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MMOG Subscription Analysis Provides New Insights
Thanks to jer0 for pointing to SirBruce's updated MMOG Subscription Growth analysis page, which tries to "chart the trend in active subscriptions" for major MMO titles using public and private data. This "major revision" has the "chart separated into three tiers" dependent on subscription size, and shows Lineage as the worldwide MMO leader at "just under 2.7 million" (though this may be reliant on bulk 'PC Baang' subscriptions in countries such as South Korea, and the game has "only 7,000 [subscribers] in the United States.") Other notable entries include City Of Heroes ("surpassed 180,000 subscribers... proof that a well-executed MMOG can still garner substantial numbers even in the current competitive climate"), and the also recently launched, but less successful Horizons ("After peaking at around 35,000 subscribers, they have since fallen to somewhere between 20,000 and 25,000 subscribers.")
I consider myself up-to-date on gaming news, but I've never even heard of Horizons. Is it good? I'm interested in trying it out. Has anyone on here played it, and if so, what do you think of it?
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
Horizons had some nice ideas but the implementation was horrible. The game felt incredibly lifeless and boring.
There were no equipment drops as far as I was aware. Only items that could be used by crafters to create equipment.
The combat was extremely boring and had little to keep anyone interested.
The only interesting things was the extensive crafting system but it wasn't enough to keep this game from dying a slow death.
Horizons has a really good crafting system and one of the best UIs I've seen. It has some major flaws though. Really bad performance on ATI cards and a lack of high level content for example. I hear they are getting better on the content though. It has a 7 day free trial, so if you like crafting or being a dragon give it a go. http://www.istaria.com/
There's a free trial if you want to try it (www.istaria.com), but Horizons has a ... colorful history.
Since a corporate takeover from the inside by David Bowman (of Asheron's Call fame, who was fired for "agressive ladder-climbing"), the game underwent an extreme redesign, and hasn't been the same since.
It made its retail debut around December of this year, still very much in beta, for which it received sound derision. The bugs were incredible. The game was a flop
Artifact Entertainment filed for bankruptcy a few months ago, and last month handed pink slips to half its developer staff. This seemed aimed at making the game a viable target for a buyout, but nothing has happened as yet.
David Bowman ran AE and Horizons into the ground. All in all, I wouldn't play an online game with no future. Subscription numbers are dropping steadily every month. Horizons is on its deathbed, waiting to die.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
after playing SWG for a few months and getting tired of paying for it, I tried some free MMORPGs. There's a list of some here.
It will be interesting to see how free MMORPGs in the future such as Guild Wars (http://www.guildwars.com/) do. For me, I personally refuse to pay 10 or so bucks a month when I don't have the time to commit to such a game.
Bowman stole the company right out from David Allen (founder of Artifact Entertainment and Pharaoh Productions) and then had the gall to get Allen fired. Allen came up with the original idea for Horizons, and when he left, the new AE mashed and changed it so much, it was no longer the same game. It has about all the similarities that the book series I, Robot has with the movie. David Allen has since shut down Pharaoh Productions and left the game development industry in disgust.
Wheel in the sky keeps on turnin'.
1 - all info on each game is provided by the game maker, so take it with a grain of salt.
;) But I doubt the makers would provide that data.
2 - the stats don't differentiate between "players" and "accounts". So a single account with 3 characters may show up as 3.
3 - the stats don't differentiate between active accounts and inactive accounts.
4 - the lineage figures are crap as massive bulk of them come from South Korean cybercafes. It's noted that South Korea apparently doesn't get many Japanese import games, thus it figures that Lineage may have a disproportionately high user base there.
A much better chart would be the server population figures for these games
------- "From bored to fanboy in 3.8 asian girls" ----------
Hehehehehehe.
I just watched an episode of G4TechTV's "Icons "profiling Will Wright and it was before the full launch of The Sims Online. Someone said something like "it could do well, or fall flat on its face."
Boy did it ever fall flat on its face.
ah...so they're still pissed about the whole WW2 thing huh?
It's been going on longer than that. Korea and Japan have been invading each other about as often as England and France have.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
Check out Aardwolf if you want something to keep on one of your windows in Screen. Its also free.
A nifty MUD client to make your play sharper: TinyFugue
In case you were wondering, an aardwolf is an African hyena that eats termites. Why they called the game that, I'll never know...
I see the replies here are sort of one-sided, so as a current Horizons player I guess I should post my views. As good as any first post, I guess. =P
First off, let's deal with the "corporate takeover from the inside." There are two camps in regards to this. There are the Allen camp and the anti-Allen camp. David Allen was the CEO of Artifact Entertainment before the "takeover," and provided most of the early days ideas, concepts and designs.
