MMOGChart.com Update

I don't know how I missed it but last week Bruce Woodcock updated his highly informative site, MMOGChart.com, for the first time in months. His data only goes out to late last year, but he promises another update soon. From the Edge Online blurb: "The charts, neatly broken into separate genre-giants, mid-size, and more-modest categories (largely due to World of Warcraft's unprecedented population squelching its competitors below), show at first glance few surprising results. As expected, World of Warcraft dominates the charts, with the Lineage pair coming in beneath, Final Fantasy XI continuing to gain ground, and UK indie-developed RuneScape coming in at a very respectable 5th, well above several blockbusters below."

Comments

SWG numbers completely wrong

[WCMI92]

There is NO WAY SWG still has over 250K subscribers. Someone recently used a packet sniffer and discovered that the number of people logged in was sent in the clear to the client (this has since been patched), and that it had only 10,400 concurrent logins among all servers in prime time (friday evening).

We've also seen server populations dwindle, including the server I play on, which is still one of the 5 most active. Used to be you would see 100 people PvP'ing on any given evening, now you are lucky to have 20 total.

SWG is lucky to have 50-75,000 subscribers left AT MOST.

Re:SWG numbers completely wrong

[WCMI92]

Press reports back in November `05 (when the New Gawfaful Experience was revealed) had SWG's subs at 200K. That was down from 250K during the CU era, and 300K during the pre-CU era.

I estimate that SWG lost 50-60% of it's sub base as subscriptions expired after the NGE bombshell. There are servers that almost completely lack population now, and even the "large" servers have declined.

Re:SWG numbers completely wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

The data on that chart is pretty old, he still hasn't had time to update it past January 2006. The SWG figure on the chart comes from June 2005. In fact, only Ultima Online has data as new as January 2006 - everything else is November 2005 or earlier.

The worst offender for out of date information in popular MMORPGs (defined as "it appears on Chart 1, 120,000+") is Dark Age of Camelot, which hasn't had updated figures in over a year.

Note that this information is from the Excel sheet, not trying to trace lines on the chart.

Link to the site

[prator]

Zonk, you could at least check if there is a link to the site described in the summary.

http://www.mmogchart.com/

-prator

still out of date

[Shivetya]

does not acknowledge fact that Asheron's Call 2 closed in December. Does not acknowledge any new launches since the last true update (D&DO).

In fact, is any of it valid?

Perhaps he attempts to claim validity by overwhelming us with numbers and pretty graphs? I admit that he first started his charts I believed there was valid data. As it has gone on I begin to seriously doubt its relevance.

RuneScape

[Tickenest]

Geez, how has the success of RuneScape gone so unnoticed? I mean, yeah, it's Java-based, and its graphics pale in comparison to other games, but yeowza, they're pulling in the subscribers, and they not backed by some huge corporation. Their accomplishments in this marketplace are nothing short of remarkable.

Re:Guild Wars?

[GundamFan]

That would be like adding Diablo 1 and 2 to this this chart.

None of these games are MMOs, and if you like Guild Wars beter than MMOs so be it... but you can't make it an MMO by comparing it to World of Warcraft and Everquest.

I am not judgeing GW because I have never played it (I hear it is fun) all I am saying is that it fits in to a very diffrent catigory of online games and tends to attract a diffrent type of gamer.

Sigh

[cspariah]

While Bruce's work is sort of interesting, it is very frustrating when people take it as gospel. Even the numbers that he feels confident enough to give a "B" to, "The numbers may not be exact for the MMOG in question, but are certainly in the ballpark," can sometimes be waaaaaay off.