SirBruce on Q23 about the subscription numbers of CoX and Auto Assault, related to yesterday’s layoff news:

The rumor reported on f13 is just flat out wrong. An unnamed source close to the games in question has indicated to me that CoH is at about 160K right now, and that AA is over “a little higher” than 10K.

I’m reporting this because it makes sense.

You can see my report for Q1 06. CoX had around 180k by the end of March, it’s just not possible that it lost 40% of the subscribers in a couple of months. Not even with a total revamp gone completely wrong.

About Auto Assault, well, they were just clueless if they were expecting something else.

Plus some infos about Guild Wars that were known:

Guild Wars sold 1.5 million of it’s initial game, and about 500K so far for the expansion. It certainly doesn’t have 2 million active players. Even if everyone buys the expansion, you’re still not going to make anyway NEAR the money would would have with an MMO. I mean, an MMO is basically like selling a .5 – 1.0 boxes per month per subscriber. You just can’t compete with that revenue stream with a non-sub title unless your MMO does really poorly.

Guild Wars was an experiment, and although it’s sold well for a PC game title, it’s not produced anywhere near the MMO levels of revenue NCSoft wanted. The idea was to see if 5-10x as many people would play an almost-MMO as a non-MMO, if there was no monthly fee. Answer: No.

Not really agree with his analysis, though. Guild Wars isn’t a mmorpg that could have gathered millions of paying subscribers and, in fact, I believe that the 1.5 – 2 million boxes sold ARE 4-5x the number of active subscribers it could have brought along (if not less).

Even here it wasn’t smart to expect much more. If they were.