I really disagree with that IGN article about how player numbers do not matter. If there are too few, or the people playing the game treating objective modes like TDM, it just turns into a mess.
You're kind of missing the point of the article though, don't you think? Here's a quote from it, and it's basically the thesis of the whole thing:
"But those numbers don't actually mean much when it comes right down to it, and they certainly don't paint the whole picture of a game's success or failure. If there are enough people playing LawBreakers that you can quickly find a game every time you play (which, in my experience, there are) why does it matter to the people playing it what the size of the player base is?"
also
"A game's long term success has to do with a lot more than just its player count on launch week. Popular games can crash, and games with smaller player bases than LawBreakers can thrive with the right post-launch support - and it's encouraging to see developer Boss Key has already put out an update."
This person isn't saying that it's not important, the person is saying that you shouldn't focus on it. The game could still be a success for Boss Key for all we know - we have no information about PS4 sales (probably the bulk of their actual sales) and know pretty much nothing about their actual budget. A developer chimed in saying that Battleborn had a budget that was over three times that of Lawbreakers. How are we supposed to sit here and say whether or not it's a failure when the cost of the game is a relatively small number that is totally unknown to us?
A keyword in the article is "focusing." The author just goes on about how useless it is to doomsay the game based on population. While a successful game may generally have a large playerbase, there could be a game out there (maybe even lawbreakers!) that could already be successful despite a small PC userbase. I don't know if that's true, and I'm pretty sure you and everybody else on here doesn't know if that's true either, so people proclaiming that to be the case are not providing anything of value to the actual conversation. These sorts of things are generally loosely based on SteamSpy, which is often looking at interest on the smallest of the big 3 platforms for fairly demanding video games (graphically). They extrapolate that data onto the other (bigger) userbases just assuming that everything is held constant. It's probably misleading and definitely ill-informed.
This isn't me saying that I think LB is in a fine place and that population is not a problem, I don't think that. This is me saying that blind speculation doesn't provide any parties a whole lot of value.