MMOG Subscription Winners, Losers Analyzed

Thanks to CorpNews for its recent round-up analyzing and rating the biggest PC massively multiplayer games. Along with subscription estimates similar to the SirBruce analysis graph, there's sharp-tongued comments on performance for Ultima Online ("It's really all your fault. If you weren't a big hit, would others have followed?"), EverQuest ("Say what you will... it knew its target audience and hit it hard enough to make EQ part of popular culture"), and Asheron's Call ("Talk about the little engine that could.")

Comments

Again... Puzzle Pirates

[Apreche]

Why is puzzle pirates being neglected so much?

So far, every MMO I've seen (and I've seen most of them) is just a glorified chat room. It's IRC plus fancy 3d graphics and sound. Sometimes there is also a progress quest included as well. No MMO that I've seen actually has skill based gameplay, which is what makes something no longer a chat room, but a GAME.

Puzzle Pirates is the only MMOish thing I play. Why? Because success is almost entirely skill based. Theoretically someone who has a trial account and has never played before can defeat the person who has been playing the game since day 1 if their skill is great enough. Not only that, but the major factor in any victory is always skill. Not only that, but the people in puzzle pirates actually role play and aren't asshats. What started as random people on the net became my crew and now me hearties, arrr! You don't get that anywhere else.

Give puzzle pirates the attention and respect it deserves. It's probably the most original and well designed game to come out in a long time.

Re:Again... Puzzle Pirates

[Bluesman]

Careful there. I learned long ago if you really enjoy something one of the worst things that can happen is that it gets very popular.

Re:Again... Puzzle Pirates

[eggstasy]

Sounds like you need to try second life
In Second Life, only your RL skills matter. If you're a coder, you can become a scripter, if you're a photoshop wizard, you can build a clothing empire.
In SL, instead of advancing the skills of a virtual character, it is YOUR skills that advance.
Bear in mind that it's not exactly a game, so you may well end up deeming it a glorified chat room :P

Re:Again... Puzzle Pirates

[RasputinAXP]

A lot of us on Corpnews know of puzzle pirates, but it's worth noting that this was the first in a series of articles GBob is writing. You can only cover so much at a time before tasting the bile in the back of our collective throats.

Re:Again... Puzzle Pirates

[Zonk]

PP is an awesome game...however, you and I are the only ones playing it.

It is a very small game, Apreche. Compared with the 400,000 people of EQ, are you surprised Puzzle Pirate didn't show up on the graph there? I would be surprised if PP had even 20,000 subscribers.

PP would be huge if they had money for advertising in real magazines or on TV. But they don't. So instead we see web ads for them on Penny Arcade and the like, where everyone already plays...

So it goes..

Re:Again... Puzzle Pirates

[danieljames]

Ahoy mates. Thanks for the kind words.

We are indeed way too small to show up in this graph; we have just over 5,000 subscribers (announcement to be made next week).

I don't actually think that advertising in gaming magazines would do us that much good, though. TV perhaps, or maybe Woman's Own. But you're right that if we had a mountain of cash we could try it.

For now we advertise/distribute where it makes sense, like shockwave, PA (where not everyone plays yet, I assure you) and, starting this week, popcap.com.

Oh, and we do hope to do a retail release this year. That will bring some ads. Arr!

Re:Again... Puzzle Pirates

[slashdotjunker]

Puzzle Pirates (referred to as YPP!) is a great game. I played it extensively when it first came out. At that time it seemed like a sleeper hit that would eventually reach up to 50,000 subscribers. An impressive number for a puzzle MMO.

Unfortunately, YPP! failed to live up to those high expectations. In my humble opinion the reason is because YPP! is too structured. The game is played by the rules and only by the rules. It is impossible to "think outside of the box" the way you can with a freeform 3D MMO.

After playing heavily for about 3 months I quit YPP! because I had fully explored the box. The game simply had no staying power for me. It was fun and a well polished game, but merely a game. After mastering every puzzle there was nothing more. It was reduced to a glorified chat program.

Whoops?

[Dark Nexus]

When a comedian makes a crack at people who live in their parents' bedroom and play on the computer all night, it's Everquest he's referring to.

Parents' BEDROOM? Shouldn't that be parents' basement? Parents' bedroom would open up whole new areas of psychological issues.

Re:Obvious Omition

[Dark Nexus]

What, did you just look at the pretty pictures? It says where FFXI is about 1/3rd of the way down the page!

These numbers also do not take into account the most recent games to hit the market, Final Fantasy XI and Lineage 2, as their impact has not yet been fully realized in North America. In four months, the numbers in this article will need to be revised.

Re:Obvious Omition

[musikit]

it is listed under "Other" taking up 30% of the market share.

