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Mmogchart.com Updated to 20.0
SirBruce writes "Mmogchart.com has been updated to Version 20.0! This is a major update, with updated numbers for many games, most notably World of Warcraft, Eve Online, RuneScape, and most of NCSoft's titles. I've also added three new MMOGs to the tracking data: Tibia, The Matrix Online, and Dungeons & Dragons Online. I've also removed the old subscriber data for Ragnarok Online in Japan, and unified the various total subscriptions charts. Also new to this update is preliminary market data for Asian MMOGs (including Ragnarok Online) that are commonly reported in terms of Peak Concurrent Users and Average Concurrent Users. Given the differences in pricing models, many of these games are not subscription-based, so a direct comparison with subscription MMOGs cannot be made. My thanks to everyone who helped with this update, and thanks to those of you who waited patiently for this update!"
It's pretty amazing that WOW has 50% of the total MMOG market share. Blizzard must be rolling in cash.
-gjr
The one that many consider the worst holds the biggest market share.
Before you mod me flamebait, let's rather try to find out just WHY WoW has the share it has. Because, frankly, I can't see the reason. Yes, I played it, yes, I was bored stiff after 3 months.
So tell me why, in case you enjoy the game. I really wish to know what makes WoW interesting. What is better than in the "other" MMORPGs? What makes WoW to something that deserves a 50+% market share?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's interesting to note that Toontown is doing better than D&D Online. That's a pretty bad sign for Atari, whose finances aren't doing particularly well these days.
What about the funniest dang MMORPG out there!!?
I hate this type of post because it's pointless. Of course many people consider WOW the worst because it's very popular. Every single person is unique and to make a game that appeals to everyone is impossible. What one person might find fun another might hate. What you find boring another finds interesting. There is nothing wrong with that and that is why there are so many genres of games.
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
You didn't like it, you were bored after 3 months...therefore EVERYONE shouldn't like it and be bored stiff.
Lineage has the second highest...have you played that? I can't see the draw for that one either, but obviously someone likes it.
Hey, we're all different. Blizzard can't please everyone all the time. You either like it, or don't. Don't take it so personally. Should everyone like or dislike the same movies? Books? You ask what makes the game interesting...but what could anyone say to change your mind? What list of things would make you reconsider it after you played it already for 3 months? You've made your mind up and we'd be wasting our time and yours trying to convince you.
And in the end, it's really no big deal. Go play something else as is your choice.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
The main draw that other people have mentioned is that with so many people playing, it's easier to get an impression of the game before you start playing. Also, odds are that if you're interesting in starting WoW, you know someone who's been playing for a while and might be willing to toss you a few gold and invite you to join their guild. The main reason I play WoW instead of a different MMORPG is because I had many friends and relatives that played WoW as opposed to the one person I knew who played Ragnarok Online.
;P):
Another draw of WoW is the lore. Say what you will about those "paladins from space" the Draenei, but on the whole what keeps me coming back is the continuation of the lore that began in the first Warcraft.
Note that these two factors have little or nothing to do with actual gameplay. WoW isn't an excellent game in itself (especially when compared to other MMORPGS), but through marketing and by fostering a sizable, devoted community Blizzard has ensured a steady and increasing subscriber base.
All of this said, I do have a couple of gripes with WoW (no WoW post is complete without gripes, right?
-Crafting needs to be overhauled to allow customization; not only should blacksmiths and such be able to change the appearance of their creations to a degree but they should also be able to affect the bonuses an item gives. The higher the crafter's skill, the more bonuses can be stacked on the item. Jewelcrafting and socketed items are nice, but not good enough.
-Corpse runs. I realize there needs to be a token penalty for dying, and not dinging the player's experience is a good idea, but just rezzing after a few minutes would be better than manually having to guide your ghost back to your corpse.
I don't see any numbers for Progress Quest! That game is awesome!
Correct me if I'm wrong, but there is no browser-based MMORPGs on MMOG chart, as you should see a mention of for example Urban Dead which count enough players to be in. So what's wrong with BBMMORPGS? Do they not appear on this site because they are browser based or because they are free?
You just got troll'd!
No way there is 190K left.
But the chart does show SWG in freefall since they released the CU, and that the NGE was downright catastrophic.
Should have listened to we who didn't want them to do away with the original game to begin with....
Corporatism != Free Market
The chart looked about as I expected: World of Warcraft towers above the rest while several other MMOs lose ground. But what I didn't expect to see is that WoW's gains are significantly higher than its competitors' losses. World of Warcraft is doing more than dominating the market--it's increasing the size of the market.
I'm interested to see whether those gamers will move to other MMO games after World of Warcraft or if they're only in it for WoW.
