For a while, it looked like zombie survival game DayZ was on the Minecraft trajectory, gathering an early cult following that bought into a crowdfunded alpha phase. Like Minecraft, DayZ’s early days have been plagued by bugs and stability problems, but while Minecraft’s user base always maintained its meteoric growth, DayZ’s user base has begun shrinking.

DayZ originally began as a mod for Arma II, but its creators eventually abandoned the mod in favor of creating a full standalone title. Since hitting Steam Early Access in 2013, DayZ has sold over 3 million copies, but despite its early success, the game is struggling to hold onto its players.

According to Steam Charts, DayZ had over 45,000 concurrent players at its height toward the end of 2013, and even three months ago the game maintained around 30,000 logged in players. Now, that number has dwindled to only 9,000, representing a roughly 70 percent drop in players in just a few short months.

Fans of the game from the DayZ Reddit community met the news with little surprise, and several users took the opportunity to point out the problems they see with the game in its current state.

Reddit user lupinewolf wrote, “Man, I already paid for this game. Had a s—tload of fun with the mod, had some fun with the alpha, but really, there’s no NEED to keep playing. So I just stopped and will give it a shot again in Beta and then again at Release.”

Other users were not quite as lenient.

“This is what you get when the community does nothing but praise, idolize, and coddle the developers and screams at anyone who levels legitimate criticism at them,” wrote Reddit user zambabo. “Maybe if you guys were more vocal on the s—t job they’ve done at developing the game instead of having this ‘everyone gets a participation trophy just for trying!’ attitude, there might actually be something that resembles a half-assed finished product by now.”

DayZ’s early success was largely responsible for the flood of zombie survival imitators, but if the developers are not able to draw fans back in, someone else in the genre might just take its place.

Image credit: DayZ