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MMOGChart Update 21 Now Available
SirBruce wrote to mention that the 21st update to MMOGChart.com is now available. From the site: "This version has updated subscriber numbers for several games, most notably World of Warcraft, several of SOE's titles, and the recently launched Auto Assault. I've also expanded the mid-range chart a bit; eventually I'm going to have to implement a dynamic graphing system." The most dramatic information can be seen on the mid-range chart. The cyan, triangled line that represents Everquest made my jaw drop.
my fave mmorpg is wikipedia
There hasn't been any updates for Lineage 1 or 2 for a while. I don't play either game, but I'm interested in their subscriber numbers, which spiked so high and now seem to be on a downward slope.
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
Who could have known there'd be so many grind addicts in the world? Enjoy your limited feedback loop for its low monthly cost.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
When is the general subscription coming? I want to pay like $10-$20 and be on all the different games, not $x per game. That's just not being managed right -- they'd all share a lot more purchases, customers, etc. if they could just combine user bases through a single subscription model.
stuff |
MMOGChart is inaccurate, incomplete and a waste of anyones time. If you think its figures are accurate, or frankly show the whole picture, you're wrong. Ignore it.
I want to see a chart showing the number of players for the free MMOs like MapleStory, Fly for Fun, and Space Cowboy Online.
There are lots of cheapskates out there looking for a good MMO that doesn't cost anything. (Myself included)
(Posting anonymously to protect myself from ridicule)
Unfortunately, these charts only chart the new MMORPG's. There are other ones that have been around longer and are quite large: OGame and Kingdom Of Loathing to name a few. Hell, OGame alone has well over a million players worldwide, and in many, many different langugages.
Why is Guild Wars not even covered in this chart? Especially, now that they've just sold 2 million copies. Is it because there is no monthly fee to play? I think that is a very stupid metric.
Not every good MMORPG requires a fee to play, but it looks like even if you create an immensely popular game, unless you're bending your customers over and asking them to take it in the ass every month to the tune of $14.95, you don't get listed.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
Is it just my server, or does it seem like everyone is quitting WoW in the last month? Pretty much all the raiding guilds are either recruiting like mad, or merging so they can still raid.
I think with the summer coming, and most classes having had their 'reviews' people are leaving since they see nothing new on the horizon. Even though the next patch is the 'pvp patch', Blizzard has stated that they won't be changing the horrid honor system until the expansion. I think when the next one of these comes out, we will see a 500,000 to 1,000,000 drop off of subscribers over the summer of 06.
I'd be interested in seeing a comparison of how additional content and frequency of updates scales with subscriber numbers. The monthly fee outpaces individual subscriber upkeep costs by a pretty high amount, so you'd figure the games with high subscriber numbers would have at least a little more attention thrown at the updates -- but I'm not sure that is the case.
Although one of the problems with making such a comparison is that subscribers in different countries add up to vastly different subscribership plans and fees. Speaking of, though I've heard it's hard to get a hold of the numbers, I'd be very interested in seeing the average money per capita made off players broken down by pricing region. I'd also imagine there's a significant amount of overhead involved in expanding your business internationally. Hrrm.
Nice to see EVE-Online's figures still going steadily up. :)
If someone starts a chart with active players or something then Guild Wars has a place.
It ain't just GW wich ain't listed, none of the free muds is either.
Oh and there is a very simple reason GW doesn't have a monthly fee, because they don't have nearly the same infrastructure costs as say a WoW. When Guild Wars starts offering the same MMO level as monthly fee games then you can talk.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Would be nice to have some numbers for RF Online too.
I know that it topped Lineage in Korea last year for a while. Even if it has then probably subsided, it is has now servers in :
_Korea
_Taiwan
_Japan
_Philippines
_China
_US/Europe
Actually, when you sum the users from EQ and EQ2, you get a drop that isn't quite as steep. EQ definitely suffers from competing with its own sequel in addition to other new games.
Looks like Blizzard might be topping out with WoW at a PALTRY 6.5 Million users?!?!?!
