EA's Sims Online Is A Flop And Other MMORPG Musings

Ignorant Aardvark writes "Wired has an article out about the upcoming Multiplayer Games Summit at E3. Some of the interesting parts of the article: 'The Sims Online has sold 125,000 copies retail, has been discounted from $50 to as low as $20 on Amazon and has 97,000 active subscribers.' Compare that to EverQuest, with 470,000 subscriptions. Investment analyst Michael Pachter says of TSO: 'They took a very popular franchise that's a single-player game in which you play with dolls, and when you play with dolls, they follow rules and behave in predictable ways. With The Sims Online, you're playing real people, and real people don't behave the way you'd expect them to.' And here's the gem of the article: 'Consumers might not be responding well to paying individual subscriptions for single online games, but might react better to cable TV-like pricing in which they get access to a number of offerings for a flat fee.' Does anyone see this pricing system as being more successful?"

Comments

Bad Comparison

[TexVex]

The Sims Online has sold 125,000 copies retail, has been discounted from $50 to as low as $20 on Amazon and has 97,000 active subscribers.' Compare that to EverQuest, with 470,000 subscriptions.

EverQuest has been around for several years; The Sims Online has been around for several months. EverQuest didn't just jump up to 400K+ subscriptions right after launch. No game of that genre has. If a MMO game gets 100K+ subscribers on launch, it's doing great. At $10 a pop, that's a cool million in gross revenues per month. So long as there's a decent profit margin in there, that's not an amount to sneeze at. But what is important here is the growth curve, not the subscriber numbers at any given time.

The retail price for the box is also not really relevant either. That is a one-time sale. The monthly subscription is recurring revenue.