"Now, how many gigabits are sent in one second at 1Gb/s? Again, the only correct answer is 1000000000." (emphasis added)
Umm, how could the answer be anything other than 1 gigabits transferred in 1 second at 1Gb/s? I'm confused. . . Did you mean how many bits are sent in one second at 1Gb/s?
How does this account for people who play more than one game. This isn't exactly a good representation of the market as a whole because you don't know what kind of overlap exists.
They should either rename this site to MMORGPchart.com as all games are fighting/rpg based games. Otherwise games like hattrick.org (820k users) and travian.com (120k users) should also be included.
...what matters is what you like, not what you are like...
...then by the year 2057, the earth will be consumed by a mass of WOW subscribers expanding at the speed of light.
One very important thing to note is that the last data point for a ton of the games on his list is June 2005 -- one example being Everquest 2.
The other thing to note is tabulating subscribers. In some of the Asian markets (can't tell you which ones in specific as I just looked this up myself) the Internet Game Rooms are very popular. You go in and buy an account that you then add points to on an hourly basis. Anyone who logs into one of those is counted for seven full days afterward by Blizzard as a paying subscriber. I'm sure there's lots of people who don't spend $15 American monthly on World of Warcraft but are counted as equal subscribers among their monthly-account-paying European and American brethren. Just as a reference it's about $3.73 to buy an account that you can spend points on and it costs a nickel an hour after that for gametime in WoW China, as per a Blizzard press release and Google's money translation calculator.
It's interesting to see what the Asian market means in terms of body count, but it makes me wonder what the relative revenue situations are like.
I really wish that the author of this site would simply put SWG at solid zeros.
##warning this post is from a Eve-online fanboy##
WoW sucked up a ton of my time the last couple of years. I know enough about the game, I think, to give you a basic idea of why some people claim it's so awesome, and others (including me) think it's not that great.
Here are 4 points that WoW has going for it. Then, in italics, purely opinion on my part.
1. First of all, the game is dang easy to learn. The first ten levels of the game are nice and slow, in a protected environment, giving you plenty of time to learn your character. It does a great job of giving you a purpose, a little story, and just enough reward to hook you on the "I need more phat lewtz" idea. In other words "instant gratification".
This is the biggest reason that WoW got so popular. Anyone can sit down and play it. It was a nice change for the genre being able to start having fun without needing to "work for it". Many older MMO nerds will tell you, however, that having to work for something makes your accomplishment that much sweeter. This will be a unending battle between WoW fanbois and the rest of us. That said, this one huge attribute of WoW made Blizzard rich(er)
2. You can get something accomplished in a small amount of time. The trip to level cap is great fun. You can always log in, do something meaningful, and be done in 45 minutes if you like. Caters to the casual gamer.
This works great until the endgame. see point 4
3. No harsh death penalties You lose nothing if you die. No XP debt, no money, no items. Only a little time and a blow to your pride. In this way you are always making progress. It's a very friendly game to everyone, at least in theory. I point to the battlegrounds as a reference. Absolutely no way to lose anything by joining a battleground. If you lose, you still make progress.
People who have only played WoW will tell you how much of a turnoff death penalties would be to them, if they were to think about another game. I think this is unfortunate. Having something to loose when seeking to gain makes nearly everything that you do a lot more interesting. I'm not going to go on about it (you can find many reasons why many people like death penalties from any whiner in a developing game's forums) but I want to point out that people can just as easily ruin your fun. But in WoW, there's hardly anything you can do about it. blah blah death penalties actually reduce ganking blah blah.
4. Raiding Endgame Getting together with 40 people in the game and taking down bosses for items is the tried and true MMORPG way of keeping people subscribed. Frankly, it can be fun.
You almost HAVE to raid once you hit 60 in WoW. First of all, it's nearly all of the content that gets added. Second, WoW is so item-centric that you can't even have fun in the battlegrounds against people who raid. This is a complete turnaround from the 1-60 trip. You join a big guild, do the same raids week after week, each requiring a substancial time commitment. We're talking 4-7 hours here. It's not the same game.
Because of this, people end up rerolling (starting a new character) and/or not really even talking to people outside their guild. It's wierd. The same "hardcore" people that complain that WoW sucks, are the same people that the game caters to at the end. It's addicting though, I admit to that.
It's stupid to talk about any product "deserving" (or not deserving) market share. Gee, Linux "deserves" to get a better market share because it's OSS and that's a good thing? No, it should get the market share based on its merits. And it's not quite there yet (although arguably close). (You can argue that other products *cough Windows cough* have achieved their market share through less legal means, but that's a different conversation for now)
Accordingly, why should WoW deserve to get less market share because you, of all people, tend not to like it? Is it because it's popular? Heaven forbid that a popular product happens to be a better product, for those who buy it.