Obviously they need to get that expansion out fast or it's all over but the crying for them.
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
That SWG NGE lost slightly less then half its subscribers is not that amazing. Even those who like the NGE have to admit that it added a whole new bug fest to an already bugged game. It would be like getting you broken fiat replaced by a lada.
What is intresting is how poorly Everquest 2 is doing. I played it for a bit after escaping from SWG (WoW does not appeal to me neither does Eve so don't bug me about those) and it too seems to have been smedleyed. Before I left EQ2 they removed spirit shards taking a lot of the fun out of the game and increased your running speed so you looked like a characters out of a slapstick movie.
At least it is nice to see I am not the only one who thinks sony is ruining the games. Perhaps once they loose them all they will realize that it is pointless trying to emulate Blizzard by making all their games easy, shallow WoW wannabees. Not that their is anything wrong with WoW by itself. Just that it is a product that already exists.
Or maybe this is just the way live works. SOE once was one of the big MMO companies and then they just lost it. Sierra, Lucasarts, Microprose and countless others have gone before them. You really have to wonder how a company that once got MMO's so right its product was likened to crack now can't keep keep a single product from loosing subscribers.
Let's see, 100.000 lost SWG subscribers. That is 1.5 million dollars of lost revenue a month. Was the NGE worth that? Same with EQ2, removing spirit shards and other easing of the game lost them well of 150.000 subscribers. 2 million dollars a month down the drain. You got to wonder about Sony's management that Smedley is still allowed on the premises without being carved up into sushi.
Oh well, blame piracy, oh wait, mmo's don't have piracy. Guess the only excuse is that Sony this time is itself to blame.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart7.html
It sure is my favorite MMORPG.
This chart makes the rest look like a joke its so out of whack.
Modesty is one of life's greatest attributes
I noticed that along with the drop in Everquest's subscribers to 200,000, the Accuracy Rating was changed to B; it had been A in all previous versions of mmogchart.com (if I remember corerctly). That makes me wonder what the source of the 200,000 figure was...
... now that they've just sold 2 million copies.
In addition to the good reasons provided by others, you should note that "copies sold" does not equal "active players" in some timeframe. The chart is showing active players. That's why the lines eventually peak and head *downwards*. Obviously, if sales were tracked the lines would only plateau.
the first people to know it would be the players.
US population numbers are pitiful. Traffic on non-official boards is stagnant at best, and negative comments abound.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I always wondered about Lineage's numbers. Correct me where I am wrong; It was at a 7 mil mark a long time ago, right? And was mostly S.Koreans? What is S.Korea's population? The only way that could happen is if every player had about 4 subscriptions. I guess that counts. It just makes Wow's subscription numbers worth more since the common American only has one, and maybe 2.
It's even worse than that.
A lot of numbers are just wild guesses. For example SOE brags something like "SWG is the third biggest multiplayer game!", but not by what criterion or how it's counted or anything... and the guy then goes and guesses a number between that of game number 2 and game number 4 in the charts. (Or rather between number 2 and what would have been number 3 if we go by known figures or if Sony is lying.)
Frankly, I fail to see any point in charting something that's a collection of wild guesses, and with the accuracy of being somewhere between 175,000 and 250,000. When you imagine that guesswork margin around the graph, it could have pretty much any shape whatsoever. Allowing for that huge margin of error, it could have actually gained players in the NGE. (Yeah, I know it didn't, but the margin of error is high enough to allow even that. Just shows how utterly useless that graph is.)
Add the fact that you have no clue what Sony measured there (or _if_ it measured anything.) Was it number of players? Number of accounts? Number of sold boxes? Simultaneous connections? What? Did they include every single Station Access account, even if it doesn't actually play SWG? Was that claim made during at the apex of some "try the game free for 7 days" campaign and including the free accounts? Or what? Basically what's the point of graphing something if you don't even know what that number means or how it was measured?
