Left 4 Dead Player Count Over Time

This ties back into two of my recent posts on Games on Sale and Today Only Left 4 Dead ON SALE. QforQ, a community manager over at GamerDNA, a neat website that tracks your gaming interests, recently released an image that tracked the "engagement level" of L4D's players on GamerDNA.

This image is pretty interesting to me because it shows the magnitude of the impact that a sale, free to play weekend, and/or holidays can have on a game's sales.

I would be hesitant to take this graph at face value, however. I'm not sure how these numbers are calculated, but GamerDNA has certainly been growing fairly rapidly in the last few months, which could have affected these results. In addition I would assume that more people have been linking their Steam accounts to Gamer DNA, which could also be affecting things.

However, the conclusion that I do feel comfortable drawing is that free weekends, new content, and limited-time price reductions on games do significantly drive game sales. I also feel safe saying that I am really looking forward to seeing more of these charts in the future.

Thanks GamerDNA!

-Jon