NCSoft finally released a detailed report for the previous year. You can get the zipped .pdf directly from here.
These are the three pages you may find more interesting:
– Detailed report for Lineage
– Detailed report for Lineage II
– Detailed report for City of Heroes and Guild Wars
This is the data I extrapolated:
Lineage
2,293,227 subs worldwide
9,059 in US
Lineage II
1,525,497 subs worldwide
76,435 in US + EU
City of Heroes
194,000 subs worldwide (which is US + EU only)
Oddly enough it seems that Lineage gained a huge number of subscribers, in particular in Korea and at the loss of Lineage 2 that goes down from 2+ millions worldwide. Like if they got swapped. With China also contibuting to the loss of L2. Lineage instead gains 400k just in Korea and in the last three months of the year.
City of Heroes has gained nearly 50K in the last three months of 2005 and probably thanks to the release of City of Villains. Looking at the general trend it seems the game suffered heavily WoW’s release (it was down to 124k) but continued to grow steadily from there.
I also notice that in Korea the number of concurrent users compared with the total subscription is *extremely low*. When Lineage was above 2 millions subs the highest daily peak was barely above 130k. The subscriptions are roughly FIFTEEN TIMES the number of the daily peak. In the US that daily peak would correspond on average to 500-700k subs max. Definitely not anything like two millions, and consider that in Korea they don’t even have all the different timezones that keep the US players way more spread over the hours. In China this is even crazier, the total number of subscriptions could go up to TWENTY TIMES the number of the daily peak.
Considering City of Heroes, the highest daily peak is also very low (23k for 190k subs) if you compare it with the numbers coming from DAoC (roughly around 30k for something like 160-180k subs) or Eve (22k for 100k subs).
It is even more odd if you compare those numbers with those from Lineage 2. With only 76k of subs the daily peak goes up to 28k. Only 1/3 of the CoH subscribers logs in during a day, compared to the 60% of L2 subscribers logging in during a day. It’s like looking at two extremes…
Impressive also the numbers of Guild Wars. In Korea it failed completely but it got nearly 1,300k accounts activated in the western market (US+EU).