The sky isn't falling. A numbers based view.

[Thylbanus]

Interesting side note. Turbine just laid off a bunch of staff and their forums arent filled with posts about it. Why is this game different?

 

Turbine laid off those employees because their work was done. Happens frequently when a developer releases a new expansion. All those people needed for coding and development are no longer needed. It's like seasonal help for developers. Why keep the lawn guys when it's winter?

[Liquidacid]

Why keep the lawn guys when it's winter?

 

cause someone needs to shovel the snow ?

[SOULCASTER]

NOOOOO but SWG was the greatest game evar!!! TOR needs to be turned into SWG2 NAO!!!!

 

/sarcasm off

 

It should, maybe SWTOR will be able to also make it 8+ years then.

[Graydon]

Turbine laid off those employees because their work was done. Happens frequently when a developer releases a new expansion. All those people needed for coding and development are no longer needed. It's like seasonal help for developers. Why keep the lawn guys when it's winter?

 

Wasn't just the contract developers directly responsible for the RoR Expansion. They let go some longtime staff including some CM's that have been around for years.

[Goretzu]

Wherever you read that I wouldn't ever go again.

 

Bioware has already made its initial investment back with retail box sales, let alone 6-7 months of subscriptions according to their Initial investor report. Which by all means is the only accurate representation of the financial state of a company due to other sources not having access to CFO's files.

 

You have to remember EA and LucasArts also invested heavily into this game. Likely with their investments being in the Subscription revenue percentages returns. So Lucas Arts and EA may not have made their money back but Bioware did.

 

LucasArts could flush their initial Investment down the toilet and not be hurt for cash, and EA makes enough money from TheSims to buy a small country. So even if this game doesn't make exorbitant profit margins EA will likely still host servers since they are relatively low cost to maintain.

 

All in all Bioware the developer got their money back and that means development will not be hindered, just don't expect EA or Lucas to shell out more money. Which is fine since "Expansions" never cost as much to produce.

 

There's no such thing as "Bioware", only Bioware EA which is simply a sub-division of EA - or to put it sucinctly just "EA" with Bioware tagged on.

[Bojangle]

ToR is doing fine and doing a lot better than Tera. GW2 the hype died faster than I though it would and has already peaked. Just too bad we won't know how much of a drop it took. Rift in all honesty I don't know how it is doing. Sounds like it got a lot better but then I hear most of the servers are barren. I think their expansion will bring in some peeps and have people re-sub too. I won't but just saying.

 

Once ToR goes f2p, a lot will be coming back along with new subs.

 

I will keep my sub here anyways but truth be told I wanted to get back into raiding and went back to WoW for MoP and I will say it is actually a fun expansion and end game. Well it is better than Cata so far and I will admit I was missing WoW because Cata was horrible. I just wish ToR's end game was harder and longer. I love their storyline for it and actually reminded me a little bit of how WoW's end game used to be where you felt the theme and the bosses weren't there after 2 trash pulls. But they just made them with too few bosses.

 

Either way ToR isn't going to die next year and will be around for a while. They will keep pumping out content and will get more subs out of going f2p imho.

[simplius]

Tera is tanking in west , because of bad partners here,,i think theyre doing fine back home

 

i cant believe that u still feed the poor noobs at BW the same lines

 

"SWtor is doing fine",,,really

 

"this game is for casuals",,,who dropped it like a hot potato

 

LOOK AT THE EFFING NUMBERS, BW,,,THAT SHOULD GIVE U A CLUE:eek:

[CosmicKat]

To answer the original question in my opinion:

 

At this point in LoTRo's life cycle... there are not really that many players left. There are not really that many players that use the forums. You can tell this when you goto page 2 of general section and the posts are 2 days old. Then goto page 3 and see that the posts are upwards of 4 days old. Page 5 here is still between yesterday and 2 days old for comparison.

 

IOW... Lotro is so old now that it has its niche players. Most of them dont use the forums. This game is still young and arent in their niche player life cycle yet.

 

Hate to break it to you but the post rate here is dropping pretty radically as well. Posts used to disappear off the first page in a couple of hours without constant replies, now... not so much.

 

This game is a year old now. It "failed" to live up to expectations and it hasn't been modified, tweaked, or changed in any significantly fundamental way. When F2P launches it will be the same game it was when it launched. That game did not knock anyone's socks off so why is there optimism of it being TOR's saviour?

