Update Speculation thread

September 9th. If update September 9th then everyone owes me 1 million dollars

 

I don't think they ever dropped an update on a Friday or in a weekend ! Beginning of next week is my guest ! It's a shame we can't see the progress using the Steam thing that allowed us to see when they released the game for the creator program tho !

 

They have released Friday updates before - there've been 11 major releases on that day. But the last one was 0.17, which was more than six years ago (16 August 2019).

Monday's slightly more likely, but not massively likely, either - the last Monday release was 0.26 (19 September 2022, almost three years ago). Since 0.27, updates have quite consistently come out on Tuesdays or Wednesdays (except 0.31, which released on a Thursday).

Also, since 0.24.1 (20 December 2021), only two updates have dropped significantly after 14:00 UTC (0.26, 14:55, and 0.33, 16:20). So, we have quite a narrow window for the most likely times that 0.37 could drop each week.

 

the thing is that updates on fridays or right before hollidays is that game braking or regular bugs are in the game for a couple of days before they could be removed

 

The devs don’t work at all during weekends unfortunately

But could you imagine the player count if they dropped an update over the weekend?

 

It's so sad devs get weekends off (

 

I'm glad the devs get some personal time off instead of just working all the time.

 

They deserve to have some time off.

The player count increases for updates are plenty big enough - people seem to be much more receptive to the content in the updates than the update release dates. Take, for instance, the three days after 0.19 dropped (8-10 April 2020, Wed-Fri). During those three days, the peak player count held at almost 8,000 players - compared to ~5,000 players in the ~three weeks beforehand (14 Mar-7 Apr 2020). It took almost a month for the peak player count to drop below 5,000 players again (3 May 2020, Sun).

Compare this to the three days after 0.21 (15-17 December 2020, Tue-Thu). The peak player counts continued to rise from ~7,500 players to over 8,000 players, and the peak for December 2020 was on Christmas, with over 9,000 players. And the peak player counts never went much below 7K post-0.21.

A good example of why the .1/.3 updates were done around Christmas a few times (and how different content can affect reception) can be shown with 0.24's peak player counts. The major update itself (2 Dec 2021, Thu) only had a peak of ~12,600 players on 4 Dec 2020 (Sat) before falling down below 10K on 6 Dec 2020 (Mon). 0.24.1, on the other hand (20 Dec 2021, Mon) had a much stronger reception, with six straight days over 12K players (20-25 Dec, Mon-Sat), peaking at over 14K players on Christmas.

Back before 0.8, there were three updates that dropped early in the morning UTC on Saturdays (0.4.3 (31 Oct 2015, 02:50), 0.5.6 (4 June 2016, 03:22), and 0.6 (23 July 2016, 00:27)), and those did lead to large increases in player counts. 0.4.3 was when the peak player count crossed 1K for the first time (double the usual 500 peak) and 0.6 almost crossed 2K for peak player count. I definitely think that the devs made a lot of money doing these tactics, but they probably weren't happy doing so, seeing as we haven't had a Saturday release since 0.6 (or a release that early since 0.7, at 00:23 UTC).

With how much money the devs are making from their .tech branch and partnerships with other companies, and how popular the game is now, I doubt they'd ever bother doing a major release on the weekend ever again.

 

I meant to agree to this post but instead liked it

OT: I completely agree, they should have a reasonable balance between work and life like any other worker does.

 

Absolutely