Jack Coleman (He/Him) is a News Editor from Ireland. This is his third full year in games media, having previously worked freelance for various outlets, including DualShockers and NME.
Previously, he’s interviewed breakout indie developers, broken big news stories, reviewed massive releases and recounted his time living as a humble woodsman in Oblivion.
A lifelong gamer, Jack is primarily interested in RPGs and narrative experiences. He’s also been playing League of Legends for a decade, unfortunately.
I was very excited about Rematch during the game’s beta and subsequent release. Sloclap’s unique take on the football genre was refreshing, feeling far closer to playing an actual 5-a-side than something like EA FC, which is more disconnected from the actual experience of playing football.
However, after pouring dozens of hours into the game, I gradually stopped playing Rematch. A cursory look at SteamDB shows that the overwhelming majority of the player base has made the same decision.
Downward Trending Curve
At launch, Rematch peaked at 92,841 concurrent players on Steam (the free beta test had roughly double the number of players, with a concurrent peak at 92,841). These days, Rematch doesn’t eclipse 5000 concurrent players on the platform, which represents a 90+ per cent fall-off in this metric since launch.
Rematch has struggled with netcode and desync since launch, which is extremely frustrating in a game that relies on precise inputs. This aspect of the game has certainly improved since launch, but core issues have a tendency to turn players off a game quickly.
The quirky nature of the game’s engine (specifically how players interact with the ball and one another) also led to the creation of certain ‘techniques’ that had little counter-play. It’s somewhat of a skill issue, but the execution of some of these techniques was so bizarre that it made you feel like you were the victim of a bug rather than any real skill expression.
Rematch’s ranked system also doesn’t have a true match-making rating, which means the skill level of your teammates doesn’t necessarily go up as your rank goes up. It also means that ranks are essentially meaningless, as all ranks are still playing in the same lobbies, which turns the ranked grind into one that’s more about time invested than skill level.
As Sloclap is an independent studio, they lack the resources and manpower of triple-A live-service behemoths. This means new features are slow to be added, and bugs are slower to be addressed. While a community will give a developer a certain amount of leeway at launch, the slower cadence of updates will eventually cause the player base to become disinterested.
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All of these factors have combined to chip away at Rematch’s player base, and a revival seems unlikely at this point, despite how strong the game’s core experience is.
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Old game has dwindling player base… What exactly was the point of this article? Just to neg on the game and put it down for losing players? 5000ccu is a strong number of players to have daily, especially for an indie team. I don’t get the point of what you’ve written…
2026-01-04 07:14:07
Mate, it is a massive drop off. I played for 100+ hours over about 3 weeks when it released. The matchmaking got so bad and the bugs were so bad I had to stop playing for my mental health. It could have been easily 30k ccu if the game was not so flawed. They delayed crossplay until months into the release so smaller regions were just slowly dying. Now I check discords and it’s basically the same 40-50 people in OCE region. Sloclap really did ruin this and it’s sad cause it is great fun.
2026-01-04 20:14:13