And that's a general problem, not just a Sony one. Some games track players. (E.g., WoW counts you only once even if you have multiple accounts.) Some track accounts. Some include every single PC in an internet cafe in Korea, whether anyone actually plays the game on it or not. (Internet cafe owners have to license each game for each PC, which for some games it's half the revenue.) Etc.
It's basically like comparing the size of three cities, except one gives you the number of families, one gives you the number of inhabitants, and one gives you the number of houses. All are valid metrics, but you can't compare numbers that aren't in the same units.
Add other distorting factors such as average number of accounts per player, or number of simultaneous connections. They can vary massively between games. E.g., if game A would ban your cheating ass if you used a second automated character (e.g., a priest set on auto-heal following your warrior), and game B actually encourages it, you can bet that game B will attract a lot of people using a second PC to do just that. Since it's an automated character, it can even be a cheap old PC with the game set to the minimum resolution allowed and absolute minimum graphics quality. And that's not the only factor. I remember reading somewhere about people having as many as 8 accounts in some games.
E.g., does the game allow macroing? I can imagine that SWG would rank deceptively higher in number of simultaneously active players (thus maybe supporting Smedley's brag) because while in other games (e.g., WoW) you'd get banned for macroing unattended, in SWG it was always fair game. A _lot_ of people leave a character just dancing in the cantina unattended overnight, and in the old days even macroing combat XP was pretty common. (In fact, rumour has it that the crap FPS-like interface in NGE is to make unattended scripted combat impossible. Sony went _that_ far to avoid tackling macro-ers.)
E.g., again, does that include Station Access accounts? A lot of people got that for some other games, or for the extras in EQ2, or whatever, and got all other SOE games for free as a result. So it's hardly apples to apples to compare people who pay $15 per month for another MMO to people who got a SWG account just because it was free.
Even if you stopped playing one of Sony's games, there's no way to unsubscribe it from your Station Access (but then it doesn't cost anything to leave it active). I know I'm technically still subscribed to SWG by virtue of the Station Pass, and so is one co-worker, although neither of us actually
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
You're not alone, and it's not just the running speed. The EQ2 graphics (and probably the animations too) as a whole look... subtly, but disturbingly wrong. They're high res, they're detailed, but tripped my suspension of disbelief all the time. In a _major_ way. There's something about them that says "nope, this isn't real" in a worrying way. I'd run towards a tree, and it would be a beautiful and detailed tree, shaded and everything, but nevertheless it would make something inside me go "WTF, this is _not_ a tree."
The best I can compare it to is an oil painting. It's beautiful and all, but you just know it's not real.
It's basically why you read all over the place descriptions like "sterile" for EQ2's world. It looks somehow... dead and soulless and strangely, disturbingly wrong.
Strangely enough, WoW's cartoonish graphics don't trigger the same reaction. You know they're cartoonish, and in some places (e.g., Gnomeregan) it looks like something straight out of a Warner Brothers cartoon, but somehow they're easy to accept. A lot easier than EQ2's.
One theory I've heard about it is the "uncanny valley", which says basically that the closer you get to the real thing, the more people start to notice the details that aren't right. So at some point the people's reaction takes a nose dive and even gets briefly into the negatives. Then it starts rising again. That abrupt dip is basically the "valley". And it could be that EQ2 is basically at a point in that valley.
Then again, Oblivion and other games with at least comparable graphics disprove that theory about EQ2. Oblivion didn't exhibit the same effect. Which makes me thinks that probably it's just something about EQ2's graphics.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Heh. Well, I had already done it at one point, so I already _knew_ it would cancel the whole Station Access subscription, but I thought I'd try it again just to be sure. Yep, it cancelled my subscription to all SOE games in one fell swoop.
So, yes, I know what I'm talking about. Once a game has been activated under Station Access, you can only cancel it by cancelling your whole Station Access subscription, for all games.
And conversely, if you ever re-activate your Station Access for any game (e.g., because your co-workers still play EQ2 and nag you about it), it will automatically reactivate everything else, SWG included. I'm not going to try that now, but, again, I've done it before, and it had exactly that result.
