Guild Wars and Eve-Online subscribers situation

Just to archive semi-old data for my “subscriptions” category.

About the situation of Guild Wars, a post from SirBruce:

NCsoft has announced sales figures for Guild Wars. The game sold 650,000 copies in the US and Europe, but only 27,000 in Korea. Total sales are about US$27.5m versus US$50m forecast.

Arenanet’s operate costs are about US$9m/year. Guild Wars itself cost ~US$16m, including marketing costs. If NCSoft is committed to the product, they’re going to have to release 1.5 – 2 expansions a year and hope they sell consistently to keep the game profitable.


Since NCsoft is also the publisher, it’s all theirs, minus COGS of course, but how much does A.Net get? That’s the real question. If it’s a set percentage, then they might not be, as a “division”, profitable. If NCSoft decides to operate it at a “loss”, that’s fine, so long as the company is making money overall.

But you’d better believe they need to do expansions within three years, because you left out development costs. Box sales have recouped the games costs and covered A.Net for one year, but each year it’s going to cost about $9M a year to operate. So you have to generate at least that much in box sales every year through expansions, plus however much it costs to actually produce that expansion — probably not as much as the whole game itself, but still, not chump change. And you have, of course, opportunity cost to consider — sure, maybe GW is making money, but is it really the best use of NCSoft’s money, or could they make more with a traditional subscription-based game?

Now, 1-2 GW expansion per year should be okay, even if only half the people who bought the first box buy the second one, but you don’t want that number to keep declining or you’ll be in trouble really quick. Also, A.Net had already missed its first “window” for an expansion; they won’t have one until next year. So it remains to be seen if they are even CAPABLE of delivering on schedule.

More data about the situation in Korea at Terra Nova.

Someone also doubted od the possible failure since the 26-27k reported is about the licences sold to PC-bangs and not actual subscription numbers. It seems that Lineage 1 has just around 19k of those licences active. Which would transform the apparent complete failure of the game into a huge success.

The numbers on Terra Nova contradict this hypothesis, though. So it’s hard to understand what is going on.


About Eve-Online the situation is more clear. CCP is organizing to try to push the game in the eastern market as well but for now there are just normal subscriptions following a positive, always growing trend. Which is the best a mmorpg could aspire to and that rewards one of the most original and less derivative products out there.

11.7.2005 – New Online Record

Yesterday, Sunday, you set a new online player record when 12.895 of you were playing at the same time! No reports of lag were reported, the ‘cold war edition’ seems to have yet again lessened the server load.

More details about the actual subscription numbers from a rather recent post on the forums:

1. How many suscribers does EVE currently have?

I think we just went past 60.000 paying subscribers the other day. That means an active account which is being paid for and is the industry standard for “subscriber”.

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