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With games like WoW and SW:G and CoH and GW etc, does ANYBODY think these guys can succeed with a mass-produced MMORPG engine?

Eve Online has been a real quiet success story since their launch on May 6, 2003, starting out small and slowly building more and more subscribers, with almost no competition in the market for its particular brand of sci-fi space simulation. As of June 2006, Eve has 125,625 subscribers.

WoW isn't the most popular by a long shot. Take a look at the numbers for Lineage, and you'll see what I mean.

Latest numbers from http://www.mmogchart.com/ put Lineage and Lineage II combined at about 3 million subscribers. WoW is at about 6.5 million and on their website they recently claimed to be over 7 million. That sounds like a pretty big lead to me.

Ain't it a shame when facts get in the way of making a point? What was your point anyway?

"Ad infinitum" is probably right, at least looking at it from the perspective of computer and video games. Last I checked, Ultima Online is on its way to being ten years old and still has over 100,000 subscribers. World of Warcraft has almost fifty times as many players. If they manage the game well, I can see it being around in twenty years. Part of that would be a yearly expansion. The only people who would want to get the expansion are probably more-than-casual players, and spending $60 a year on a game you might spend 60 hours a month playing (or more) isn't really that expensive. A year or two later, that can be free to any new incoming players.

World. Of. Warcraft.

The MMO market is huge, explosive, and has not hit the consoles (probably due to the fact that it would suck to use a keyboard/mouse in a recliner). Between all the MMO's we are talking about an easy 10,000,000 players

You have an interesting definition of "dead." City of Heroes has about 160,000-170,000 subscribers, as of their last monthly report. That's quite respectable for an MMO that's not World of Warcraft, Everquest, Lineage, etc. MMOGchart.com says that "City of Heroes is proof that a well-executed MMOG can still garner substantial numbers even in the currently very competitive climate." If you assume each of those subscriptions counts for $10 a month of revenue to CoH (considering their multimonth discount subscriptions and the game card sales of which they only see a portion), that's still over $1.5 million of revenue every month, about $20 million per year. Think they're gonna want to throw that away?

You have an interesting definition of "dead." City of Heroes has about 160,000-170,000 subscribers, as of their last monthly report. That's quite respectable for an MMO that's not World of Warcraft, Everquest, Lineage, etc. MMOGchart.com says that "City of Heroes is proof that a well-executed MMOG can still garner substantial numbers even in the currently very competitive climate." If you assume each of those subscriptions counts for $10 a month of revenue to CoH (considering their multimonth discount subscriptions and the game card sales of which they only see a portion), that's still over $1.5 million of revenue every month, about $20 million per year. Think they're gonna want to throw that away?

To see its perspective compared to other MMOs, check out this chart:

http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart1_files/Subscription s_8846_image001.gif

It pretty much beats every other popular MMO out there combined. That's impressive.

Also, considering the expansion coming out, I'm sure that will attract either new players or players who quit before and then want to see what the Burning Crusade is about (new content, new characters, new spells, bug fixes, enhancements, etc).

Here's the link to illustrate my point:

http://www.mmogchart.com/

SWG, UO and CoH/V have whopping 3.8% of the market COMBINED. WoW has 52.9%. Those are hardly Windows-only success stories. In fact, the only game that offers true native Mac support, WoW, is the only game that can truly call itself Massively Multiplayer. There rest are little more than pretenders.

Any company that ignores 20 million relatively affluent users does so at it's peril. WoW has proved that by NOT ignoring them.

First of all I think it's a very narrow view to call WoW the MMO leader. Lineage 2 has far more players / revenue / you name it. WoW is the most popular MMO here in America (one might say in the English speaking market)... but to place it in some high regard and label it "unbeatable" by other games is a little short sighted.

http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart1.html

The population of one server droping says NOTHING of the population of other/new servers.

Sure, the oldest servers are going to lose players, but as long as the new ones *gain* players faster, it's a net gain.

WoW is *still* growing faster than any MMO, ever. You're gonna have to come up with something more than anecdotal evidence to discount the volumes of evidence of that.

Because WoW is more popular than all the rest combined. http://mmogchart.com/Chart7.html

Where did 10 million customers go?

Here is where.

Yes the parent is spot on,
the MMOG's took many customers.
Blaming Piracy like the music industry is not
going to bring the money back.
Perhaps some better MMOG's would.
I play WoW, is there room to compete?
I think so.

http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart7.html

It sure is my favorite MMORPG.

This chart makes the rest look like a joke its so out of whack.