The Allen camp claims it was a vicious, ruthless takeover, taking Allen's baby away from him and then ruining it.
The anti-Allen camp claims that Allen was fired due to incompetence and inability to make all his nice ideas into something real, and then the remaining staff created a game as best as they could with the funds and time left at their disposal.
Thing is - WE DON'T KNOW. We can never know either. All we have are Mr. Allen's biased articles and interviews and AE's official (and thus, naturally, biased) comments. In the end, this becomes a non-issue, since it's the game itself that is important, and not who made it and who not made it.
Also, AE did not file bankruptcy, they filed bankruptcy -protection-. The difference is huge, and the story is long. Details can be had www.istaria.com, for instance.
Alright, now for the game itself.
Horizons of today is a completely different game than Horizons of pre-launch, or even at launch. I'm not going to say much, in order to not come off as biased, but I will bring up a few of my personal likes.
Variety and freedom: Character development in Horizons is very flexible. You can decide to do anything at any moment. You can build complex characters with multiclassing, leveraging individual strengths of the different classes. For instance you can train up a warrior based class for the melee capability, and then switch over to a mage based class to get some magic support, then to a cleric based one to enhance your survivability. Since you can join any and all schools available in the game, you can do a lot of things. (Exception is dragons, more on that later.) Tired of killing things? Go join any of the crafting classes and start building weapons, armor, houses, food...
Construction: Unlike many games where you buy a premade house to put your things in, in Horizons you buy a Plot. The plot has a set size and any of three zonings which determine what structures can be put on the plot. (RCI - Sim City players will be familiar with those.) When you've placed a building on your plot only the basic scaffolding is actually placed. You then have to build it yourself. Putting in that final stone block on a building and seeing it complete is very gratifying.
Crafting vs fighting: While Horizons is very crafting centric, it's hardly a must. I know several players who have opted to ignore crafting in favour of more adventuring, and they are doing well. Likewise, if you don't like fighting you don't have to do that either - as long as you can outrun the occasional monster wandering around dangerous resource places.
Dragons: To my knowledge, Horizons is the only current MMORPG that allows players to play as dragons. Playing as a dragon is a -very- different experience to any other race.
Community: Due to how Horizons plays, it tends to attract social people, or "team players." In no other game have I met a community so helpful, kind and cooperative as in Horizons.
In the end, Horizons is not for everyone. It is a niche game, and everyone knows it. Chances are it might be for you. In fact, you know what? Don't listen to me. Don't listen to what anyone else says about this game either. Go download the trial and play the game to get your own perception. It won't cost you more than your time and some bandwidth. If you don't like it, fine, leave it. If you like it, a winner is you! I will give you one advice, however. Don't be afraid to join the community. Ask for help, trade, just plain chat. The communication inte
Heh, considering crafting normally consists of:
1) Hunting around endlessly looking for a fancy materials drop, repeatedly
2) Running back to the "craft station"
3) Hitting "craft repeatedly" to create as many items as you can
4) Holding your "great" item over everyone's head as if you made some huge accomplishment, only to sell it at the store so you don't get screwed in a trade.
I'll stick to programming. At least the time and effort is normally worth it.
The game can be played in a window (rather than maximized) and many players take advantage of this fact to keep some browser tabs open to the incredibly detailed websites and wikis out there that cover all these subjects. These websites are easy to find from the www.atitd2.com Links page.
Also, the Linux client runs great! I just started playing this game two days ago and I'm hooked for sure.
Its not perfect by any stretch, but COH had the smoothest release and has the least problems of any of the MMO products I have tried.
Its a fun PvE game, the AI on the mobs is quite good - again far better than any other MMORPG game I have tried - and the developers seem to have a handle on what the game needs. They listen and respond to public feedback.
Currently its a bit content light, but they are adding new content and new features quarterly at the moment, and the first (and only) patch was pretty problem free.
I went to DAOC from EQ because Mythic looked like they were doing things right and addressing the aspects of EQ that really bothered me, and the whole RvR thing looked neat. I played it since release until the release of City of Heroes, and was a pretty big DAOC fan. I don't think I could return now, COH has spoiled me. It is lightyears ahead of the competition in my opinion, and while its early still, being only 3 months old, I think it has a very bright future.
Its well worth checking out City of Heroes if you are looking for a new game.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Checkout www.eventide.net.
They are doing exactly that.
Client is free, play is free, they get donations.
It is working quite nicely.
Disclaimer: I am an active memember of the ROE community, I may be a bit biased =)
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
Runescape lists how many people are playing at one time. I just added up the servers on the pay side of things and came up with just shy of 10,000 players online right now. If you go with 10% online at any one time, 100K doesn't seem an unreasonable figure.
