I wouldn't expect Steam numbers are all that indicative of the success of a game like this. It seems targeted towards a console audience.
This site tracks how many people have logged a trophy on Marvels Avengers... 1.6 million. Seems like an alright number I suppose?
Now let's compare to unsuccessful vs successful games...
Anthem
1.5 m sales early followed by a slow incline. It doesn't say anything for engagement which I think is the biggest factor with these titles. The developers want people to keep playing, endlessly... which we know didn't happen with Anthem.
Plants vs Zombies Garden Warfare 2
Obviously these trophy stats are only a proxy for sales, but I think they paint a good picture of how the population of a game develops over time. Note that you don't have to earn a trophy to tally into these totals, you just have to load the game up on an account. That creates some issues as you could have one copy of the game logged multiple times, if it's played on multiple accounts.
In that sense it counts total users, rather than total sales.
Nevertheless, at the moment the answer is that it's impossible to say much about the success of the game because we know nothing about it's sales performance over time. If you look at Plants vs Zombies Garden Warfare 2, it didn't pick up sales very quickly but it was able to sustain its sales throughout the 2 year period. Even today, new users are picking up Garden Warfare 2. According to Gamestat more new players are picking up Garden Warfare 2 than Battle for Neighborliness, which is a strong testament to the long-term popularity of the former game.
The metrics here that are most meaningful are total sales, and weekly active users (not daily, because there might be specific reasons that people are more or less inclined to log in during certain days). We can see here that the early for Marvel Avengers are... to be honest, a bit underwhelming. They're in-line with Anthem, and a far cry from something like Destiny 2 (which isn't pictured hear, but has 5 million users tracked on PS4 within its launch window).
That isn't to say that Marvel Avengers won't be a successful game, but it doesn't look like one right off the bat. Success will depend on whether they can draw in new players, especially going into the holiday period, and with upcoming updates.
The data in the OP, regarding daily active players on steam definitely makes it look like the game has a problem with churn. We would need to be see data from previous days / weeks to really understand what's happening. But it looks like a lot of folks that bought it on Steam, aren't coming back to the game.
This might be what you see from the typical churn rate of a free to play mobile game.
The data we have is a little different, since we'd normally want to know how many players we had on day one, versus now, but we only have concurrent players. Nonetheless you can use the concurrent player count to similar effect, just be aware that you're probably getting a much larger number of players logging in over the course of the entire day.
Usually, retention measures would be
Day 1 daily active users
Day 7 daily active users
Day 28 daily active users
And for a mobile free to play, you might be expecting a 10% retention rate by day 28 (pictured above). Using the CCU numbers on steam, we have something similar to that...but the big issue here is that Marvel's Avengers isn't a mobile free to play, people have paid money to be here. So you might expect retention to be quite a bit higher. I'm certain that Crystal Dynamics do. So at least in my opinion, it points towards a problem with player retention.
I don't have data on what churn rates should look like among console games, but if we look at something like Destiny 2,
which picked up 3.5 million players early, then saw that daily active number drop to 1.5 million, that's much better performance than the 10% retention rate that the Steam data paints for Marvel Avengers.
But no one can really know outside of Crystal Dynamics and their publisher. That trophy data I presented is only a proxy for game sales, Steam data only represents the audience of the game on single platform. We don't have the complete picture. Nevertheless, if I had to make an estimate based on the limited information that we have, I'd wager that the game is significantly underperforming, on all fronts.
- The game was received much more poorly than the developers and publisher would have hoped for.
- The games sales are likely below expectations.
- Player retention is likely, significantly below expectations.
But, there are still factors that are up in the air. I'm sure that the developers have a big marketing push planned for this game, as well as updates and whatnot, surrounding the upcoming holiday period. Whether this games future will be one akin to Plants vs Zombies Garden Warfare 2 (healthy growth, decent player retention), or Anthem (poor growth and retention) will be more evident at the end of that period. So I think a good time to pass judgement on this games success will be around late January, February time.