FFXI

[Anonymous Coward]

These will be much more interesting once they're updated to include FFXI. From what I've heard of player numbers, it pretty much blows away all of the other games listed there, including Lineage, particularly since the US PS2 release. It also shares one of Galaxies' key strengths, namely that it's been able to draw in a lot of the people who wouldn't normally play a MMORPG. Plus, of course, it's release in the US didn't blow goats, unlike Galaxies' release, which sucked pretty much everywhere.

I'd bet that MMORPGs that launch badly suffer the greatest player losses over the first few months. Once people are hooked, they're hooked... the trick is to get them there.

Meh

[genrader]

I don't really care for this guy's article, while he seems to be telling what he thinks is wrong with MMORPGs, and it is true, his recommendations aren't what I would recommend for a few.

Take my latest MMORPG that's a non-beta, Star Wars Galaxies. His recommendation is to provide the Space Expansion to be perfect. That's not the case, because if so then the original game where you're still going to spend a minimum of 40% of your time is STILL going to be screwed over. Too many people can become Jedi, the Galactic Civil War is still overpopulated with Rebels, PvP is completely screwed up, the economy needs fixing, etc.

margin of error: 3.5 million?

[Anonymous Coward]

the number of people subscribing to MMOGs has increased from 450,000 players in 2000 to over 2.5 to 6 million today Perhaps it's just a typo.

Re:margin of error: 3.5 million?

[ooby]

6 Million people subscribed today?

Cattassing - Genuine Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Reading MMORPG boards I've worked out most of the slang - MOB, DOT, NUKE, phat lewt Kill stealing, PK etc etc etc.

But I've never seen a definition for "catassing" - what exactly is a catasser or catassing?

Skip the troll replies please, I really want to know.

Re:Cattassing - Genuine Question

[Anonymous Coward]

catassing is a slang term that has evolved over the past 5 years, it's from the early days of UO. There was a newspaper article regarding this guy who played UO excessively, over 100 hours a week and his friends had not seen him in months. When they went to his apartment looking for him the guy looked like shit,had trash everywhere and an overflowing litterbox. His apartment smelled like shit. It was a huge article for us MMORPG junkies to point and laugh at people who put their real life obligations behind their game time..we would say these people smelled like cat's ass. This later became known as "becoming a catass"..someone who spends too much time playing games. More recently the term catass is used to describe a playstyle. For instance "I don't want to catass for 400 hours to get this Über sword".

This is roughly translated to "I don't want spend 400 hours of tedius boredom for a stupid sword".

Dead On

[Zonk]

That's a really great synopsis of the current MMOG market. Here are a few predictions for you, based on those numbers, for the coming year:

- World of Warcraft, simply put, is going to change everything. Subscription numbers for UO, FFXI, DAoC, AC, AC2, and EQ are going to fluctuate wildly when WoW comes out as people cancel their subscriptions to give Blizzard's game a shot. I don't know how many will stay, but I expect World of Warcraft, by the middle of next year, to be comfortably within the 250,000 - 300,000 area.

- Star Wars Galaxies will continue to hemmoraghe players until this fall, when the space expansion comes out. Regardless of how good it is, their subs are going to skyrocket as people flock to the game that has X-Wings and TIE Fighters. This influx of players will sustain them at least another 2 to 3 years as they continue to patch in new content and....(shhh) fix the game. SWG has passed the point where they could have failed. It isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

- Anarchy Online is going to be a sleeper comeback kid late this year or early next year. Their upcoming expansion sounds good, Funcom has finally managed to start to move beyond their disaster of a launch, and people are getting tired of Fantasy MMOGs.

- Lineage 2 is not going to do very well at all in the states. US gamers just don't like being ganked.

- AC and AC2, despite losses to WoW, are going to continue on quietly and happily. Jessica Mulligan is no slouch, and despite aging graphics and a tiny playerbase those games just keep getting better.

- City of Heroes is going to be a success...for a while. CoH is going to draw a whole bunch of newbie MMOGers into the fold who have never picked up a MMOG before. 6 months down the line if they don't have villains patched in they're going to start losing people as the fact that there is nothing to do besides combat starts to wear on the playerbase.

- Middle Earth Online is going to be a middling success. Their design concept is only so-so, but they'll attract enough attention via newbie MMOG players lusting after Legolas to stay afloat.

- Warhammer Online .... ?? I don't know where it's going to pull it's playerbase from. Have to wait and see on this one.

- EQ, one year from now, will no longer have such a commanding lead over all other US MMOGs.

- EQ2 is going to do "okay". It's a very different game but the branding alone will be enough to keep it going. Despite what SOE says, EQ is going to lose players to EQ2, futhering the WoW effect on the original Everquest.

