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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
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.
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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
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. :)
You can only stay the current favorite for so long, so it's not really surprising. Eventually a lot of people are going to move on to something else.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
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.
:P
Despite the nature of the troll, there actually is a point here. Giving SirBruce the benefit of the doubt about the numbers, there's the question of, well, what exactly does the subscription metric tell you? It tells you something, but certainly not turnover rate, average satisfaction, profits, the number of "deadbeat" accounts, etc. Everytime I see this site pop up I spend a couple minutes wondering how exactly to interpret it -- and then I usually forget about it until next time because it's just not something that catches my interest in the right way
Of course, this isn't news to anyone, least of all SirBruce, who actually discusses better metrics and the limited utility of subscribership numbers. It's just that there isn't an easy way to access the information needed for all those other metrics. And to claim that the subscriber numbers are useless is pretty narrow minded.
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.
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
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