that it does sort of feel like there’s more space for them to evolve and break new ground.

But another matter that I’m certain is being brought up is the fact that there is effectively a win condition. I’ve basically “finished” Craftopia, feel about finished with Palworld, and have gotten to an apex in No Man’s Sky. All of these games have added stuff over time, butreally none of them have added enough to where it feels like getting to the next moved goal posts is going to take that long.

Sam Kash (@[email protected]): I’ve played enough survival sandboxes at this point to learn that in large part they are simply not for me. For all that Dune Awakening is doing right, I just can’t find it in my heart to care enough to play it.

But the biggest thing that I can see is that saturation point. I think we’re just about there. And as my colleague Tyler points out, a lot of these games just feel like a different coat of paint. By and large players are doing the exact same content. Run around here, gather there, kill a few things, smash some loot together to make some items, then build your house.

I know that fans of the content could find a way to summarize MMOs in a seemingly similar and aggressive way. But it’s just a lot of the same, and I don’t think I need any more of them.

Tyler Edwards (blog): I do think saturation is an issue. I think there is also a certain degree of an expiry date to these kind of games. Eventually you reach a point where you’ve maxed everything out and “surviving” is trivial.

I’m not the biggest survival fan, so maybe it just seems this way to me, but I also feel like the genre is pretty stale. It doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of difference between games other than the “fluff.” Do you want to punch trees as a viking, a barbarian, or a vampire? It feels like there’s room for someone to score a big hit with a fresh take on the gameplay loop, though I’m not entirely sure what form that would take.

Every week, join the Massively OP staff for Massively Overthinking column, a multi-writer roundtable in which we discuss the MMO industry topics du jour – and then invite you to join the fray in the comments. Overthinking it is literally the whole point. Your turn!