To play or not to play: that is the question that friends ask me when they're thinking of picking up a multiplayer game but hear that it's "dead." The game in question is almost never actually dead, but it's understandable why they thought it was. A still-somewhat-new fixation on player counts in our hobby has made it increasingly easy for spectators to glance at a SteamDB graph, see an arrow pointing down, and begin a narrative that a game is dead or dying.
Before such an absolute label became the default vernacular for multiplayer games, we more often asked a simpler question: Can you still find a match?
