Jett-Rinn Posted April 6, 2012 Share Posted April 6, 2012 as long as they can add more FREE weekends, then they can Pad their numbers a bit....... Stephen Reid has already said on Twitter that trial accounts aren't counted. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thedrumchannell Posted April 6, 2012 Share Posted April 6, 2012 Stephen Reid has already said on Twitter that trial accounts aren't counted. No, he said "As far as I know" and guess what? Anyone that follows Stephen's Twitter understands that Stephen doesn't know crap. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kevlarto Posted April 6, 2012 Share Posted April 6, 2012 Speculation is never a good thing, look what it does to the price of oil, I will wait for the facts.. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
terminova Posted April 6, 2012 Share Posted April 6, 2012 No, he said "As far as I know" and guess what? Anyone that follows Stephen's Twitter understands that Stephen doesn't know crap. He knows more about it than you do. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BCBull Posted April 6, 2012 Author Share Posted April 6, 2012 It does look like play time has almost dropped by 1/2 according to xfire. time !=subs but time is a good indicator. http://www.xfire.com/games/swtor/Star_Wars_The_Old_Republic/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
terminova Posted April 6, 2012 Share Posted April 6, 2012 It does look like play time has almost dropped by 1/2 according to xfire. time !=subs but time is a good indicator. http://www.xfire.com/games/swtor/Star_Wars_The_Old_Republic/ So, based on ~3.5k players out of....over a million...so... 0.35% of the playerbase? I'm not sure what conclusions we can adequately draw from that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sirsri Posted April 6, 2012 Share Posted April 6, 2012 (edited) So, based on ~3.5k players out of....over a million...so... 0.35% of the playerbase? I'm not sure what conclusions we can adequately draw from that. actually quite a lot. What you do is correlate the number with some other known quantity. A million players is a pretty big sample, but it might be strongly self selecting. Lets say you know there are 4 million wow players, from whatever official otherway verifiable metric. And that equates to .4% of xfire numbers, so then .35% equates to 3.5 million etc. It's marginally more complicated than that, if you start averaging in multiple known quantities, or trying to adjust for selection bias (if you know say call of duty is significantly over represented or the like). But this is a pretty well established and accurate exercise in statistics. Now that only gives you played time, not sub time. Pretty much the only way you're getting accurate financial data is from a transaction processor or from the mouth of EA itself. Since EA is publicly traded and SWTOR is a fairly large portion of their business they will get asked about it, and have to honestly answer. The thing is, there are honest answers, and there are more honest answers. We currently have X. Is one honest answer. We project Y in a short time frame is also an honest answer. But tells you a lot less. The thing is, they can't outright lie. Shareholders and the SEC don't play nice with that sort of thing. They don't have to provide guidance, which tells you something in and of itself (e.g. RIM just declined to provide guidance for its next quarter), and it's up to shareholders to interpret that, in the case of RIM a major management shakeup sort of obviously explains why they can't guess the future just yet. EA does about 3.6 Billion dollars in revenue, they spent somewhere around 300 million on SWTOR, and possibly more if you count advertising etc. At a million subs that's 180 million in year in revenue, which would be 5% of total revenue. 2 million subs would be a big deal on EA's balance sheet, and they can't really hide major discrepancies. Edited April 6, 2012 by Sirsri Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BCBull Posted April 6, 2012 Author Share Posted April 6, 2012 So, based on ~3.5k players out of....over a million...so... 0.35% of the playerbase? I'm not sure what conclusions we can adequately draw from that. 3500 is enough to poll with about an 7% margin of error. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ConradLionhart Posted April 6, 2012 Share Posted April 6, 2012 I predict a lot of trolling on the forums when the report is released. No bet. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ConradLionhart Posted April 6, 2012 Share Posted April 6, 2012 I love how most posters in this thread are accusing companies of making stuff up, completely disregarding the legalities behind false advertising (as well as the companies being open trading, so you can view pretty much everything they do financially as well concurrency if you have industry access to gamesindustry.biz) and then backing it up by making up their own figures and assumptions. So far from this thread I have learned that some games companies may or may not have a random number of subscribers of whom may or may not be part of the games free trial, or not. It's just unbelievable that some people don't want to be wrong so bad, that when faced with proof they then grasp at straws to save their own egos? "How can there be 1.7 million subs? There are barely any people on my server, and my guild doesn't have as many people". Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ConradLionhart Posted April 6, 2012 Share Posted April 6, 2012 My prediction is, 2 million. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BCBull Posted April 6, 2012 Author Share Posted April 6, 2012 It's just unbelievable that some people don't want to be wrong so bad, that when faced with proof they then grasp at straws to save their own egos? "How can there be 1.7 million subs? There are barely any people on my server, and my guild doesn't have as many people". You have to be honest, it doesn't seem like 1.7 million. You never see more than 20-30 at a time, and that's only if you are standing by the pvp terminal. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Oofpez Posted April 6, 2012 Share Posted April 6, 2012 You have to be honest, it doesn't seem like 1.7 million. You never see more than 20-30 at a time, and that's only if you are standing by the pvp terminal. You have to be honest, WoW doesn't seem like it has 10 million subscribers. You never see more than 90-100 at a time, and that's only if you're in Org, dancing on the mailbox, waiting for you Cross-server LFR pop. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jandi Posted April 6, 2012 Share Posted April 6, 2012 The magic 8-ball says "No". There, that's as accurate as anything in this thread. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hargrave Posted April 6, 2012 Share Posted April 6, 2012 heres something that accurate http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-electronic-arts-worst-company-consumerist-20120404,0,6290021.story?track=ud Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BCBull Posted April 6, 2012 Author Share Posted April 6, 2012 You have to be honest, WoW doesn't seem like it has 10 million subscribers. You never see more than 90-100 at a time, and that's only if you're in Org, dancing on the mailbox, waiting for you Cross-server LFR pop. that's because 6 mill of those are in china Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shingara Posted April 6, 2012 Share Posted April 6, 2012 (edited) that's because 6 mill of those are in china yup and eu/russia take the bulk of the 4 mil left over. Tis wierd when you split the demographic up like that though isnt it, swtor has 1.7 mil from last report and in the same market wow has 4 mil so not a million miles apart really. Lets see what happens to the figures with oceana release. Edited April 6, 2012 by Shingara Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