Everquest (and it's younger brother) are almost non-issues anymore... http://mmogchart.com/Chart7.html

"According to http://www.mmogchart.com/ it had 45,000 players at the last time they counted"

Seems that the last time they counted was a year ago :/. I think it's pushing 200K right now. Right up there with everything other than the heavy hitters like WOW and Evercrack.

After all, WoW only comes out on top after the top two games are taken out of statistics.

O RLY?

This game gets triple the press of games that are 100 times more popular (yes I made this stat up but it is probably close to true). According to http://www.mmogchart.com/ it had 45,000 players at the last time they counted and it seems like every week there is a news article, TV segment or slashdot post about Second Life. Is somebody tipping these people off or something? Sure it offers a currency exchange for US dollars, but so does Everquest 2 and Entropia universe, along with countless games that have a black market for such thing. You can run businesses? Oh wait, I think I recall setting up a shop and selling customized goods in Star Wars Galaxies 3 years ago. Players can create things? Well how about trying to modding tools that come with almost every game that isn't an MMORPG these days, creat all you want. To me it just seems like people are playing a glorified chatroom, but maybe that appeals to some. It still doesn't explain why this game gets so much attention.

http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart10.html
And what about the peak http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart9.html ? More than one million concurrent user at peak? holy shit~
Hello? Just seeing this would mean that wow is far from having a 50% market share..
I don't know why sirbruce discount his own charts, maybe I missed something?

http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart10.html
And what about the peak http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart9.html ? More than one million concurrent user at peak? holy shit~
Hello? Just seeing this would mean that wow is far from having a 50% market share..
I don't know why sirbruce discount his own charts, maybe I missed something?

1. Why isn't ________ listed?

There are four main reasons why a particular game isn't listed in the charts:

a) The game in question isn't really a MMOG, at least by my reckoning. Games like Diablo II and Phantasy Star Online fall into this category. Guild Wars developers say in their own FAQ that they do not consider their game a MMOG; in addition, it doesn't charge a monthly fee (see below). Please don't email me trying to insist otherwise; I'm not likely to be convinced.

They should either rename this site to MMORGPchart.com as all games are fighting/rpg based games. Otherwise games like hattrick.org (820k users) and travian.com (120k users) should also be included.

Neither of those appears to charge a monthly fee, so they aren't games that MMOGchart would track. Check out the FAQ for the types of games that aren't tracked.

EQ2 still hasn't reached the number EQ1 hit, but there's a helluva lot more competition out now than there was in 1999. Also a lot of the people who made EQ so good left before or at the beginning of the EQ2 project (McQuaid, Trost, etc). I myself am now looking at Vanguard should I ever really get interested in MMOs again (after 7 years they get to be kinda the same thing in every single game) http://www.mmogchart.com/ for the numbers

I meant to say, "WoW is huge." ...Darn html....

Oh I don't know.. it has more subscribers than EverQuest or EverQuest II. In fact, the only MMORPG's that have more subscribers than FFXI are World of Warcraft, Lineage, and Lineage II. Source.

Also note that besides FFXI along with World of Warcraft and Runescape are the only games still without a downward trend. There numbers have only been going up since release. Not bad considering EverQuest II flopped shortly after release, D&D Online is doing the same, and most all other MMO's are going downhill.

I just logged on with my 360 copy for the first time in a year.. and man, there are just as many people if not more speaking english than Japanese (we coexist on the same servers). I have friends who have been playing for 3 years, and they certainly don't live in Japan. I think you underestimate the game's popularity. But that's alright, I'm sure you'll become more aware of things when you get older.

http://www.mmogchart.com/

Because being #4 means no one plays it...

To your first point, I think he acknowledges that the data only goes to the end of the year. However, I agree with the overall sentiment. The primary source for his data is publicly released information, and, as we know, PR mouthpieces rarely trumpet bad news.

If you examine each individual MMORPG, very rarely do you see declines in subscriber base. Typically, you see a growth period followed by an eternal plateau. I'm suspicious that the lack of news isbeing interpreted by the author as a "no change" when in reality, it could be a significant decline which is not announced by the publisher. Users moving around between MMORPGs would result in them being double/triple counted for these purposes.

Has anyone compared the total subscriber numbers to numbers obtained through other methodologies (incidence surveys?). The chart (which excludes Lineage I/II) above extrapolated using his method would predict something like 15-20 million total subscribers by December of this year.

Zonk, you could at least check if there is a link to the site described in the summary.

http://www.mmogchart.com/

-prator

This shouldn't be funny. It's pretty accurate. People playing MMOGs are far less likely to buy other games because: (1) MMOGs are addictive, (2) They need a lot of time investment to achieve "success" (or to "win" the game) and (3) MMOG game experience for many far surpasses boring single player experiences. This has been known for years now.

