…but at least they make SENSE.

(the source of this discussion is an interesting article that appeared on the New York Times. Signe posted it integrally here. There’s interesting stuff to read aside the vague references to the numbers I discuss here)

You probably all know SirBruce. This is a discussion on F13 where I guess World of Warcraft numbers. And, of course, I’m never wrong:

SirBruce:
Well, they never mention subscriber numbers, unfortunately. I knew about the 700K figure a few days ago, as well as the fact it was getting lots of playtime in the Korean cybercafes.

I’d say there are at least 500K subscribers now. Potentially 100-200K more if you count Korea. But unfortunately, that’s only an estimate..

So WHY you keep estimating BADLY?
700k of box sales are EXCLUSIVELY for the american release. You assume a 200k vanishing as a churn rate?
In Korea there are 100k loggin in at the same time. How it’s possible that this number is EQUAL to ALL the subscribers?

A believeable estimate, right now and with the data we have, is that the american subscribers are at 600k if they sold 700k (and the box sales for the LAST WEEK still put WoW just behind HL2 and The Sims2). And 150-250k, at least, for Korea.

With the European release they’ll break easily 1M.

SirBruce:
“It appears that World of Warcraft is on a pace to generate at least $200 million in subscription revenue this year, in addition to more than $50 million in retail sales.”

$200 million / ($15/month * 12 months) = 1,111,111 subscribers per month on average. Now, that’s probably not possible, because they only sold 700K copies; it’s the payments from the cybercafes that distort this. So we still can’t be sure how many people are playing in South Korea, but at least it’s putting us in the ballpark.

No, it’s probably not possible just because you have a very personal idea even of the basic math.

—

Haemish:
Wait, isn’t the general consensus that only 1/8th of all subscribers are logged in nightly? So if that is even remotely true, they would somehow have over 2 million subscribers?

Because I believe most numbers aren’t correct.

I do not believe that each night 250k are logged in. Instead I believe they reached that at peak during the holiday. About Korea I don’t know but it’s not impossible to guess the numbers for NA and my bet is that they are at 600k.

In general the proportion is 1/4 – 1/5 anyway. Eve-Online has 13k at peak and 50k+ subs. DAoC, back then, 60k at peak and 250k in total
Everquest went above 100k logged in with 450k in total or so

All these examples are America+Europe, so the peak log ins are smoothed. While WoW has a good 95% of the playerbase completely focused in a few timezones. This means that there are MORE peoples logged in and less resulting total subs. So it’s probably 1/3 – 1/4. With a rough 150k or more logging in at peak we have about 600k.

This is an estimation, but an estimation that makes sense. Plus the game is still on the top three, while, as an example, EQ2 *vanished* after the first week.

The title is a news? No, of course, someone has too leech the success in some way and make money. You know, there are peoples in this world employed to be tards and they also make a lot of money doing it.

The old news was from Penny Arcade and Blizzard’s unforeseeable success with World of Warcraft that was brought up as an excuse to the servers dying:

Based on our market analysis, we made some initial calculations about the size of the massively multiplayer online games market in the United States.

My answer at that time was: “Their analysts suck”

So we arrive at the news of today. SirBruce writes:

NCSoft just reported their financial results and they were well below analyst forecasts.

Guess what? “Their analysts suck again”

We are talking about City of Heroes here. Commenting the game I always repeated: “A casual gameplay is equal to casual subscribers”. In fact that’s what happened. The whole message:

NCSoft just reported their financial results and they were well below analyst forecasts. The biggest reason was lower than expected royalties from Taiwan due to fewer NCSoft players, as well as continued financial losses at their US and European subsidiaries. I’m sure now there will be more pressure than ever to get games like Auto Assault and Tabula Rasa out sooner rather than later.

The figures below are for December compared to September:

Lineage I “Monthly Access” – 2,085,385 down from 2,366,798

Lineage II “Monthly Access” – 2,065,187 up from 1,516,632
(This is entirely due to launch in China. Without China’s numbers, they’d be down to 1,413,535.)

City of Heroes – 124,435 down from 163,053

The following is a general comment I wrote on Q23:

—
Expanding the idea. My opinion (since I don’t have reliable sources) is that Shadowbane isn’t suffering the launch of EQ2 and WoW as much as other titles. DAoC, instead, is directly affected by those because WoW directly appeals to the same audience. Shadowbane is a different market with its own niche, personality and charisma. In the same way you can see that Eve-Online numbers are actually INCREASING.

City of Heroes is another case. It is ‘ruined’ by iteself. Once I commented: “A casual gameplay is equal to casual subscribers”.

