2 Million Pirates Shanghai'd

The Escapist's news feed reports that 2 Million characters have been made in Puzzle Pirates since the launch of the game. From the article: "Three Rings' CEO Daniel James sees 2 million users as confirmation of the micro-currency model. 'We believe that this model represents the future for online entertainment. Our inspiration continues to be the Korean market, where 'free to play, pay for item' is the ubiquitous business model for online games. As the US market matures to meet Korea, we intend to keep leading the way.' In addition, the company recently released the beta version of a new game, Bang! Howdy, a multiplayer online tactical strategy game for the PC, which uses the same payment structure and online distribution model."

Comments

They forgot to mention...

[BigCheese]

...that both Puzzle Pirates and Bang! Howdy are available for the PC, Mac and Linux. I play it on Linux and it works flawlessly.

Characters is different from real people behind

[gmuslera]

In the game you have accounts. Each account can create as much as 3 characters in an ocean, and the game have 6 oceans (3 related to subscribed users, 3 to the ones that uses micropayment/doubloons, but you can have characters in all oceans). You must be subscribed to create a char in the testing ocean, so the amount of people/characteres there is far lower than in the other/production oceans, so for each account/real person behind, you can have 15 characters in the game.

But also, you can create (and discard later or not) any amount of accounts, sometimes enables you to get some economic (in game) advantage, sometimes gives you more possibilities, sometimes it could be used as a way of cheating, and all of this is valid specially in the oceans that use micropayments,

2 millon characters is a big number. But is pretty far from the number of real people that actually plays the game (my estimation is below 50k, maybe less than 20k even)

Re:Characters is different from real people behind

[FirienFirien]

On any single night, there's 1000 people or so online on the server that I'm on. There's 5 oceans/servers (not counting the test server); then factor that up by geography and day of the week timing. As I post, there's 3259 online, and it's the middle of the US night. Mmogchart.com puts them at 35k current subscriptions in March, so your 50k figure is probably about right; but your earlier reasoning is off. Only a tiny tiny fraction of people will have filled up 15 slots; it's largely pointless. What does complicate it is that by creating a satellite account to buy dubloons, you get shanghai points for your crew; you can then transfer the dubloons and ditch the satellite. Bonus shanghai point. That, in the dubloon/micropayment oceans, is what's boosting this figure.

Sure, 2 million characters is a flawed number; and a figure of 50k when compared to games like WoW is pretty small. It's still by far the most social game I've seen - and that with easily the largest ratio of girls to guys. I'd guess it as around 50:50, probably ± 5-10%.