 

It's no longer new. Yes, bug and feature-wise there have been improvements but this is the same game that failed to be a blockbuster a year ago. If the only thing that can salvage your product launch is to give it away for free, your product is not what people want.

[Tim-ONeil]

Hate to break it to you but the post rate here is dropping pretty radically as well. Posts used to disappear off the first page in a couple of hours without constant replies, now... not so much.

 

This game is a year old now. It "failed" to live up to expectations and it hasn't been modified, tweaked, or changed in any significantly fundamental way. When F2P launches it will be the same game it was when it launched. That game did not knock anyone's socks off so why is there optimism of it being TOR's saviour?

 

It's no longer new. Yes, bug and feature-wise there have been improvements but this is the same game that failed to be a blockbuster a year ago. If the only thing that can salvage your product launch is to give it away for free, your product is not what people want.

 

It's been estimated that wow has sold over 40+ million units and only has about ~10 million active accounts. This is why that retention number is significant. If you can offer your product to an even larger audience then you stand to gain back customers and grow.

 

Unless somehow you believe the retention potential for this game is 0% which would be a strange thing to claim.

[CosmicKat]

It's been estimated that wow has sold over 40+ million units and only has about ~10 million active accounts. This is why that retention number is significant. If you can offer your product to an even larger audience then you stand to gain back customers and grow.

 

Unless somehow you believe the retention potential for this game is 0% which would be a strange thing to claim.

 

The retention potential has already been proven to be somewhere between 25-10%. If it jumps to 50% but most of them aren't paying, what use are they? They don't help the game and they don't help those of us who do pay.

 

F2P could be a saviour to a game that had a bad launch, such as DDO. F2P is a way to get people to try your game, if millions already tried it then it's not going to have the same affect.

[Tim-ONeil]

The retention potential has already been proven to be somewhere between 25-10%. If it jumps to 50% but most of them aren't paying, what use are they? They don't help the game and they don't help those of us who do pay.

 

F2P could be a saviour to a game that had a bad launch, such as DDO. F2P is a way to get people to try your game, if millions already tried it then it's not going to have the same affect.

 

If you are going to quote statistics that we have numbers for at least use the right ones. 2.47 million boxes claimed to be sold vs 500k to 1 million active subs is a range from 20-40% after doing the calculation. By severely underestimating that you are showing your own bias.

[LordIceclaw]

It's been estimated that wow has sold over 40+ million units and only has about ~10 million active accounts. This is why that retention number is significant. If you can offer your product to an even larger audience then you stand to gain back customers and grow.

 

Unless somehow you believe the retention potential for this game is 0% which would be a strange thing to claim.

 

World of Warcraft is also 8 years old, for chrissake! A mmo this old and this popular is of course going to have an impressive rate of turnover in its playerbase. There was never 40 millions people playing that game at the same time! Not everyone is going to stay hooked on the same game for 8 years. That is the difference with ToR's 2 millions, which happened during the first month and and were playing at the same time.

If you prefer, WoW kept increasing in size before achieve a certain caliber, just shedding parts of its playerbase to replace them by an equal or greater number of players, while ToR had an initial stock of players that pretty much left in drove, barely reimplaced by stocks of new blood.

[Roalmo]

The only good thing about this post, is that is closer to the LAST post with fanboi ginned up numbers.

 

After the next stockholders call, there will be no more "numbers", or vague statement about numbers of subscribers..

 

why? cause it is free to play and the suits can dodge the question easier.

 

And the view presented here is not a numbers based view, but a selective use of various statistics. And to call it "science" is to mate it with an oxymoron like "political science" not hard science.

[TUXs]

The only good thing about this post, is that is closer to the LAST post with fanboi ginned up numbers.

 

After the next stockholders call, there will be no more "numbers", or vague statement about numbers of subscribers..

 

why? cause it is free to play and the suits can dodge the question easier.

Yup. Soon all the numbers will become meaningless as every person who has ever played the game will slip into their reporting of "accounts".

[Goretzu]

If you are going to quote statistics that we have numbers for at least use the right ones. 2.47 million boxes claimed to be sold vs 500k to 1 million active subs is a range from 20-40% after doing the calculation. By severely underestimating that you are showing your own bias.

 

I think it is fair to say that the number at that time was almost certainly below 750,000, because I simply don't think they'd have used that sort of language if it had been above 750,000 (750,000 to 1,000,000 sounds a lot better PR-wise than 500,000* to 1,000,000 *or whatever significantly more than 500,000 was).