Just look at the massive amount of people playing these games.

not to digress... but last I checked EQ2 still hadn't caught up to EQ... and based on the people I know who have played both, I kind of doubt it will.

http://mmogchart.com/Chart7.html

There's a good site that tracks subscription numbers on lots of different MMOGs here. It has dozens of games, and has been tracking subscription stats since 1997.

There is also regarded as a immune system copy, which is very comfortable usable. It does take a couple of years from now.

There are over 30000 golf courses in the world (source: Golf Digest), and I've seen a study saying there are 60 million players ( can't remember where I saw it).

So, still wanna bet?

I think this has to be linked. http://mmogchart.com/ A study on the MMOG subscription numbers declared by the publishers.

So why not have both? Why alienate such a large group of people.

Because they're afraid that more players will stay with the old version, and it'd be pretty humiliating for a corp to be faced with such objective proof that "newer" != "better".

Sony tried to have both, and released Everquest2 while EQ1 was still running. They attribute some of EQ2's disappointing results to that choice. Looking at http://www.mmogchart.com/ EQ2 still doesn't have nearly the subscribers as EQ1 (although I don't know if this is confused because of Sony's combined-subscription plans).

The concern of auto-cannibalization is greater for an franchise property like Star Wars. The marketplace might support niches for several kinds of online games based on spaceships, androids, and laser-pistols, but there can only be one "Star Wars Online" at a time. To be THE StarWars game carries automatic value, independent from the quality of the specific game.

The publishers wanted to shift to target different customers, but didn't want to dilute their brand by continuing the older service. Thus, the many existing subscribers suffer because Sony hopes to replace them with 5x the number of 15-21 year-old males.

(This will turn out to have been a losing gamble- if they wanted online twitchy StarWars combat, they should've tried to improve StarWars-Battlefront2 with a more compelling and persistent online service. Instead, they're making a pale WoW-clone in a StarWars skin)

This is just a survey. The numbers provided under the "what MMOG are you playing most" question only tell you the demographics of the survey sample, NOT the total online population.

The best breakdown of total active subscribers can be found here.

The fact that well over 50% of the respondants were playing primarily World of Warcraft tells you more about the results of the other questions. For instance, obviously you could not have been playing World of Warcraft for longer than 12 months, which is why the results of that question reveal a huge dropoff after that. That does not mean most people play an online game for under a year before changing, simply that the one they're playing now hasn't been around for longer than that.

It's a matter of game quality, though. SOE's games aren't that good IMO and the subscriber numbers kinda reflect that (probably the best data is here. I'd rather pay $20 a month for one really good game than $20 a month for 4 bad games, 5 mediocre ones, and 1 sorta-good one. If the small operator has a better game than it already has SOE (or whoever) beat. And even if there were 10 really good games on one bill, who would find time to play any more than one of them in this world of 800-hour MMORPGs? Seems more like a bullet point to get quick sales than an actual legitimate good deal - and as I said the smaller operator will be fine as long as the game is good.

As you point out there are some players that absolutely love it. We now have 71.000 customers, experiencing continuous growth since launch, surpassing big titles such as Sims Online, Asherons Call (1&2) and Planetside (See http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart3.html). I can only assume from that fact that your statement is indeed correct and there are some players that absolutely love it ;)

We will however never be a mainstream game and we have never intended to be so. We have a brutal and harsh universe and embrace PVP, and consciously live with the drawbacks of that decision as a cost of doing business. Your experience of being a miner attacked by a pirate a stellar example of such cost. Nevertheless, would EVE be so unique and growing if it didn't have such an extensive PVP system? I seriously doubt it :)

However, I can't agree with your estimation of the skill training system, time required to train to be proficient and the gap between experienced players. I'll go in to some basic details first so everyone reading is on the same page;

In EVE, a skill is trained off-line, each skill involving 5 levels, each level giving an additional cumulated benefit. Since we are talking about combat proficiency, lets take the Small Projectile Turret skill. It allows the Operation of small projectile turrets and gives a 5% Bonus to small projectile turret damage for each level trained, resulting in 25% bonus to damage at level 5.

The key here is to look at levels 1-4 and compare them to training from 4-5. Training from level 1-4 to get an accumulated bonus of 20% takes a day. Training from level 4-5 to get an accumulated bonus of 25% takes a bit more than 6 days. If I have a decent amount of learning skills trained and implants, these numbers would change to 3/4 of a day and 4 days respectively. I can shave more off with better learning skills, better implants and a character in a combat bloodline. I should also mention that advanced learning skills and implants were released considerably after launch, so older players are at a disadvantage, having spent more time achieving the level they are at today compared to the possible speed of a new player.