Those numbers will go up again (slightly) after they launch the PvP and then, again, when they’ll launch City of Villains but I’m sure the game will keep oscillating between the margins it has already set (120-200k). Which isn’t bad considering that NCsoft will start to cannibalize its own numbers soon with Tabula Rasa, Guild Wars etc.. (Tabula Rasa will ‘fail’, you’ll see)

FFXI is probably strongly affected as well but you still have to consider that it isn’t that founded on the western market and the loss of subscribers is a detail for them. They do not go in panic mode when they have their own untouchable market space.

About DAoC I still believe in my own prediction. They’ll see the numbers rise after December but they’ll never get all back and they’ll lose more when WoW will launch in Europe. Long term they’ll lose some more but I’m SURE that it will be deserved, because it’s in their FULL possibilities to radically improve the game without suffering the market as they are now. If they fail it’s just their fault with no justification.

SOE is also feeling the impact. I’m not surprised, they won’t release numbers soon. Both EQ and SWG are leaking subscribers and they have zero (effective and working) plans to stop the hemorrhage of players. Long term they have the strength to impose themselves on the market again but they wasted too many resources and made too many errors. I also don’t see them learning, hence I expect to see even more errors.

EDIT: Interesting is also to consider Ultima Online. Sunsword commented that the release of WoW and EQ2 didn’t affect them. Completely different was, instead, the release of SWG. Guess what? This makes sense.

(my personal opinions)

Anyway, congratulations to NCsoft for the transparence. Let the hiding and tricking the subscriptions numbers practice to the losers.

I have seecret sources to attempt another analysis of the future. Who will win between EQ2 and WoW? How they’ll affect the subscriptions of the other mmorpgs?

I won’t explain the merit of my conclusions so you can take all this like bullshit:

From what I heard and from what I see WoW not only will “win” over EQ2, but it will gain a quite relevant advantage. Both right at the start and in the long run. EQ2 will show very modest numbers (or better, it won’t show since SOE will never release the actual numbers when they could demonstrate a partial failure). The game will go on but without reaching the expectations of its management. This means a maximum of 250k of unique accounts in the short-mid term (till six months), but probably settling on the 200k line, more or less.

WoW will succeed both in the short and the mid term. It will actually do better than what I expected and imagined before, breaking easily the 400k mark when the european version will launch. The side effect is that Blizzard will have to face for the first time a bunch of “unexpected” problems, from lag, to collapsing servers, to exploits. This not just at release but also along its cycle. A lot of things will change in Blizzard’s attitude, both in how it works internally and outside with the community. Good or bad? We’ll see. It’s a huge mainland, before it settles down there will be some earthquakes.

What about other mmorpgs? Niche games will feel the impact but not so much, they’ll just have to face a downward flexion but nothing too relevant. At least in the short run. In the long run the situation will ask these smaller worlds to show some fighting spirit or they’ll slowly die. Not-so-small worlds will face a stronger, more direct impact, in particular because they offer directly the same type of product, which more then often looks already “tired” on its own. In this case I expect a downward flexion in subscribers around 20% for DAoC, the game I follow more closely. Other mmorpgs could show different results but everything will happen in the long run, slowly.

Future competitors? MEO isn’t worth the attention, same for Matrix. Tabula Rasa will show soon its limits and only Guild Wars will find a good place where to settle down but mostly as a side-effect of this genre instead of a direct competitor. Vanguard is still an empty envelope with a lot of mist inside and all the other project are too immature to be judged at this point.

This time is Eve-Online to reveal more precise numbers. When things are good peoples don’t seem to hide them:

That number (and the 11k mark) was beaten again on Monday when 11,284 players were in EVE at the same time. To put those numbers into a little different perspective, that is an astounding 23% of the accounts online simultaneously!

|…|

Finally, we crested 50,000 active accounts on Saturday. The “little game that won’t make it past Christmas (’03)” did just that and more! There have been some rocky stretches along the way, but EVE continues to expand and grow. Next stop, 75,000 active accounts.

Congratulations.

New release of Sir Bruce graph, now divided in three sections. The first is not worth the attention since it’s out of scale due to the asian market. The other two graphs, instead, are interesting.

I’m happy to see that Everquest is finally climbing down and that Electronic Arts (Ultima Online + The Sims) is sinking quickly, probably more than what is shown in the graph. In general I think that the market is way, way more healthy than what it deserves.

The more I look and interpret these numbers and the more I’m convinced that World of Warcraft will go out of scale. It’s a blend of what made Everquest, Final Fantasy XI and City of Heroes skyrocket. All at once.

An Analysis of MMOG Subscription Growth – Version 9.0