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

[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

[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!

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.

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.

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