 

But at the end of the day there's no way to know.

[Xaintis]

I also thought maybe it would help to bring in a completely non biased industry analyst's view of the subject of long term growth.

 

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2012-08-01-star-wars-the-old-republic-could-attract-upwards-of-50-million-monthly-players-says-wedbush

 

Believe it or not their job is to do the type of research that I did and make predictions based on that information. Many times they are correct and sometimes they are wrong but you should at least consider that they have a much better knowledge of the subject than you personally (even myself) possess and their opinion shouldn't be discounted.

 

Even if you disagree with the message Wedbush Securities is presenting it's pretty interesting to see that type of growth predicted from a business analysis perspective.

 

50 Million monthly players? Yeah, and this games going to compete with WoW....

 

Oh and Wedbush? Seriously? http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-Wedbush-Morgan-RVW1763556.htm

 

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/07/us-finra-wedbush-idUSBRE8761FF20120807

 

http://www.mahanyertl.com/mahanyertl/bad-day-for-wedbush-securities/768/

 

Believe it or not their job is the same as the devs, milk their customers for more money then they deserve.

Edited October 29, 2012 by Xaintis

[TUXs]

Tim, did you ever happen to look into VGChartz?

 

They have a "Pro" option that would seemingly allow you to access the data you're looking for.

Access to advanced tools for the extraction of total sales by platform, publisher and genre over a given period of time. Year-on-year comparisons, revenue estimates.

Just a suggestion.

[Tim-ONeil]

Tim, did you ever happen to look into VGChartz?

 

They have a "Pro" option that would seemingly allow you to access the data you're looking for.

 

Just a suggestion.

 

The games in question doesn't have any numbers on the site though so that would be risky to purchase a license assuming they'd sell one to a non industry person in the first place. I'm not paying to research this either just to be told I'm a fanboi if the numbers don't agree with the people that diametrically post against everything thing I ever say.

[dcgregorya]

If you believe that by 2013 this game will have more than 100k paying subscribers you are very optimistic.

 

Their F2P option will be the last bad move in a series of bad moves as any 'free alternative' will do nothing but reduce their subscriptions.

[Bojangle]

If you believe that by 2013 this game will have more than 100k paying subscribers you are very optimistic.

 

Their F2P option will be the last bad move in a series of bad moves as any 'free alternative' will do nothing but reduce their subscriptions.

If this game doesn't have more than 100k paying subs by then, then that means Tera will be shut down because it would have 2k subs. GW2 would be dead etc. Hate to break it to you troll but this game still outsubs most of the others except WoW and I believe EvE. It has way more than Rift, Aion, LotR, Tera, Warhammer, EQ2, EQ1, etc. GW2 has hit a huge decline of people logging in also. If you say it hasn't then you are blinded. GW2 hit its peak fast and after a month has dropped significantly.

 

I was on Tat the other day and still has 85-100 people on it. I logged on the first time in awhile for GW2 and it was dead in the starter area and dead in the 1-30 areas. Logged out 10 mins later of boredom.

 

So come 2013 hope you are still here so I can say, "I told you so."

 

p.s. LotR says hi and their f2p and numbers increased a lot and still increasing.

Edited October 29, 2012 by Bojangle

[Grumblechris]

Hi Tim, nice article - I'd like to point out a few things though that you haven't taken into account with your initial piece (apologies if this has been covered elsewhere in this thread)

 

The charts you are going from only take into account subscribers, and that includes for FTP games. Games such as RuneScape and Aion have much higher actual player numbers than those listed when you include free players - (RuneScape approx 2.5 mil, Aion 4.5 mil) so saying SWTOR is the 2nd most popular game in the MMO market is pretty disingenuous.

 

I'd also highlight that the numbers on MMO data are generally pulled from official reports - investor reports etc - which tend to be over-inflated, especially at the start of an MMO's lifecycle, using techniques such as including accounts that have lapsed for less than a fortnight, accounts which are still active in terms of paid subscription, but the player has stopped playing etc.

 

Obviously a lot of this is down to the inavailability of the data - MMOdata is a good way of tracking what companies are saying about their own numbers, but little else.

