In these graphs, you can see both games take a jump at COVID. You can see the Wall event and the Season 0 in the ESO graph, and you can see the first and second Prime TV seasons’ bumps in the 76 graph. While player counts are almost the same between ESO and 76, the engagement on their subreddits tells a different story. 76’s engagement is around twice that of ESO’s.
I think this bodes very badly for ESO.
That being said, Twitch Stats fare a little better for ESO.
There are about 25% more channels for ESO than 76, and overall viewers is about twice as high. On the one hand, that undermines my thesis that ESO is doomed, given that I think 76 is in no danger, and all these numbers are in the same ballpark. However, there’s not a lot of value in watching 76. Things are too quick and too random. I don’t like watching people play games; I’d much rather just play them myself. However, I can totally see watching someone play through a trial in ESO, and that takes an hour. Two, perhaps, if they’re not pros, and they’re doing vet. I mean, maybe you’d watch someone do the raid in 76, but if the group knows what they’re doing, that’s 10 minutes.
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I would like to take this opportunity to point out that I’m chasing the BOS underarmor style plan. It has a 5% chance to drop from two events in the game. These events come and go with some invisible schedule, so I do every one I can. For months now. I’m now sitting at 133 of these events without a drop. If you do the math, that’s like flipping heads nine times in a row. When I bitch about this on the subreddit, I get endless defensive replies that “it’s just RNG!” Sure, it is, but that doesn’t make me feel any better about the way this game is being run.
I don’t think this is a sustainable way to direct the game. As I point out with other data, if I was in charge at Bethesda, I’d be using this data to make different decisions about how the game is structured.
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I also asked for a summary of the updates on the timeline, to see the relative impact. Turns out, they don’t even count compared to the show.
# | Update / event | Date | What it added | Visible effect on Steam |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| — | Wastelanders + Steam launch | Apr 2020 | Human NPCs, dialogue, factions | The data starts here — ~15.8k avg, fades fast as launch buzz cools |
| 2 | One Wasteland For All (S2) | Sep 2020 | Level scaling, Daily Ops | Negligible |
| 3 | Steel Dawn (S3) | Dec 2020 | Brotherhood of Steel questline | Small |
| 4 | Locked & Loaded (S4) | Apr 2021 | Loadouts, S.P.E.C.I.A.L. tweaks | Small |
| 5 | Steel Reign (S5) | Jul 2021 | BoS conclusion | Modest bump |
| 6 | Expeditions: The Pitt (S10) | Sep 2022 | Instanced expeditions | Modest Oct bump |
| 7 | Atlantic City | Dec 2023 | New expedition region | Small |
 | TV show season 1 | Apr 2024 | Amazon Prime series | The event of the chart — 72,930 all-time peak, +331% avg |
| 8 | Skyline Valley (S17) | Jun 2024 | First-ever map expansion | Real, but mostly riding the TV wave down |
| 9 | Milepost Zero (S18) | Sep 2024 | Caravans, legendary crafting | Small |
| 10 | Gleaming Depths (S19) | Dec 2024 | Raids return, 4-star legendaries, C.A.M.P. pets | Noticeable Dec bump (+34%) |
| 11 | Ghoul Within (S20) | Mar 2025 | Playable ghoul, Perks Catalog | Small |
| 12 | Gone Fission (S21) | Jun 2025 | Fishing | Small |
| TV show season 2 | Dec 2025 | Premiered Dec 16, weekly through Feb 3, 2026 | Second-biggest surge: +64% Dec → +31% Jan → peak Feb, then falls off after the finale |
I guess all I can say is that, if I were in a position to direct how the game is developed and marketed, I would be using this data more than they seem to be.
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Out of Jim Carrey’s top 10 movies, 2 are free to stream, on 2 different services. Every other hides behind a rental. A second paywall, after paying for the streaming service.
My issue is that 80-90% of every movie you think, “Hey, that’s a good movie; let’s watch that,” is the same. All the good stuff is behind a second paywall.
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I really just goes to prove the old saying by Upton Sinclair: “It is hard to get someone to grasp a fact when their salary relies on not seeing it.” Just follow the money. Every time. Or “mammon,” as the case may be.
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Controversial take, I know, but ban them too, and for the same reason that you’d ban bots. If bots are disrupting the game balance or ruining the economy with some particular behavior, then the actual people doing that same behavior are too. I can already hear it: “But, but, they’re paying subscribers!” So are the accounts running bots. Why is it ok to disrupt the game with time and effort, but not with programmed automation?
]]>The ticket got picked up yesterday. “Still a problem?” “Yes.” It’s always still a problem.
Get a call this morning. “Please show me.” “But I sent the error in the ticket.” “Yeah, yeah, please share your screen.”
I can barely understand her. For part of the call, I can’t hear, because she’s scraping something around on the desk. The rest of the time, I can barely hear, because garbled call center chatter is cutting through the “background suppression” on her mic.
