Interesting news thanks to Sir Bruce. The precise number of Eve-Online subscribers:
6-01-2004 – 45,642 subscribers
A really good work considering the “screensever” nickname. It will be interesting to see how the community will react with the release of the new expansion, expected for September/October.
The numbers seem to come directly from the CEO of the game.
SirBruce posted on CorpNews more precise numbers about NCSoft:
Summary:
Total Revenues: $72 million
Gross Profit: $45 million
US Sales: $16 million
Lineage I Monthly Subscribers
Korea – 1,685,100
Taiwan – 720,076
Japan – 77.438
China – 169,697
US – 7,191
Lineage II Monthly Subscribers
Korea – 1,078,491
Taiwan – 206,089
Japan – 113,279
US – 76,421
City of Heoes Monthly Subscribers
169,925
You remember the announce of the three most important peoples leaving Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa? It where I first wrote about the smell of vapor. Learn to “read” the news.
Now the news:
Guild Wars was awaited for Q4 2004, now delayed to Q1 2005
Tabula Rasa was as well awaited for Q4 2004, now delayed to second half of 2005
More interesting NCSoft news. Active subscribers.
Lineage 2 – 76.000 active subscribers
City of Heroes – 170.000 active subscribers
Box sales:
Lineage 2 – 86.000 boxes sold
City of Heroes – 190.000 boxes sold
If this is true I have to reconsider my guess of 400k active users for WoW in the first six month. If that’s the status of the market WoW will break half-a-million in the first six month.
Slashdot is the source.
Square officially confirms the new record: FFXI has surpassed EverQuest with 500.000 paying subscribers. And it’s not only this. They also have 1.200.000 active characters, something to consider since every character in the game brings to square one more dollar each month.
The records aren’t over, they also claim for 140.000 concurrent logins at the same time, breaking another EQ’s record.
There’s a lot more in the report, for example what Lum has pointed in his blog:
* 42% of their customer base hasn’t made it beyond level 10.
* 34% of all characters are level 1 mules.
Well, don’t tell anyone but I’m still subscribed from the beginning and I just discovered that my toon is still at level 10 …
Anyway, this is also related with all the other things I wrote these days. Why FFXI is having a so big success? Part of it because it’s playable for everyone. Once again the performance of the client. It’s surely one of those game where the tech isn’t pushed so high, still the artistic mood is inspired and unique.
The fact that the PSX2 shares the exact same game of the PC version adds to this. Access offered to a broad playerbase and not just a few rich geeks with the latest hardware.
I’m happy to see a company revealing informations that are usually kept reserved. It has been really interesting to read and it’s a demonstration about how many of the design choices were absolutely good. Like having multi-hardware, multi-language worlds.
Now lets see how the market changes when World of Warcraft starts its challange.
I don’t really know where all these players are coming from.
There’s a press release about City of Heroes breaking the 100k subscriptions mark, even more surprising is the result of Lineage 2 at 60k (considering the value of the game). Both numbers are referred to North America only.
In the press release there’s a lot of bragging about the smooth launches as well. I tried to track the official one but all I managed to find is the link to Warcry.
Press release on Warcry
I found a better link here.