 

One thing I'd like to see an investigation of, is how many people can there be on a single server. I've heard numbers ranging from 15k to 30k players, with a concurrent limit of about 5k. (I think anyone that has played SWTOR will agree that even 2.5k players online at once is a massive stretch, this would be about 500 on the fleet, 100 on every planet and 500 playing operations.... higher than I've ever seen it by a long way). So even if we take the stretch limit of 30k... spread over SWTOR's 20 global servers would only hit 600k players. And that assumes that every server is full, including RP servers. Which we know isn't the case.

 

Yeah, it's difficult to know exactly how many people are playing SWTOR. I applaud you for trying. But look at the facts. Ignore the EA investor's reports, since they are simply there to keep investors happy until F2P happens and the numbers will jump anyway, hiding the subterfuge. No, the facts available to us show a very different story. And that story is around 200k active players.

Edited October 29, 2012 by Grumblechris

[Bojangle]

Hi Tim, nice article - I'd like to point out a few things though that you haven't taken into account with your initial piece (apologies if this has been covered elsewhere in this thread)

 

The charts you are going from only take into account subscribers, and that includes for FTP games. Games such as RuneScape and Aion have much higher actual player numbers than those listed when you include free players - (RuneScape approx 2.5 mil, Aion 4.5 mil) so saying SWTOR is the 2nd most popular game in the MMO market is pretty disingenuous.

 

I'd also highlight that the numbers on MMO data are generally pulled from official reports - investor reports etc - which tend to be over-inflated, especially at the start of an MMO's lifecycle, using techniques such as including accounts that have lapsed for less than a fortnight, accounts which are still active in terms of paid subscription, but the player has stopped playing etc.

 

Obviously a lot of this is down to the in-availability of the data - MMOdata is a good way of tracking what companies are saying about their own numbers, but little else.

 

One thing I'd like to see an investigation of, is how many people can there be on a single server. I've heard numbers ranging from 15k to 30k players, with a concurrent limit of about 5k. (I think anyone that has played SWTOR will agree that even 2.5k players online at once is a massive stretch, this would be about 500 on the fleet, 100 on every planet and 500 playing operations.... higher than I've ever seen it by a long way). So even if we take the stretch limit of 30k... spread over SWTOR's 20 global servers would only hit 600k players. And that assumes that every server is full, including RP servers. Which we know isn't the case.

 

Yeah, it's difficult to know exactly how many people are playing SWTOR. I applaud you for trying. But look at the facts. Ignore the EA investor's reports, since they are simply there to keep investors happy until F2P happens and the numbers will jump anyway, hiding the subterfuge. No, the facts available to us show a very different story. And that story is around 200k active players.

Where are you getting your numbers from? "Aion 4.5 mil" Aion does NOT have that many players. That game tanked as fast as it was released. It didn't even come close to the mil mark.

[Grumblechris]

Where are you getting your numbers from? "Aion 4.5 mil" Aion does NOT have that many players. That game tanked as fast as it was released. It didn't even come close to the mil mark.

 

Aion may have 'tanked' in the west, but in the East it was a massive success, stealing many of Lineage & Lineage 2's players.

 

You say it didn't even come close to a mil yet it topped 1 million WESTERN sales back in 2009. In the East sales were far higher, and it had over a million players in the first week, before it even came out in America or Europe.

 

You dispute my facts yet clearly have no idea what you are talking about.

 

Yes, Aion is in (fairly rapid) decline, but it still has an enourmous Eastern following.

Edited October 29, 2012 by Grumblechris

[CosmicKat]

If you are going to quote statistics that we have numbers for at least use the right ones. 2.47 million boxes claimed to be sold vs 500k to 1 million active subs is a range from 20-40% after doing the calculation. By severely underestimating that you are showing your own bias.

 

I don't believe numbers released by people who stand to make money by inflating those numbers.

 

My guesstimate was based on over 90% server contraction, and servers currently populated at about the same level they were a month post-launch. I thought I was being generous.

[Andryah]

Does he happen to own stock in EA by chance?

 

If he does, he is required to state so when making analysis such at this public.

 

As for his numbers, the purpose behind those numbers is to create a view of "headroom" in the model, as a platform for the balance of the article.

 

I don't believe any MMO will get an MAU of 10M in this era of MMOs.... but I do believe they can continually process new customers in/out of the active player base pretty much forever (given the TAM, total available market, open to them).

 

But regardless if any of us buy into the numbers presented in the analysts sketch of the future.... Freemium is very much the wave of the future for MMOs... and it is the right direction to go for the game producers. SWTOR moving to that model quicker rather then slower is a good business decision, regardless what the various armchairs in the forum say to the contrary.