Bleeding Edge has been out for roughly three months now and the journey has been anything but what developer Ninja Theory would have had in mind.
The team-based multiplayer brawler has been bleeding players since launch. The overall player-activity was never there to begin with but with each passing month, the numbers have continued to fall drastically. Bleeding Edge is stuck in a nose-dive on PC right now and ironically, being compared to Battleborn at release just makes the current situation even grimmer.
According to third-party tracker Steam Charts, Bleeding Edge saw an average of just 25.6 monthly players in June and an average of 39.3 monthly players in May. The only month that saw the best player-activity was April, basically the launch month of the game, and even that recorded a measly average of 125.2 monthly players. Bleeding Edge has only seen an all-time peak of 828 players on Steam, which was 61 concurrent players on average last month.
Furthermore, as an additional measure to portray how bad the player-retention has been, Bleeding Edge has roughly 50 concurrent players at the time of writing, and this is actually good news. The game on average has normally seen less than 50 daily players in the last month.
The supportive community of Bleeding Edge believes that a competitive mode will help provide an incentive for players to stay. From an esports perspective, the sense of accomplishment from winning ranked games might help save the game, at least in theory. The same line of thought was picked up by Gearbox Software for Battleborn as well. However, the developer nonetheless ended up pulling support for Battleborn a year afterwards.
Ninja Theory needs to pull a rabbit out of the hat and soon. Bleeding Edge is available on Xbox One and PC. There are no player-numbers for the Xbox One version but they are likely to be the same as PC if not worse.
