Dateiliste

Since there's obviously some ongoing interest in how many people are still playing Descent 3 we decided to publish some figures taken from Dateiliste.

Our Descent 3 installer has been relatively successful for more than 5 years now, and maybe the amount of download requests shed some light on this ancient game's popularity.

The term "download request" here doesn't refer to the technical meaning of an HTTP request as described by the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).

A download request for the Descent 3 installation program at Dateiliste means that users first sign up to the site (www.dateiliste.com). After this, they either need to send an email or a private message to the user Descent to justify their wish to download the game. In essence this means that potential D3 pilots are required to provide some proof that they own a legal copy of the game themselves before gaining access to our installer.

The amount of those download requests we keep receiving is still relatively impressive (a bit more than 2 every week), considering that the game is 14 years old.

It's probably impossible to tell how popular this makes the game and how many gamers are really playing unless they do it online. However, comparing the download figures and the amount of players retrieved from online game trackers suggests that most downloaders never seem to make it online.

Our Descent 3 installation program has been available publicly for around 5 years and 8 months. Right after we published it there were more or less no download requests at all for the first 3 months.

708 pilots so far have requested and gained access to the download of our version of Descent 3.

All of of these 708 pilots downloaded the game at least once while some of them downloaded it more than once. There are no exact figures regarding the correct numbers of downloads (well, there are but we don't keep them).

Taken 5 years and three months into account (again, pretty much no requests or activity during the first 3 months), this makes around 128.73 requests per year, or 10.73 requests each month. This is just a little bit less than 2.5 download requests per week.