Sure, Tarkov has had mild success. There's probably been close to 250,000 sales in its history. However, it's always going to be hampered by things like Class 6 armor can't be beaten by x ammo, or y ammo has a cost of ABC so it's out of the range of z% of players.
You can't have a shooter that is 'skill-based' be about numbers that aren't reactionary. That's why the meta never shifts. That's why this game has 20k viewers on Twitch. That's why the game is dead (I've run 10 Shorelines [I'm working on my 40 extracts from Shoreline for my weekly…]) and I've met 3 people in Resort in the past 10 Shoreline runs.
Too many threads coming up today about how Battlefield is trash (no you're trash at it) and they're so glad EFT is bug free (earlier today none of my keys except WASD worked… so bug free.) This game won't ever be 'main stream' (most of your friends haven't heard of Tarkov) because Nikitas vision for the game is to be an open world MMOFPS. It's never going to get there, it's always going to be a lobby based shooter. For a lobby based shooter, it's cool that you can customize your armour, kit, and full load out – but there is simply too much disparity between armours and ammo required.
I know I'll just get a bunch of teenagers (the new audience for this game) flaming me in the comments, but I just got tired of seeing all the Battlefield hate when literally the only thing wrong with that game is the bad bloom and the servers a few days ago (which are fine now.) It's clear a huge chunk of the community is playing BF2042 right now though, since the servers are even more dead than normal.
All that being said, it won't succeed on the servers alone. Terrible netcode, terrible desync, terrible connectivity errors.
