Peak is always during launch day, then there's a long tail, and very successful games might slowly rise after a couple years and surpass the launch peak.
While Dwarf Fortress has had a fantastic launch, it will never be a wildly popular game to increase its player base by much more than its release, especially in the oversaturated gaming market of today.
Yeah there's always a fairly substantial drop-off. Dwarf Fortress[0] dropping by half from 14k on average down to 7k one month later is roughly the same as Elden Ring[1] (522k to 211k) but on a slightly different scale
If you would like to hear an analysis of these two trends, Jason Rohrer goes over launch day sales for a game he released in 2014 and 2018 in this gdc talk [0].
Peak is always during launch day, then there's a long tail, and very successful games might slowly rise after a couple years and surpass the launch peak.
While Dwarf Fortress has had a fantastic launch, it will never be a wildly popular game to increase its player base by much more than its release, especially in the oversaturated gaming market of today.