So, yes, there's no way to make a point to Sony by unsubscribing SWG even if you wanted to.
Heck, in SWG's case they have their head so far up their ass that you can't even give them feedback why you unsubscribed. The usual "give us feedback about <insert game>" link you get when unsubscribing, this time led to a page saying basically "well, go away, you need an active account for that." (Never mind that the account is still paid for and active until the middle of July.) Very subtle, that. Guess they really don't want to hear what people think about the NGE. Heh. But I digress...
Well, still, good riddance. I should have done that a long time ago. Guess I must thank you for reminding me
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Unfortunately, I'd be hard pressed to see a correlation.
A game like COH/COV, which is at the trailing end of the market, has provided 6 major free content additions so far. "Issue 1" was the game as released and 2 to 7 (7 is the current) have added new zones, (at one point) new classes, new outfit pieces, new quests, new power sets, new kinds of conetent like arch-villains and giant monsters, etc. Pretty much half the game at this point, and a lot more than half the quests, are new stuff. It also includes _all_ the level 40 to 50 content: areas, quests, rewards, you name it. The game launched with level 40 as the cap, and the last 10 levels have been added later.
By comparison, EQ2, which topped at a lot higher numbers of subscribers, well, I don't think it's given a single area for free yet, other than the Isle of Refuge (the newbie area). New areas, including those for the newly introduced extra levels, have been sold as a commercial expansion pack. They have been however churning new quests in a hurry. Down side: they all feel like mass-produced crap. E.g., you get to kill a bunch of bears and deers and wolves to see which of them stole a manuscript. I'm not making this up, sadly.
Moving to the other end, WoW didn't seem to give that much for free yet. They have added the battlegrounds and some high end pure-grind dungeons, together with the equipment to grind for, but other than that there's been very little new content AFAIK.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
A mistake that seems to be somehow built-in people's heads is that a MMORPG is sorta like a marriage. "Until death do us part."
This is reflected in two major falsehoods that get posted again and again:
1. "If I got tired of a game after 6 months, it's a sign that the game now sucks and deserves to be shut down."
2. "If people I know left after 6 months, it's a sign that the game is dying."
In reality, 6 months is (or was in the EQ days) the average time a player stays on a MMO. Sure, it depends on the player and the MMO too, but the vast majority of players don't stay for ever. It's just a game. At some point you've seen the content, got sick of doing the same thing over and over again, and move on or at least take a break.
In reality, WoW is still doing pretty damn well, as reflected by both the number of active subscriptions and the queues. You'd notice it if there was a massive exodus, because there would be no more full servers in the list, and no more queues.
It does, however, show the turnover mentioned before. Some people get sick and tired of it and leave, some new people join, and some people come back after taking a break. And some just start a new character or whatever. It's enough to see your old pals leaving, or your old guild needing new members, but not really enough to sink the game yet. And yes, it means you too at some point will get sick and tired of WoW.
(Note that I'm not saying that this is automatically the case with all games. Some do have poorer quality or sprout some uninspired change that does cause an exodus. Just saying that WoW doesn't seem to be there (yet).)
And a lot of guilds are recombining not only because they've lost level 60 players. (Though they certainly do lose them: guess what level will someone be after 6 months?) They're recombining because they're finally reaching the point where they need to take part in those 40-man raids. A lot of people form some casual guild at level 10, make lots of alts, play solo or in small groups, and are as happy as a clam... until they reach the tier 2 dungeons at level 60. Then they suddenly discover that the old system won't get them alive through the end-game dungeons. Suddenly being the casual guild with 10 people at level 60, and half the rest alts under level 20, just doesn't work any more.
Enter a round of policy changes, "stop inviting people below level 60!!!" posts on the guild boards, and recombining with other guilds to get a viable mix of 40 players that have the level and equipment to take part in those raids.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
10-15k or 30k but a accuracy rating of B?
percentage wise those are very different numbers. The health of the game would be very different in each case.
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