Someone earlier was saying the assumption is 1/5 (20%) of your subscriber base online at anyone time - that's like 2.5 hours everyday. If that is realistic, then you're only talking 50K. Really, considering his methodology, being off by 2X is not that bad, and I think the trends he points out are valid.
Now, for Runescape, I wonder - note the steady progression upward. Perhapes not having to pay to play initially and not pay for upgrades is having an effect The cheap $5 a month means even bored players might hang on a lot longer just to play the updates. These guys might be on to something.
I play Runescape myself and I don't sweat it if I don't play for a week, or a month because I'm busy - it ain't a large chunk 'o change.
W9x:Thanks for the make-work project Bill.
You left out the legal system, the tests and all the dev and player run events.
It's just a little be more complicated than you make it out to be.
Mt first post on slashdot (damn, now I need an account).
I've been playing ATITD for um, close to a month now. If you want a MMORPG that does pit players against players and has a *maassive* set of skills, try it. It's free for 24 hours of play (that can be a single day or as long as you want to stretch it). It's also cheap ($15/mo) to play longer.
It's not a combat game. I like to think of it as a civilization building game, like Civilization or Masters of Orion. However, both of those are played in "god" mode; in ATITD you play the individual.
You have to collect (it's Egypt keep this in mind) sand, mud, grass, and wood and from there develop the civilization, with your fellow players. New "tech" is available from the university, once researched anyone can have it. Skills are paid for a the school.
Bored already? Try some of the tests for Egypt. 7 different tests in 7 different school should keep you busy. Want to raise stats? Play takeshot or one of the other 5 games for improving stats. What to increase your skills? *USE* them. While you can spend all your time (Gosh, really I have) gaining more resources and buildings, there's plenty of tests available that allow you to become an Oracle in a diciple.
For newbies, I still suggest ATITD, the first telling. If you need help, of just someone to ask questios of, hit the Disciples of Anubis (my guild) or DaTwinkDaddy (me). The beta is still gonna have bugs, and not as many players. You may find yourself lost. With the old telling, you don't get the privaldge of discovering anything, but you can play around with a lot of the game at our guild site. (We still need rabits, cobras, and some of the "test" buildings, but there's a lot at the guild stie you might not see signle player).
Speaking of single-player: Some MMORPGS make it easy to solo. With ATITD, that's a no-go. AT ALL.
You wanna pass tests? You gotta find other players. You wanna develop new resources, other players are not required but, they help *a lot*. Trading is very important. *Cooperation* is very important. [1]
Anyway, I haven't checked out the list of free MMORPGs yet, but if you want an MMORPG you dan't have to pay $50 to try, check out ATITD.
1: Get off newbie island; build a tent [Initiation into architecture]; and check out the "Test of the Megalopolis" -- then tell me you can solo this game.
It was Runescape's own parent company that announced they did indeed have over 100,000 bona-fide real subscribers. Remember, these people are only paying $5 a month, and you don't have to have a top gaming rig to run it, so I find the number plausible if higher than I would have guessed. The ratio of peak online users to total subscriptions varies from game to gave, but is generally in the 10% - 30% range. That's still a large variation, but at least you can verify if you are in the ballpark. I don't know that your measurement of 10,000 was taken at a "peak" time, but even if it was, a 10:1 ratio is not that unusual. Bruce
The 5xpeak rule is not hard and fast; as I've said before it varies from 10 - 30% depending on the MMOG. But I do not use those for the basis of my numbers to begin with; only for verfication to make sure they are in the ballpark. The 20,000 figure comes from the very Horizon bankruptcy documents you cite, so you know they are not just "shouting/boasting". Many companies are proud of their numbers but still won't release them because of old company policies. This is changing, but slowly. Bruce
I'm one of the developers on the free (in the sense of not having to pay money to play it) MMORPG game called PlaneShift (http://www.planeshift.it). The MMORPG engine is fully Open Source (GPL). This game is still in development and the current released demo is getting old. But even if you can't do a lot in it yet (only explore, chat, hunt crystals) it still has 100000 registered accounts. The next version which will soon be released will have magic, combat, ...
The game is fully free. You don't have to pay to download the game and you don't have to pay to play it.
Greetings,
Project Manager of Crystal Space (http://www.crystalspace3d.org). Support CS at http://tinyurl.com/cb3x4
Let's assume cost of revenue is only 50% (very generous!) so that leaves us with $450,000 gross profit.
Let's assume a total encumberance of $160,000 per employee (realistic). That gives us enough for 2.8 employees, not including you. That, of course, would be for zero net income.
Not much of a company, eh?
(Encumberance means all costs associated with an employee: ie. salary, taxes, healthcare, office space, electricity, etc. Think of it as TCO for people. It can get as high as $220,000 in large companies.)