It feels like Daggerheart losing steam, and I worry for the future of CR
As the subject line says, it feels like a lot of the initial excitement over Daggerheart has died out, at least what I can tell from this subreddit, r/criticalrole, r/daggerheart, other RPG subreddits, and from youtube view counts.
It felt like there was a lot of energy and engagement at r/daggerheart in May, and nowadays it feels like crickets, even though a rules update AND a new episode of the Menagerie dropped yesterday. The main sub's live discussion post, which at this time only has 52 likes, 232 comments where over half of those comments are from a single user. This sub hardly talks about daggerheart.
The youtube view counts for Daggerheart content also seem to be dropping hard.
- Menagerie ep 1 seems to be stuck around 881K (3mths old), ep 2 is 159K (2wks old).
- 1.3 update is at 138K (2mths old), 1.4 update 79K (1mth old)
If you compare these to their CR's main campaign content, it seems pretty bad.
- VOX Machina S3 opening, has 414K views and is only 7 days old.
- C3 episode 97 has 267K views and is only 4 days old.
- Candela Obscura live has 106K views and is only 11 days old.
In other words, Menagerie ep2 is doing only slightly better than the most recent Candela. Think about that. (I also can't help but raise my eyebrow at the fact that Sam hasn't returned for any more Daggerheart content.)
I'm concerned that Daggerheart is going to be a pretty big flop. And it's going to sting a lot harder than Candela because of the amount of energy and resources that have gone into creating this game.