Vortex Gaming

Krafton's life simulator, InZOI, had a record-breaking launch. However, the game currently faces a sharp decline in player engagement, despite selling over a million copies and peaking at 87,000 concurrent players.

Since the electric release, InZOI's daily averages for active players plummeted to around 3,800 as of April 24. The drop has been steady so far as the game lost 80 percent of its active players consistently since mid-April. The situation got so bad that InZOI started nearing the player numbers of The Sims 3, its main rival's 16-year-old outdated title.

Considering InZOI has been considered "The Sims killer," this fall from grace paints a concerning picture for the game's future. InZOI's still in early access, so there can be some breathing room to grow and improve. Most complaints have been about the depth levels in the game. Players cited limited gameplay variety, which led to them getting bored.

Krafton also commented on the matter, and the developer disclosed that it would improve communication with its community. In regards to this, Krafton aims to release more development updates and live Q&A sessions and rely more on player feedback.

"Our goal is to create a transparent development journey," Kim said in a recent message shared through InZOI's Discord server. "We want players to be part of the process as we shape the future of InZOI together."

The current roadmap of InZOI has features like pools, pets, and expanded activities. From an objective standpoint, Krafton entered a genre that has been dominated by a single game for more than 20 years. EA's The Sims has been the sole king of life simulators, with each challenger falling short and retaining interest for prolonged durations. Krafton is already well-versed in maintaining live-service games, so that expertise could come in clutch here when it comes to rolling out player-favorite features to InZOI.

The target userbase for InZOI is made of players with refined characteristics, as most have been playing The Sims for a long time. It's possible that most users will have plenty of ideas to pitch to InZOI developers, and some might just make the cut to address the lack of content in the game. At the time of writing, InZOI currently expects a content update in May, which may help increase the player numbers going into the summer.