Everyone has their own opinions on products. All of those "hardcore gamers" who think that WoW is ruining the genre, or ruining games in general because it happens to be popular, need to look in the mirror. If we really want gaming to be a form of mass-market entertainment (see Nintendo's E3 2006 press conference for a really good speech on this), we need MORE titles like WoW. If you happen to be bored by it, then that's fine. Just don't spout this BS about how it doesn't "deserve" its market share.
-- jchenx
I sit correced. The point, however badly voiced, stands.
...believing this guys numbers. yeah, some of them may be accurate. Blizzard has been tooting their horn with their subscription numbers. But, I've been playing Star Wars Galaxies since the beginning back in 2003 and there is no way they currently have just under 200,000 subscribers. The number of subscribers has the be half or even 3/4 of what it was in it's peak. So, I know that number to be just wrong. What other numbers are just wrong? EverQuest still has 400,000 subscribers???
Since you seem to have played Guild Wars at least a little you might know this already, but for anyone else who is wondering, the Diablo comparison isn't the complete picture.
Once you hit level 20 in Guild Wars, which takes most people well under two weeks, you move on to PVP (or the post-level-cap PVE content). By this point you've mastered the mechanical skills of playing, your level and gear are capped, and the game becomes more like a collectable card game than a character-sheet-centric RPG like Diablo.
You can only take 8 skills with you at a time so the metagame is all about finding combinations of skills that work well together and anticipating what skills your opponent will have. I've never liked the card games, mostly because of the transparent cash grab, but I was surprised to find I actually enjoyed building and trying out skill combos in Guild Wars (at least for a while, then I got bored; then came back after a few months, then got bored again). YMMV.
There are thousands of articles around as to why WoW did well, from it's existing franchise, to taking the Warhammer minature artwork through to the game, to simplification and a slick interface. But I had had my does of EQ1 and to be honest find them all very boring these days. I am waiting for a generation shift, something new to come to the genre. Compare the gameplay of an MMO with the gameplay of a moden single player RPG like Oblivion, or the gameplay of Half-life 2. It's a huge gap still. Ever grind in Quake? I mean back in the 90's you could excuse the genre of better gameplay because of the additional technology involved, but these days they should be closer to the single player variants. Until they do, I have had my dose.
Yes, this is indeed a glaring omission. Here is the number you require:
Progress Quest: 284,913
That's roughly twice Eve Online's population, and maybe a tenth of Runescape's free players.
(source:)
It is, however, the best game of its genre that will run on any operating system I'm willing to use.
I've been quite curious as to what percentage of WoW-players are mac-users. My guess is that it's quite high indeed, perhaps somewhere between a quarter and a third. There are what, around fifteen million macs recent enough to run it well in use today? Some nontrivial portion of those fifteen million will be used by people who have some interest in gaming, but have very few games available to them. Blizzard is one of the few companies that has had the sense to capitalize on this market, and I wouldn't be terribly surprised to hear that a million or two of those fifteen are also a million or two of Blizzard's six.http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart10.html
And what about the peak http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart9.html ? More than one million concurrent user at peak? holy shit~
Hello? Just seeing this would mean that wow is far from having a 50% market share..
I don't know why sirbruce discount his own charts, maybe I missed something?
Sony has this funny little thing called Station Access, which gives you access to pretty much all SOE games. If you want to play two SOE games (e.g., EQ2 and Planetside), you're marginally cheaper off buying a Station Access. If just want the extras in one game (e.g., extra character slots and some other advantages in EQ2), they're often _only_ available as Station Access.
Once a game has been activated under Station Access, there's no way to say "nope, I don't want to play this one any more" as long as you keep your Station Access. E.g., once I activated SWG under that payment plan, no matter how much I find SWG a steaming pile of shit and an example of how _not_ to design a game, I can't unsubscribe it. On the upside, it doesn't cost anything extra to leave it there.
On the downside, I too get counted in such "look how many players we have" statistics.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I'm not surprised. WoW outbeats all MMOGs in the 'market' simply because it is well written, well designed, very scriptable and fun for players of all sorts. Also the amount of support sites for WoW is staggering. And yes, with 6.5 million subscribers Blizzard is generating a lot of cash. With the paraphernalia and the planned movie it will only increase it's marketshare.
-- Neminem laede, immo omnes, quantum potes, iuva.
Again I don't see Guild Wars in the charts. While I don't expect them to track every single MMOG, Guild Wars should make it past the 120,000+ threshold, and definitely be in the 120,00-700,000 range. I think that deserves some special attention despite the fact it's free-2-play.
"Ack. Yech. Barf. Snort." - Bill the Cat
I've been waiting for an update to add to my new pages for forever.... I', sure you'll start seeing the info on other sites like mine real soon...
Webmaster
http://www.beatwow.com/
I don't know if the rest of you are bothered by this, but.... Runescape beating out every other MMO on that chart aside from WoW and Lineage is a little disturbing.
Hooray for more guesswork that people will assume is gospel.