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Free Realms Approaches the Five-Million-Player Mark
A few days ago at Comic-Con, Sony Online Entertainment president John Smedley spoke about the success of Free Realms, their free-to-play MMORPG that relies on microtransactions for a business model. The game was released at the end of April, and by mid-June there were upwards of three million registered users. Now that total is approaching five million, with no sign of slowing down. Min Kim, another panelist at the discussion, said, "When people started talking about it back in 2003 or 2004, people said Western games would never want to do this, to play a game for free and then buy items. And now everybody is saying, 'We're going to have microtransactions as part of our business model.'"
I was bored and wanted to see what the hype was about, so I went to check out Free Realms and what do you know, its windows only...Its a browser game for christs sake... Invest the time and make it multi-platform...I guess I'm out...thanks again sony...
"It's not that I don't understand what your going through. Its that I just don't care"
I didn't play very long, but it seemed everything beyond basic questing is locked off until you buy stuff. There's a lot of cosmetic, pet and other things that all cost. It sounds like frills but it felt like 75% of the game.
In the case of WoW the way the count a subscriber is a person who paid too play the game in the last 30 days. In the case of most of the world, that means someone who has an active monthly subscription. In the case of some Asian countries, it means someone who paid for some play time last month.
"Every time Free Realms crosses another million player milestone the same thing always gets implied.
The totals are always stated to be the unique number of players who have signed up for the game and actually played the game."
Yeah, because these numbers are meaningless. Sign up and play once, then quit? You still count as a "player" until the end of time. Comparing the numbers to anything other then another game with the same model is meaningless.
How many people spent money on it in the last month? That's the number that REALLY matters. You'll notice they don't release that one.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
FWIW, the number of available Free Realms servers has not increased in the past few months. (At 10 when I checked last week.) When Free Realms first launched in April, the number of servers grew quickly, at a rate of about 2 per week. It's been at 10 since around the end of May.
Unless they're upgrading the capacity of each server, this indicates that the number of active players is remaining constant, so new people are entering at the same rate that people are quitting. But in a free-to-play game, the number of registered users = the number of active accounts, and that number increases monotonically.