- The Sims Online should be put out to pasture. That creepy melting pot of social darwinism was doomed from the get-go. EA should let it die.

- Shadowbane will continue to slowly exist as a team of dedicated and talented developers rescue a game that had almost as bad a launch as AO. People will always want to "Play to CRUSH!" so SB will always have players.

My 2 cents. I spoke a little more about this here: Quality over Quantity.

Re:Dead On

[chrismcdirty]

Any predictions for Guild Wars?

Re:Dead On

[*weasel]

At least your WOW subscription guesses are reasonable. Most people keep throwing around 500k - 1m ... and everytime someone suggests numbers that large it turns into a joke.

My only point of contention with your prognostication is: expansions don't bring in new gamers, never have.

They can bring back gamers who cancelled recently - but rarely do they retain anyone they bring back. They bring a quick surge from former players who give it a shot - and they retain players they haven't yet lost. Their largest effect is stalling the hemmhorage of players who have seen/done everything and are getting bored.

And Warhammer Online is going to live or die based on its ability to pull its audience from European gamers (the way Lineage2 lives or dies based on its Asian success). It has a distinctly European 'flavor' (like all Games Workshop properties) and for the most part European gamers are under-serviced with commercial persistent worlds.

Re:Dead On

[SoVeryWrong]

I agree with your assessment of expansions, but I think the SWG addition may behave a bit differently based on the giant fanbase for the XWing/Tie Fighter games.

It could possibly pull those people into MMOGs, if they make the cost of entry low enough that it doesn't require 6 months of play to get a fighter.

Re:Dead On

[*weasel]

With the current advertised rate of inflation in SWG, I doubt it'd take much time at all to buy a starship.

The problem I see, is the divergence between MMO -RPG and MMO -Space Combat Sim.

Frankly, I don't see twitch combat on the MMO scene working out to well, even on broadband connections. (and most gamers don't have those).
Witness WWIIonline's 64 unit visibility limit, and the all-too-exploitable client-side hitscan of Planetside.

And any 'slowing down' of combat to appease technical reality is going to turn off those outside gamers. Not to mention SWG's trademarked open-ended play - which is quite a departure from traditional space shooters, and not a taste that everyone has acquired.

Surely it'll pull in quite a few new gamers, I just don't see them staying in significant numbers.

Similarly with WoW actually. Sure, "it's Blizzard" so it'll pull in people who've never played a massmog. But that doesn't mean those new gamers will necessarily convert into subscriptions.

But of course, this is all armchair prognostication. I'm just guessing based off past performance, independent of even considering the individual quality or situation of MMO expansions.

If you told me EA totally borked up the design of The Sims Online 6 months before it released, or that Mythic was going to tick off its playerbase with it's Trials of Atlantis expansion -- I wouldn't have believed you. But that happened.

Who knows what'll actually happen in 6 months?

slim pickings

[rhettoric]

I think this article was pretty spot-on.

This is still an immature market no matter what anyone says. I'm the perfect user for this sort of thing (make my own hours, disposable income, and a geek), but none of these established MMOGs have kicked my can. I did consider Everquest, but it just seemed like the same monster-killing over and over again, with no compelling plot. And you can have all the pretty graphics and explosions in the world, but that doesn't make a good experience (Jonny Mnemonic anyone?)

I think WoW is going to be compelling and profitable and thus, the new standard by which all the others are going to be judged. I know I'm going to try it out.

Still looking forward to part 2

Lineage 2

[Negative9]

Just a note concerning Lineage 2:

I've been playing the beta and it's not a gank fest. If you pk someone who doesn't fight back you turn red and pretty much ruin your character (it's possible to work the karma off but if you've committed multiple pks you usually won't live long enough to do so). All my encounters with red named players so far have involved watching them run for their lives while being chased by a mob of other players. Reds tend to be pretty rare.

Other than that though the game is a complete flop. You may not be able to get away with pking, but griefing is another matter. Another player can follow you around stealing your kills and otherwise harassing you but you can't kill him for fear of going red.

The level grind is worse than any other game I've played, and the money requirements to keep your equipment up to date is steep. This might not be a problem if it weren't for the fact that the real conetent of the game (the guild PVP system) exists at the high end, but to get there you have to farm/grind your way through the boring and poorly developed PVE content.

Exploits, scamming and boting seem rampant, the GMs claim they're banning people, but I still see the same bots week after week.

There's no variety in the characters either, everyone has the same equipment at any given level, and the base models are severely limited, so it's attack of the clones.

They didn't even change the chat window to support english text, the word wrap often breaks words in two, making it annoying to read.

I'm sure it'll find an audience with those who actually seem to like the grind, but I can't see it becoming a major hit in the US.