I am gonna continue tilting at windmills until Fatshark takes note of this

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide General Discussion
1

So do you want to know the single highest player spike in Darktide’s entire history?

source: steamcharts.com

image
image748×180 16.6 KB

Is it Unlocked and Loaded? Nope.

Is it when Arbites released? Nope.

How about the class overhaul in 2023? Nope.

The single highest spike in players was in May of 2025. Warhammer Skulls. There was no new content - a couple of hotfixes. There was the Arbites announcement, sure, but that wouldn’t immediately drive new players, and Arbites itself didn’t generate a notable spike.

Do you want to know what cracked a peak of 40k players for the first time since launch? What got people invested in playing more than any other update or event ever has?

HAVING AQUILAS AS A REWARD FOR COMPLETING EVENTS.

That was it. That was what made people play this game again. Not even a sizeable amount! Barely enough to buy a trinket or weapon skin! But it was enough to get people to play.

And Fatshark has ignored this, with every event since reverting to worthless rewards of materials, trinkets, and portrait frames.

Give the players Aquilas for playing. You’ll encourage them to spend some more money to close the gap on the FOMO shop’s prices. You’ll get more people playing, which means more people buying the game, which means more money from both the game itself, DLC classes, and more cosmetic buyers.

I’m going to keep pointing this out until Fatshark does something about it.

It’s just that simple. Give players rewards that matter and they’ll play more.

Give people Aquilas Fatshark.

EDIT: My point was disproven pretty much immediately. Curse wonky data collation, I thought I had something to actually convince the C-suite to do things. I still want Aquilas for events but I have less hard data to prove it now beyond ‘yeah we cracked 10k again’ which is less impressive than ‘highest player spike ever’.

37 Likes
2

It was?

https://steamdb.info/app/1361210/charts/#max

EDIT: It wasn’t. The aquilas event ran from May 22 thru June 9th, during which time the daily peak concurrent players capped out at 15,763 according to the actual daily data on SteamDB.

Peak daily concurrent during the Arbites release a couple weeks later was 43,439.

Peak daily concurrent for the Dark Communion/Havoc launch was 22,812.

Peak daily concurrent after Unlocked & Loaded was 16,333.

Peak daily concurrent after the talent reworks was 33,824.

8 Likes
3

Given that Arbites were released somewhere in June and there clearly was a spike in players back then, i find this graph highly suspicious.

1 Like
4

I’m pretty sure the SteamCharts chart is just easing/smoothing the data in some jacked up way. If you look down the page from the graphic in the OP, you’ll see that the numbers on the same page don’t even line up with the graph.

2 Likes
5

Go and check the player numbers yourself then over on SteamCharts. June 2025 had the highest spike of peak players (42k) in YEARS and it was due to the event rewarding Aquilas.

Fatshark knows what players want, yet actively choose to not cater to them. Not even for small easy wins.

1 Like
6

No, this isn’t true, sorry. If you look at actually numbers on the actual days, you’ll see the real spike was long after the aquilas were available.

image
image1896×878 84.4 KB

2 Likes
7

That’s just wishful thinking.

Do you really believe aquila rewards from events is what’s really gonna save this game? Would you play it non-stop if, say, Auric Maelstrom missions would give you 5-10 aquilas?

1 Like
8

Tbh, if anyone reply yes to that I’m somewhat saddened

3 Likes
9

Technically, it wouldn’t be the worst idea - it works in Helldivers at least. But yeah, i agree.

10

Bugger. My point has been disproven by better data.

2 Likes
11

5-10? Nah. Prices are too inflated for that to be viable.

2500-3000 for event completion? Absolutely.

1 Like
12

I hope that if this ever happens, Aquilas will only be available to Havoc 40+ players; that would provide a good incentive to play, even if it’s just for 50 Aquilas. It’s not bad during events, but it might get out of hand, which wouldn’t be ideal.

13

Havoc 40 is a terrible metric for free aquillas, might as well go to my job and make money faster than grinding that horrible mode. The way they gave them out the first time was just fine.

11 Likes
14

Absolutely not. Havoc should be sweatlord territory exclusive to the sweatlords. Not something people will play for a reward.

12 Likes
15

Checks out with recent info and actions too. Hive Scum follows Arbites quite closely, probably due to how much of a financial success it was. Then there’s the interview of the Dev on youtube, who says they’ll focus on making classes until they need to do other things. The Fatshark has smelled blood here.

Why have a limit on playable characters anyway?
16

There’s no way Hive Scum is the product of <6 months of work.

2 Likes
17

How so? I mean is this known info? What makes you say that?

18

There was a massive advertising push for darktide and other GW games during the skulls event. Of course there was a huge increase in players. Trying to claim that the increase in players was due to the free aquilas is just disingenuous.

3 Likes
19

I dug into this a bit since I realized neither of us seem to know for sure. They actually had an interview this summer where they stated they have 3 classes on their list to add, and in another interview from earlier this week, the design director states Hive Scum wasn’t on the list at the time (and that it’s bigger now).

So Hive Scum almost certainly was started after summer this year, so at the maximum any hive scum specific work on it started 5 months ago, unless I’m missing something still.

Why have a limit on playable characters anyway?
20

I admire your honesty in being corrected and regardless I agree with you on wanting Aquilas back as a reward. I do think it would help and people would come back more often for the drip.

3 Likes