The MMO Numbers Game

Terra Nova has an interesting discussion going, talking about what really matters when we talk about a virtual world's population. Total registered accounts? Accounts logged in since last month? Concurrent users? Interesting stuff. From the article: "In a similar vein we discussed Second Life's 100K+ members, a figure which I and others have questioned here on TN. Cory Ondrejka said that SL's 'concurrency numbers are rapidly approaching 4500, about 17,000 residents were in SL in the last 24 hours, and 50,000 in the last 30 days... If you go back even 90 days you get about 90% of the accounts having logged in.'"

Comments

What about coerced registration?

[Chaffar]

Betsy said, "I think registered number of users does measure at least casual interest, while concurrent users measures ongoing/active interest.

Well it's true but let's not forget that a lot of people are COERCED into registering for something when they actually want something else. This IMHO makes the whole "registered users" idea completely useless UNLESS the registration serves only one purpose, which is to play the mentionned MMO.

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Subscription

[mwvdlee]

Since most subscriptions are on a monthly basis, I'd say only the number of accounts that have logged in within the last 30 days "quantifies" an MMO's popularity. Afterall, these are the people willing to pay for it.