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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.
Sony already does that for their own titles
But to be honest, the way these games are designed I'd rather pay $15 a month to play one exclusively as opposed to paying $25 for access to one game I'll play a lot and five games I may never log into. I don't have the time and/or energy to devote to half a dozen MMOs.
Grind and WoW only apply to the grind of repeating end game content. You gotta put two and two together and realize that the reason World of Warcraft has such a significantly larger fanbase is the casual gamer; and for them, World of Warcraft is amazing. The 1-60 leveling experience is better in WoW than most other games out there.
:P
If grind addiction really did exist, Galaxies would still be huge
1. Why isn't [MMOG_NAME] listed?
There are four main reasons why a particular game isn't listed in the charts:
a) The game in question isn't really a MMOG, at least by my reckoning. Games like Diablo II and Phantasy Star Online fall into this category. Guild Wars developers say in their own FAQ that they do not consider their game a MMOG; in addition, it doesn't charge a monthly fee (see below). Please don't email me trying to insist otherwise; I'm not likely to be convinced.
b) The game in question is free and/or doesn't charge a regular monthly fee. Games like Furcadia, Magic: the Gathering Online, and Project Entropia are good examples; these games are normally free to play, but some players can also pay a variable amount to access additional content in the game. This makes it almost impossible to come up with a number comparable to monthly subscribers in other games.
Both points relavent in general, the most significant bit is emphasised by me.
It's covered in the first two points of their FAQ, but to make things more convenient: 1. Guild War's developers have said that they don't consider their own game an MMO 2. The lack of monthly fees, while not a determination of what type of game it is, make it far harder to track and get useful data - you know how many started playing the game, but without a tracking metric for when they stopped playing the game, it's a useless comparison.
NCSoft provides subscriber numbers for all of their games every 3 months. The figures for March, the last data points for L1 and L2, came out in May. You'll have to wait until August until you see an update on how they were doing as of June. (I was lucky to get interim updates for CoX and AA.)
Bruce
In the analysis for FFXI (nobody ever reads that), I discuss that fact that given the census figures, subscriber numbers could be as high as 700,000. But the more I guesstimate numbers to put on the chart, the more I get slammed for guesstimating. :)
Bruce
Because I only count paying Second Life subscribers, not the free ones. Same goes for RuneScape and Puzzle Pirates.
Bruce
Maybe 7 million total registered users, but not all of those were active at the same time. And South Korea has a total population of 45-50 million, so 1 in 10 people playing Lineage is amazing but not impossible. The South Korean MMOG phenomenon had a lot of unique factors that caused it to grow so large, including an economic downturn that left a lot of young 20-something men without jobs, Internet access concentrated in urban centers, and a ban on console imports until recently. Bruce
Damn, stupid slashdot formatting. Let's try this again:
>It's even worse than that.
It may be worse than that, but not for most of the reasons you gave.
>A lot of numbers are just wild guesses.
No, they aren't. The only "guesses" on the chart are the latest data points for SWG and DAoC, and those are based upons sourced statements from others that put the number within a known to be correct range. That leaves 99% of the rest of the data on the chart to be non-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.)
Subsequent conversations with Smedley explained by what criterion and how it was counted. So you're just flat wrong here.
>Frankly, I fail to see any point in charting something that's a collection of wild guesses,
I do too. Luckily, I don't do that... I chart real data points, with a couple of informed guesses, and no wild ones.
>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.)
That doesn't make it useless at all. Did you even continue reading the analysis? Because I had an inside source providng me a related number for the same month that I could use to determine with some accuracy the total number of subscribers. Yes, you still wind up with a large margin of error, but enough to have high confidence it didn't actually gain players.
>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?
It was none of the above. It was total active subscribers, which includes those people currently able to play the game via station pass (but not all of them), as well as those currently on free time. Which is basically how almost every other data point on the charts is calculated. (Some choose not to count their currently active free accounts. Typically, this is never more than 10% of the total subscription base, so it's not a big issue. This is also discussed in the analysis.)
>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.)
Who told you this? Because it's not true. WoW, or any other MMOG developer, has NO WAY of linking an account to a specific player. They might know what name you put on it, and they know the name on the credit card that's attached to it. That's it.
>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.
None of the games I tracked include "every singled PC in an internet cafe in Korea", so your objections here are irrelevant. Again, what is tracked is current active subscribers. In a few cases where the data providing is a similar but somewhat diffe