terminova Posted April 6, 2012 Share Posted April 6, 2012 actually quite a lot. What you do is correlate the number with some other known quantity. A million players is a pretty big sample, but it might be strongly self selecting. Lets say you know there are 4 million wow players, from whatever official otherway verifiable metric. And that equates to .4% of xfire numbers, so then .35% equates to 3.5 million etc. It's marginally more complicated than that, if you start averaging in multiple known quantities, or trying to adjust for selection bias (if you know say call of duty is significantly over represented or the like). But this is a pretty well established and accurate exercise in statistics. If you use a ratio and compare to WoW, then you end up with around 1.7 million players if you base your numbers on the ~17k players that play WoW and upload their data to xfire, and then assume the same percentage of SWTOR players are doing the same, give or take a couple hundred thousand. If you look at the numbers themselves, what it looks like is the number of hours played by individual people using xfire is dropping from 5-8 hours/day being played to closer to what WoW players using xfire are playing which is ~4 hours/day. I dumped the numbers into a spreadsheet and did some math. I'm not trying to say you are wrong, my issue was with the conclusion the person I was responding to was claiming based purely on the pretty picture graph. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
terminova Posted April 6, 2012 Share Posted April 6, 2012 3500 is enough to poll with about an 7% margin of error. Except you're trying to draw an impossible conclusion from data that doesn't support your conclusion or have anything to do with it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
samht Posted April 6, 2012 Share Posted April 6, 2012 Blizzard is legally bound to tell their shareholders the truth meaning if they say there are 12 million active accounts then there are 12 million active accounts, and people that haven't paid for their account for years have had their accounts frozen due to non-payment meaning they are not part of the active account count Blizzard is using. Likewise, Bioware cannot lie to their shareholders and lie about the number of active accounts meaning if they state there are 1.7 million active accounts then there are 1.7 million active accounts. I'm going to point out that WoW China does not work on the same payment system, as far as I know, that the Western world uses because of laws and rules in China. ^ what she said, plus I think it depends on where their qtr end. Last time they only looked up until Dec 31st 2011, this time its probably until 3/31/12. I would guess 1 million or less if the qtr ends in March. 1.5+ if its right after patch 1.2, because I know ppl will want to check the jesus patch out. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ConradLionhart Posted April 6, 2012 Share Posted April 6, 2012 ^ what she said, plus I think it depends on where their qtr end. Last time they only looked up until Dec 31st 2011, this time its probably until 3/31/12. I would guess 1 million or less if the qtr ends in March. 1.5+ if its right after patch 1.2, because I know ppl will want to check the jesus patch out. I see what you did there, on a Good Friday. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fungihoujo Posted April 6, 2012 Share Posted April 6, 2012 You have to be honest, it doesn't seem like 1.7 million. You never see more than 20-30 at a time, and that's only if you are standing by the pvp terminal. Cool, I'm on a heavy WoW server and outside of Orgrimmar there's about 2 people at any given time. Guess that means if you leave the main city, WoW's a f2p fail game with 20 subscribers amirite? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ConradLionhart Posted April 6, 2012 Share Posted April 6, 2012 Cool, I'm on a heavy WoW server and outside of Orgrimmar there's about 2 people at any given time. Guess that means if you leave the main city, WoW's a f2p fail game with 20 subscribers amirite? This is the humbling FACT, that even WoW servers do not have like 1000 people at all times. I am not subbed to the game so I cannot check, but I would hazard a guess that they do not have that much more than SW:TOR. People use bizarre proof and reasonings, that 100 level 50s is a small amount. If they check a single WoW server, the number of level 85s is only slightly more considering that their subs are 6 times more than SW:TOR. They then use biased proof by checking the server load when most people are asleep. I cannot help but shake my head at the nonsense that the anti-SW:TOR brigade keep dishing out. Is there server population problem? Yes. Just don't use poor reasonings to explain it, then get angry when we point out how flawed it is by using it on WoW. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nitewolfe Posted April 6, 2012 Share Posted April 6, 2012 One thing you can be sure of if the subs number had risen ea would have told everyone in the world. Since they have not i cant help but think that the numbers are below the 1.7 they said before. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LovarBoy Posted April 6, 2012 Share Posted April 6, 2012 (edited) Around May 1, judging by the past report. I predict 2 million subscriptions. 2 million? Where are the the servers, they are playing on? Quite sure less than 1,4m subscribers, everything else is unrealistic. Just look at the servers, it's void on 90% of them. One thing you can be sure of if the subs number had risen ea would have told everyone in the world. Since they have not i cant help but think that the numbers are below the 1.7 they said before. That's the truth. If there would be 1,8m or 2m subscribers, BioWare would have told us. They did the last time with the 1,7m and they would have done that again, if the numbers were higher. So, logical consequence --> less subs than previously. Edited April 6, 2012 by LovarBoy Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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