Therefore, the skill system inherently has a built in favoritism towards new players even though off-line skill training would seem to contradict that simply because you spend relatively more time achieving those extra percentages. Surely, a 2 year player will be better off in general than a 6 month player, but if you train wisely, fit for the occasion and position yourself well, you can have him running too.

Remember, you only need to train for about 5 months to get everything to level 4 which a 2 year character all has to level 5. If you want to advance to higher tech levels however, you start getting training prerequisites of level 5 in certain skills, which again requires you to start selecting what you want to specialize in.

I assume you the 3 years you mention are to train all those skills to level 5 and you are right, if you want to max out the skills, you will need something in that ballpark. But that also means you can use almost any ship and any module from any race in the game and be pretty damn good at it. Currently, nobody has that ability, EVE is only 30 months old.

I'd also like to point out a new feature coming up, which is called "Eye for an Eye" which I believe might help your situation. If someone kills you illegitemately, like you describe, you get an "Eye for an Eye" contract on him which allows you to shoot him down whenever you see him - once. I don't know if that is the kind of retribution you are looking for, but it might be.

Thanks for voicing your concerns, although I don't agree with some of them - but I hope I addressed them to some extent.

Nathan "Oveur" Richardsson
Senior Producer - EVE Online

Eventually, someone will make a WoW-killer in the MMORPG arena. It may take a few years, but it'll happen.

WoW Killer? Do you not know about the exclusion of existing games in some statistics? Or do you need a recent chart?

Eventually, someone will make a WoW-killer in the MMORPG arena. It may take a few years, but it'll happen.

WoW Killer? Do you not know about the exclusion of existing games in some statistics? Or do you need a recent chart?

Eventually, someone will make a WoW-killer in the MMORPG arena. It may take a few years, but it'll happen.

WoW Killer? Do you not know about the exclusion of existing games in some statistics? Or do you need a recent chart?

This is not surprising. The amount of people (kids) playing this game has been steadily increasing, especially as parents start to actually worry about what their children are playing... as http://www.mmogchart.com/ shows... its recently surpassed 100,000 subscribers, twice as much as AC2 had even at its peak... and its still in that 'growth' area.

Had, or has?

http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart1.html

Guild wars is the only MMORPG I know of that does that. What others are there?

And finally... http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart1.html

Does it LOOK like they're feeling the heat from Guild wars?

Have you seen this chart?

http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart1.html

Doesn't look like interest is dropping at all.

No doubt that WoW is the largest MMO here in the states, but the largest overall? Not by a longshot.

There are two million people playing World Of Warcraft - and with Guild Wars fighting WoW for the top place in the PC games chart - I'd say that the appeal of the MMO can be pretty damn non-hardcore.

Although what might be changing is the average sticking time. There are fanatics that play any game for years - people still play Quake 1 daily. MMOs used to only attract those fanatics - but gradually more people are discovering the MMO. But it doesn't mean that to play and enjoy an MMO you have to play it for years. If you play WoW for a couple of months, see all you want to see - then get bored with it - so what? You got your money's worth. Move on to another MMO and quit complaining.

I've played Planetside on and off since launch - quitting once to go play City of Heroes, game back to Planetside, quit again. Tried WoW, quit that, was going to go back but then I picked up Guild Wars - I slowed down somewhat but I'm still playing that, and now I'm also messing around in Second Life. Trying to get into Battlefield 2, but I'll probably just casually play until the next big shiny MMO comes along - which it eventually will.

My personal rule is that I'll never pay more than two MMO subscriptions at the same time - but I'll try to keep it down at one if I can. I then treat the MMO as if it were any other game when it comes to my buying decisions and what I want to spend my gaming time and money on.

actually the numbers seem to have climed slightly after their sharp drop a few months ago (at least according to http://www.mmogchart.com/). At least the population has stablized.

It'll be intersting to see what happenes when the asian servers go live and the expansion comes out. I wouldn't expect WoW numbers but it should see a nice spike and it is more likely to retain people than it was when it rolled out (the game has changed a lot since then).

If you want some strict subscriber information, you can check out http://www.mmogchart.com/ - if you look at a few trends, EQ is slowly declining in subscribers. SWG was never that popular and has been declining as well.

EQ in the last few months combined their servers and got rid of at least half (I believe), which is more than enough proof for me that they are losing players.

Not quite. Read the FAQ on MMOGChart.com to understand how Lineage counts accounts.

Simply put, if anything, their numbers are inflated.

Do you believe the numbers at http://mmogchart.com/ or not?

The WoW numbers have been going up very steadily since release.