I do the thing. I watch in almost-horror as it works flawlessly this time. I know I will never understand what has just happened. Anathema to me. I need to know so that I don’t have to fool with this in the future. “OK, it worked this time. What changed?” Mumbles. She wants to end the call and close the ticket.
I decide it’s not worth the hassle of the language barrier and the technology friction on the off-chance that she could actually tell me why it wasn’t working before, and why it’s working now, so I tell her she can close the ticket and end the call.
This is my life now. AI does almost all of the actual coding, and I try to get infrastructure setup like I’m trying to assemble a watch inside a closed box with someone else’s hands. Still challenging, to be sure, but not the kind of challenging that has lit my fires and made me love what I do for 30 years.
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Last year, Microsoft slashed ZeniMax Online Studios to the bone, cutting an unreleased game that had been taking 7 years in development, and firing half the studio that was working on it. Although not fired, per se, the studio lead left right after. These moves apparently lit a fire under the butts of the people who remained. The Elder Scrolls Online announced and is releasing an overwhelming slate of new content and quality-of-life upgrades through the next couple of years, and the game’s population count is now starting to rebound. I think this trend will continue.
I’ve quit ESO. I’ve looked at several other games to replace it. Battlefield 6 was good and interesting, but the skill range is too high, and the sweats have run off all the casuals. I tried Warframe, which has a nice player count these days, but there’s no multiplayer end game to speak of. I tried Destiny 2, but even fans say it’s nigh impossible to get into as a new player, now that they deleted the first half of the content. Between the inscrutability of the systems, player counts being in the toilet, and Bungie in serious trouble after the release of Marathon, I’m giving this a miss pending better fortunes. I hate any game that’s all or nothing, which eliminates extraction shooters, like Arc Raiders, from consideration. Diablo IV and Path of Exile are too dark for my tastes. WoW is too cartoonish. Final Fantasy XIV is too furry. Guild Wars 2 looks interesting, but it’s PC only, and I just want to game on my console in my recliner. And that’s about it for MMO’s that I might be interested in.
So all of this continues to leave me with Fallout 76. Meanwhile, Bethesda Game Studios adds less content and more bugs with every release of Fallout 76. It’s in a bad place right now, and the player counts definitely reflect this. Bethesda fumbled the latest re-release of Fallout 4, which is still plagued with bugs, after many months. They fumbled Starfield’s original release, and now continue to fumble with Starfield for Playstation, which is also reportedly full of bugs. It seems they’re never going to get to The Elder Scrolls VI. I sure wish Microsoft would kick their rear ends in gear somehow. Given popular sentiment on the subreddit, I think the current trend with player counts in 76 will also continue unless something changes drastically. Their recent announcement about the next big patch clearly continues the decline.
Bethesda, please, make Fallout 76 great again. I find it almost inconceivable that I can’t find any games I want to play besides this one right now.
Investigation into Amutable GmbH founding documents, undisclosed conflicts in the systemd birthDate merge, EUR 855K in undisclosed government funding, and $42.2M in corporate lobbying.
Source: systemd birthDate Merge: Corporate Filings & Governance Failure – TBOTE Project
The executive summary:
On March 18, 2026, a first-time contributor submitted a pull request adding a birthDate field to systemd’s user record schema. A Microsoft employee merged it against 37 thumbs-down and 1 thumbs-up. The community submitted a revert. Lennart Poettering – who had incorporated a commercial Linux startup called Amutable seven months earlier – closed the revert without merging and locked the discussion. The entire sequence took 48 hours.
This investigation pulled Amutable’s founding documents from the German Handelsregister. The corporate filings show three equal shareholders, no outside investors, and self-dealing exemptions that let any founder sign contracts between the company and their own personal entities. All three founders were employed at Microsoft when they signed the founding deed. A hidden shareholders’ agreement – referenced three times in the Articles of Association but never filed publicly – governs economic rights, IP assignment, and vesting terms the public cannot see.
Three decisions put the birthDate field into systemd. Each was made by someone with a direct financial interest in the outcome. No one disclosed those interests. systemd has no conflict-of-interest policy, no steering committee, no community veto, and no disclosure requirements. The project that boots every major Linux distribution has less formal governance than a typical mid-size open source project.
Amazing. Astounding, even. So good, old Lennart Pottering is a bad guy. Who knew? Was he always?
From his Wikipedia page:
Poettering was born in Guatemala City but grew up in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Hamburg, Germany. Poettering worked for Red Hat from 2008 to 2022. He then joined Microsoft. In 2026, Poettering left Microsoft to cofound Amutable, a company focused on integrity verification for Linux systems.
What happened during his 4 years at Microsoft to make him leave and make this his whole identity?
UPDATE: Looks like I stumbled into more conspiracy than I knew:
