The Cesspit. - Subscriptions

Eve-Online surpasses Warhammer

Wed, 06 May 2009 18:14:13 -0700

I guess it's worth pointing out.

Yesterday was EA financial conference and this time there is no mention of Warhammer subscription numbers in the official report. Probably because subs numbers don't look all that awesome (if you trust x-fire, the game is steadily but slowly losing activity, that considering various factors would lead me to guess the sub number at 280k in the most optimistic case).

From other sources it was repeated the 300k number for the end of March. I don't consider this reliable but it's an hint that either they are where they were in December, or under but still around that number. If the numbers were higher you can bet Mythic and Mark Jacobs would be all over the forums boasting better results, instead there's absolute silence.

So I'll be optimistic despite all hints of numbers being lower, and say Warhammer is at 300k.

What is instead proven is that Eve-Online has 300k confirmed now.

In January Eve had 250k. Warhammer 300k. Four months later Eve gained another 50k, Warhammer is either there stalling, or losing behind the scenes.

The surpass happened.

Because, you know, after a few years every game is stale and ready to be replaced. Or so they say. I wonder where Eve will be in another year. And I wonder where Warhammer will be.

What's up with EA? EDIT: Warhammer 300k

Tue, 03 Feb 2009 08:55:51 -0800

This is not about Warhammer, but since it was mentioned in early December on the forums I've been keeping an eye to the financial charts.

It was mentioned in December (and on a bunch of business sites) because the chart had a new dip, but if you look at how it was going along the year you can notice that the crisis started in September (yeah, Warhammer again, but it's likely a coincidence and more a problem of world crisis).

Today I think is the day of their earnings conference. I have really no idea on how to read these charts as I know little to nothing about economy, but the chart today reached a new low and is under 15 (whatever 15 means).

STOCK PERFORMANCE: Shares of the Redwood City, Calif.-based company tumbled nearly 57 percent during the quarter to finish at $16.04. In Monday morning trading, the stock hit a new year low of $14.78.

I guess the next few hours will be important? Maybe investors are waiting to see what happens with the conference.

About Warhammer:

EA's earnings call is in a few weeks and after that, there will be a lot more clarity about our numbers.

First reports already in:

Warhammer® Online: Age of Reckoning®, an MMO from EA’s Mythic Entertainment studio, ended the quarter with over 300K paying subscribers in North America and Europe.

This means 300k as December 31 2008.

Indeed. And flawless victory.

EDIT: Mark Jacobs only comment at this time:

Because not everything that I hoped to talk about was in the earnings call (they had other things to talk about obviously), I'm waiting on guidance from corporate to see if I can add a few additional bit of information that weren't contained in the call before I write a longer post than this.

Apparently he's pissed because EA didn't spin the numbers enough to make them look better.

EDIT2: Comments from EA:

And while we expect to benefit in the future from increased sales from these franchises, generally games with a two on them sell better and do sell with a lower R&D budget.

drive our content direct-to-consumer. This is a strategic initiative that is very important for the long term. In FY09, we made $150 million online investment with limited associated revenue. In FY10, all significant online spending, except for the LucasArts BioWare Star Wars MMO, will be generating positive income. These investments are working. We expect over $500 million in direct-to-digital revenue in fiscal year ’10.

And also for fiscal ’10, we are going to get a full year of Warhammer subscription revenue. We talked about the fact that we are already at 300,000 subs. That is a very ratable and more predictable business, and so that is new for FY10 compared to fiscal ‘09.

On MMO's recent numbers

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 05:40:27 -0800

I'm the first to say Xfire numbers are unreliable. If you look at Eve-Online the game had a HUGE increase of active players during the holiday, that now seems dying down. This coincides to when they reactivated all canceled accounts for a period of time, so it may explain the surge of activity.

But the "real" numbers looked almost unaffected by that. Look at these graphs. These measure the activity in the same way of Xfire, only of all the players instead of a smaller sample. It is weird that the huge activity increase that Xfire showed is only very slightly reflected in the other graph. The recent weeks also aren't showing the same consistent dip on Xfire. How can this be explained? Maybe they had a special promotion through Xfire that rigged those results, maybe some bug on the client or database.

In any case Eve-Online seems to have stalled during the last year, maybe reaching its full potential within the constraint of game design that sure isn't made to be appealing to the large public (along with basic flaws that they simply decided to not address). Now it is slightly growing again, but probably as result of momentary situation related to promotions or launch of expansions. They have already another in the works where they rewrite for the 10th time the tutorials (hint: it's gameplay that should be reworked, not the tutorial text).

Hard numbers: currently Eve-Online has 250k subs. Putting it head to head with DAoC at its peak.

Now lets see Warhammer. No real numbers to see, beside it vanishing from forums discussions and relevance overall. Xfire is all we have. Not meaningful or reliable, but reasonable. The game is relatively stable, slightly dropping as players burn out. We don't have real subs numbers, not even projections. Sure is that we won't have them as EA is likely not too pleased to the point of publicizing them. MJ public "target" was at least 500k, but from other interviews it was quite obvious that his and EA target potential started from 1M going up (or better, a target to reach. didn't mean to have 1M in 1 month).

Warhammer doesn't likely have 1M now, I doubt it has 500k. I doubt it has 400k. From Xfire and general reception it is likely that by now its success is set. Meaning that I doubt it will see a relevant increase or even a sudden relevant decrease. It is whatever it is. We can only guess that number, but we know that to sway it now it will take some "extreme triggers" that it is not realistic to expect (especially from Mythic's righteous game design).

On Warhammer potential subscribers I've said a whole lot of different things. Now I'll explain so people won't accuse me of writing all kind of things to the different forums and then only link those that were right (I'm not one who wants to win arguments when in fault). When Mythic decided to sell out to EA, I said that Warhammer would have never surpassed DAoC at its peak. 250-260k then. This was as a reaction to the sellout. I explained that I thought it was a bad move. Mythic needed money to be more "secure", so they went with EA that was working like a guarantee and put them out of troubles. My point was that this transition also had negative aspects to not underestimate. One of them is that if you get much more money to make the product, then this product also HAS TO be much more successful. So if Mythic could be successful by reaching a certain target, with EA's acquisition that target would become much, much bigger. It's like as if going from 1 to 10 Mythic didn't want to go through all the steps, but make a big leap and find itself at 10. I'm against those sort of things.

This year, in August, I got the occasion to try Warhammer. I was surprised, found a game much better than how I was expecting. Good execution, good artistic talent and direction, overall well done and strong in potential. Under these conditions and in a moment favorable for MMO market (no matter what you are going to argue), I thought that the potential subscriptions would climb from my own first "blind" guess. So I wrote on F13 that I expected it to be between 250-500k, with the potential for more if they solved some basic problems (irony: look two posts down and there's another revelatory in retrospective question).

Well, not too shabby for a prediction. Four months later Warhammer didn't solve those basic problems, but made them worse in some cases. As I wrote in various occasion I don't think the game moved in a positive direction, but actually did a number of counterproductive and wrong moves. Pretty obvious that all the potential I saw wasn't and isn't going to be realized. The game's real performance seems rather close to my view.

Today, it is a meaningful thing to notice Eve-Online is probably going to be more successful than Warhammer. We won't know when exactly since we don't have numbers. But it is happening.

It is also an obvious defeat for all those who thought EA's marketing power was enough to attract the big numbers.

P.S.
About showing numbers and naysayers: this will never affect the market in a relevant way. Sure, forum warriors use numbers all the time to prove validity of their opinion (I did it here), but they do not influence results. If there's a site who shows a chart of a game population going down the game won't continue to go down because of that chart. The numbers are consequences, not causes. So: fire all marketers, hire competent game designers with eyes that can see.

Warhammer has 600k subs

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 19:31:40 -0800

Accordingly to Mark Jacobs, with some approximation, the current "active" subscription numbers should be somewhere around 600k.

This is the logic:

Our retention rate is higher than 70% based on current data. DAoC was indeed 72% in North America. WAR's number is higher and remains higher than DAoC since billing began. I'm quite happy with WAR's numbers as they are exactly what I expected they would be.

800k is the number of registered accounts accordingly to EA (see the recent financial report).

75% is my guesstimate on retention rate, since Mark Jacobs states here that it's higher than the 72% of DAoC.

75% of 800k is 600k.

Imho, the number will drop. By how much will depend on too many variables. The game is supposed to grow for a few months, this is what Mark Jacobs expects. But with WotLK release it will have an hard time. From January onward a lot will depend on the quality of the games, but I doubt Warhammer is going to improve. Mythic is already working to add more scenarios.

Unrelated, from Q23:

I heard that the layoffs started hitting Mythic today. Just three so far.

Warhammer DID NOT reach 800k subs

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 20:09:19 -0700

There's a lot of confusion on the forums (and Gamespot) about EA fiscal report and Warhammer subscription numbers.

Specifically the part that gets quoted the most:

Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, an MMO from EA’s Mythic Entertainment studio, sold 1.2 million copies in the quarter – with over 800 thousand current players.

The confusion is about two aspects. The first is whether 800k are real active, uncanceled accounts, or just registered accounts. The second is whether the number is as of 30 October, the day the report was compiled, or 30 September, the end of the second quarter that is subject of the report.

The first aspect is rather obvious if you just read the title of the PDF:

As you can see, it clearly states "Registered Users" and not active subscriptions.

The second can be inferred by looking at the other two press releases.

September 26

in the first week since launch over 500,000 new players have registered

October 10

today announced that 750,000 players have registered

Now, if the Fiscal report was limited to the 30 September then we would have a time paradox since Warhammer had 500k registered accounts as of 26 September, then 800k as of 30 September and finally 750k as of 10 October.

Obviously the 800k is to be put later than the last press release and probably closer to the day the fiscal report was compiled, so the end of October.

But there's also another point to consider: gold sellers.

Let’s subtract from the 800k all those fake accounts that gold sellers made. 13k are just those that Mythic caught and banned. I expect the total number to be much, much higher.

If the CD-key system was cracked then they can create unlimited accounts, and so the number of active accounts is not in any way indicative of the success of the game.

Moral of the story: we need to wait for active subscriptions to see how successful the game is (my guess is that they are south of 500k and that they'll have a very hard time passing that number, with WotLK release in a couple of weeks).

CCP/Eve headcount

Thu, 03 May 2007 08:42:30 -0700

As recent as last week:

We've never been shy about letting the community know approximations of the number of active subscriptions (approaching 170k), trial accounts (about 22k), peak concurrent users (34,420), staff (201), etc. Information like that is normally mentioned on the forums or in news items, so it may be hard to spot. Most of the forum regulars see the numbers and will generally pass the information along to those that ask.

Just the renovation of all the 3D models in EVE (not including the graphics engine) is about 80 people.

EVE is still growing rapidly, we're about 2000 short of 170.000 paying subscribers. Not counting EVE China or trials.

Reaching 160K at christmas, Jan and Feb were slow, now going on 170K. That's paying subscribers.

They seem now bigger than Mythic. But I guess it depends on what you consider "staff".

Of those 201, 150 are working on Eve. The rest? I don't know, but CCP is working on different projects.

And about this specific gripe, they also have something interesting to say:

player: There used to be a time when the only thing CCP thought about, and MORE IMPORTANTLY, every individual at CCP ever thought about was EVE. This was the core group of developers that made EVE, that launched EVE, that imbued EVE with life. This core group of developers is now sundered both in their minds and at thier company.

Oveur: The new MMO is being made in Atlanta to prevent this from happening. A new team is being built there to prevent this from happening.

I drink the Kool-Aid, the fact that the WoD game is being built elsewhere wipes most of my concerns. Good work.

NCSoft - Q4 2006 report

Mon, 19 Feb 2007 19:00:05 -0800

Fifth article in a series! A couple of weeks ago NCSoft release their quarterly reports about subscription numbers and financial status.

The .zip file with the original pdf document can be downloaded here.

Summary:

- Tabula Rasa close to beta and to be released in second half of 2007.
- Guild Wars skips the "spring" expansion, only one expansion to be released near the end of the year.
- Lineage 2 breaking 100k subs in the western market.
- CoH/CoV falling back to 150k.
- "All pass" service in the works (one monthly fee for all games).

Raw numbers:

Lineage
1,408,170 subs worldwide (+52,200)
11,953 in the US (+2,226)

Lineage II
1,036,303 subs worldwide (-80,624)
105,039 in US + EU (+11,039)

City of Heroes
154,953 subs worldwide (that is US + EU only) (-17,467)

Guild Wars
3,122,000 boxes sold (+675,000)

Lineage is doing pretty well and currently has 400k more than its sequel. This should give a hint to all those mmorpg companies that continue to abandon their games to build stupid sequels that cannot even top the original. I repeat: in this genre sequels are stupid for a long list of reasons, and this is valid even for the "disguised" sequels, not just for those games sharing the exact same name. Anyway, Lineage seems stable or slightly growing everywhere and I also noticed the "personal accounts" are rising. Someone knows how much Koreans pay monthly?

Lineage 2 instead is like Lineage in reverse (sales went up 2% for Lineage and down 2% for Lineage 2), while one is stable but slightly growing, the other is slightly declining and losing subscriptions in a consolidated downward trend. The only point of notice is that the game is becoming successful in the western market and now has more than 100k. I'm impressed. I don't know from where these players are coming (maybe the consequence of NCSoft aggressively countering the "free shards"?) and I DEFINITELY cannot understand what players like in this game. Maybe the lust for PvP make people digest all sort of crap. I wonder what could happen if there was in the market a vaguely decent PvP game.

CoH is losing a sensible number of subscriptions but I saw that coming. The development stalled as the staff was moved to other projects. I read that they released a new patch recently, so the subscriptions may slightly rise in the next quarter, but I doubt this game has an interesting, bright future. As for the binomial DAoC/Warhammer, only one can survive between CoH/CoV and the Marvel-branded title in the works. The game is on a (albeit long) countdown and will likely sink over time as its appeal fades (obviously that's not something they are going to admit).

Consolidated City of Heroes/Villains franchise sales were 5.5 billion Won, down 26% QoQ due to a decrease in user base.

Not much to say about Guild Wars. In the last report I wrote that the Nightfall release made them sell another 500k and reach 3M total, so the number was already updated. It seems holding rather well. The real interesting thing is that they seem to have discarded the plan of one expansion every six months as only one is planned for this year and to be released around the release of Nightfall a year ago (October). I wonder if this is still a viable business choice.

Overall from a superficial glance at other numbers it seems that the only market sensibly growing is the European one (+68%). While the profit for the full year 06 is down a -43% over the 05. Sales are stable, while costs went up (also because of Auto Assault trainwreck).

It's interesting to see their previsions for 2007. They expect Lineage 2 to go up by a 12%, CoH and Guild Wars to lose 15% and between a +969% and +1313% for "other" games. This last number is actually believable and even conservative as they are launching new stuff this year (Aion in Korea and Dungeon Runners and Tabula Rasa in the western market).

For 2007 business goals, NCsoft is anticipating sales to be between 358 billion Won and 367 billion Won, a 6% to 8% increase from the previous year. Operating profit is expected to be between 42 billion Won, with little change YoY and 49 billion Won, a 13% increase year over year. This guidance reflects Tabula Rasa, Aion, and several casual games officially launching within year 2007.

NCsoft’s total investment in product development (Live update cost + new game development cost) grew to approximately 90 billion Won last year from 25 billion Won in 2003. In 2007, this investment is expected to grow to 108billion Won, a 18% increase from the previous year. This strong commitment in product development reflects NCsoft’s strategy to build a strong portfolio of products to keep up with growth in online game market, that is expected to grow 30% a year.

NCsoft has built a development system to introduce at least one blockbuster MMO games and several casual online games a year. To do this, NCsoft spent 64 billion Won for new game development in 2006. This amount will grow to 80 billion Won in 2007.

I hope some of those go to Lum ;)

Tabula Rasa and Aion will officially launch in the second half of 2007, meaning that sales contribution from these products will be limited to some extent. However, games launches have certain costs associated with them, such as the purchase of game servers, the hiring game masters, and marking expenses. For these reasons, profit margin in 2007 could be lower than our mid-term target margin 20%.

In North America & Europe, Exteel, a mech shooter game and Dungeon Runners, a multiplayer action role-playing game, will officially launch in the first half of 2007. These multiplayer games will be free to download and play at the basic levels of gameplay. Additional contents will be available for a fee (in-game item sales and membership packages).

Tabula Rasa, a highly anticipated MMO, will enter a closed beta testing stage soon and will officially launch in the second half of 2007. Also an additional update to the Guild Wars franchise will go live in the second half of 2007.

As I'm against RMT I don't like what they are doing with Exteel and Dungeon Runners. As I wrote in the past I'm willingly to pay for content, but not pay for items or other unjustified smoke and mirrors.

Finally, they also announced an "all pass" monthly subscription working along the lines of SOE one. So you can play all NCSoft games while paying one unified monthly fee, but I guess you still have to purchase the single games and eventual expansions. We'll see if NCSoft will be able to provide a better deal.

Eve-Online quote-play

Wed, 24 Jan 2007 14:09:00 -0800

In a recent comment I wrote that I don't like much Eve's current direction. I'm done commenting game design so I won't go in detail, but here some meaningful quotes.

The first comes from a dev blog and demonstrates I wasn't so wrong:

Invention was supposed to be the revolutionary feature of Revelations and should have changed the entire science and industry genre as we know it, with the potential side effect that could change the biggest part of the player economy; Tech 2.

However, the effect that invention was supposed to bring has not yet been seen.

Only a couple players had managed to build an interface.

Then we can pass to give a look at Eve current development schedule. For reference you can use the previous battleplan and the E3 news.

The biggest disappointment to me is that the main feature of Kali seems completely GONE from their plans. Not delayed, gone. They used to describe the whole expansion as:

The upcoming expansion to EVE Online—codenamed Kali—will introduce an innovative Advanced Reactive Content System (ARCS), in which the political landscape and physical borders of nation-states within the game can be altered dynamically through the collective outcome of player actions, thus directly controlling the game universe destiny and resulting storyline.

This was in the form of "Factional Warfare" that I described throughly, analyzed in design potential and praised as one of the most interesting thing ever.

Gone.

In their dev blogs there aren't anymore references to Factional Warfare. The Kali patch isn't anymore named Kali, but "Revelations". And the three chunks (Spetember 06, December 06 and April 07) once again delayed. Oveur:

The engine itself is a bit different, depending on whether you are talking about our optimizations to our DX7/9 engine or the optional Vista engine - or the actual combination of both which is the big package. Currently, the big bada-boom is in Revelations 3 at the end of the year.

"End of the year" almost surely meaning you won't see anything till 2008 and later. Another full year delay on top of the year delay on their 2006 plans.

Don't mock me when I think of Vaporware when they talk about walking on stations with models turning their head dynamically toward noise to simulate human behaviours. From a dev blog:

This brings us to an area of computer graphics called dynamic avatar human-to-human interaction. It tries to apply knowledge derived from years of research of human body language into the actions of computer generated avatars, so that their behavior mimics human behavior without the user or NPC controller micro-managing every little twitch of the body or glance of the eyes.

This is one of the areas that we intend to research and apply to our animation system.

V - A - P - O - R - W - A - R - E

But I was writing about Factional Warfare. You would think that CCP has OODLES of time if they waste it on this kind of TOTALLY USELESS (and very, very pretentious) shit. Oveur says that Revelation 3 at the end of 2007 will be the engine upgrade to Vista. So Factional Warfare is for Revelation 2? From a dev blog:

Following Revelations 1.4, we'll be refocusing our efforts on Revelations 2. It was covered at fanfest, that we have the hots for warfare in Revelations 2 on all levels. But what does warfare & the increased emphasis on improving current content rather than adding new stuff really mean?

So "Warfare". No more "Factional"? Why? Just playing with names? Not adding more "new stuff"?

Uhm, no. It looks like the "increased emphasis on improving current content" means that the "Factional" is gone. Or at least that's what I understand when they describe the new "Warfare" without the "Factional":

We want to improve the goalsetting in warfare, by improving and adding options to player buildable infrastructure. This means improving Starbases, Outposts, Stations and Sovereignty. However, Warfare also needs something to fight with, so we want more tactical and strategic components there.

As you can imagine, this isn't only for the people shooting, this creates goals for everyone, a fighter can't survive without his industrial backbone. The industrialists must build the infrastructure and the merchants are there to supply the essentials you can't acquire yourself. It's all interconnected.

Then they go commenting fleet combat changes. Uhm, that's a blatant U-turn. Factional Warfare was about everything but combat.

The orginal Factional Warfare was NOTHING about big ass fleet combat and uber guild PVP. It was instead a "bridge" between casual players and those big corps. It was a way to make the NPC empires an active part of the game. The kind of work that Eve needs from a very long time. See the quote above about the "Advanced Reactive Content System". Or the bottom level of the Factional Warfare right from their own description:

The initial idea is that players can elect to take on missions as mercenaries - in which case the reward will be mainly monetary - or as enlisted soldiers, where they will be rewarded with increased standings and discounted ships and equipment. With the contract system in place alongside it, FW can be something individuals or even alliances can sign up to, with contracts for single missions or for the duration of a long-term campaign.

Whether through trade, bounty hunting, resource allocation or even combat, FW is entwined with the very EVEness of Eve itself. It is where the rich background of Eve will come to life.

This is all gone. Now "Warfare" just means a patch that will affect fleet combat. It's a combat mechanic patch. Nothing about the original plan. Not even close. It's a completely different direction.

Which couldn't be put more clearly:

all Warfare improvements in Revelations 2 are aiming for the same thing. Even though it's improving current features, it's encouraging gameplay which not only is more fun and easier to jump into, it's also good for the general performance of EVE.

Time to backfire on CCP? Is this the result of TomB replacing Lekjart as Lead Designer? Quoting myself at that time:

Of course these are all early claims with no substance. Yet. But mmorpgs are long term projects and the shit that happens *today* is crucial for tomorrow. When everyone will have already forgot what happened and what brought the change of pace.

Of course all these delays also mean that CCP staff is so idle and bored that they decided to keep themselves busy by working on a new MMO.

And to conclude, subscriptions news that you can compare with my previous report:

less than 20% of the EVE community have 2 or more subscriptions. The other 80+% are single account users.

We have just over 156k subscriptions and an average of 15k active trial accounts as of the reported metrics at the beginning of the month. There were 34,420 players logged in on Tranquility Sunday afternoon.

Sir Bruce, the owner of mmogchart.com is a great guy.

WoW pre-exp launch: 8M worldwide, 2M in the US

Thu, 11 Jan 2007 12:05:57 -0800

Reporting this because they give us relevant infos:

more than 2 million players in North America, more than 1.5 million players in Europe, and more than 3.5 million players in China.

My previous considerations were both right and wrong:

if nothing changes we would see the subscriptions climbing at above 8 million just by the end of September.

If that's true it would be a safe bet saying that the NA subscribers will climb above 2M BEFORE the launch of the expansion. Again, I doubt it. We'll see if I'm wrong but I'm not so sure that the NA subscribers are even above 1.5M. That would disprove the data we have now, though. But that's my suspect.

An average of the two and we are there.

What I can see now is that the growth is still rather constant. This would mean that by the end of 2007 WoW would reach 10M worldwide, but this without counting the effect of the expansion (and the competition, but I don't think there are any real competitors yet).

It's possible that the expansion alone will give the game another 1M in our market (US+EU) easily. That 1/3-1/4 growth is what I would expect. We'll see.

Also interesting to consider that both US and EU market seem to grow at a similar pace. About half a million every year.

August 2005 - 1M in the US
January 2006 - 1M in the EU (with US probably at 1.5)
January 2007 - 2M in the US, 1.5M in the EU

Those being official numbers.

My suspect here is that the growth slowed down during the 2006. But the imminent launch of the expansion already gave these numbers a boost. The 2M in NA would already include some returning players that are getting ready for the expansion launch. So the point is: how many more subscribers, beside those already back, the expansion will bring to the game?

Guild Wars hits 3M (boxes) and patches Most Requested feature

Thu, 14 Dec 2006 15:37:53 -0800

What a perfect occasion to write about something I left behind. My notes and comments on NCSoft seasonal reports.

Fourth article in a series.

The .zip file with the original pdf document can be downloaded here.

Summary:
- Lineage I&II and CoH stable
- Guild Wars doing "okay"
- Dungeon Runners still not here
- Tabula Rasa not in sight

But let's start from Guild Wars. I was going to archive the press release when I noticed this part:

Reconnect After Disconnect — One of the most player-requested features comes to Guild Wars! If a player gets dropped from the game due to a connection problem, and that player can reconnect within ten minutes, the player's character will be relocated to the spot of disconnection. If the character was performing an action, such as casting a spell or auto-attacking a target, that character will complete the action as if still connected. If a player is in a group when disconnected, the other members of the party will be notified about the player's connection problems.

WOOOOOT!

At last! It's since I played for the first time in beta that I ask for that. Finally my first complaint got resolved and I'm happy. Good work.

The press release was to announce they sold 3 Millions of boxes:

December 13, 2006 (BELLEVUE, WA) — Fueled by sales of the hit game Guild Wars NightfallTM, the latest release in the award-winning Guild Wars® franchise, sales for one of the world's leading subscription-free online roleplaying games have surpassed three million units worldwide in a little more than a year and a half.

Notes:
- That's the cumulative number of all three expansions. That would mean: Prophecies + Factions + Nightfall = 3M
- As of September 06 they were at 2.4M, so Nightfall has sold around 500k till now (roughly).

Raw numbers:

Lineage
1,355,970 subs worldwide (-43,939)
9,727 in the US (+42)

Lineage II
1,116,927 subs worldwide (-22,001)
94,000 in US + EU (+10,779)

City of Heroes
172,420 subs worldwide (that is US + EU only) (+1,420)

There's not the need to go in detail for each as the situation seems stable in all three cases. I'm quite surprised that CoH is holding that well. This year it didn't have the help of the release of a major expansion as it happened a year ago with CoV. Since its release CoH sat at around 170k and aside the highs and lows it's still holding surprisingly well, especially for a game whose development cycle I consider particularly lacking. As it is happening to CCP also Cryptic is now busy with the development of a brand new game (for Marvel) so I'm quite sure CoH will be left progressively behind as their efforts concentrate more on the "new". It will be interesting how the game will perform in the next months. For now it is doing much better than how I would have "predicted".

There's also a positive note:

We are revising up our guidance for year 2006 to 339 billion Won on the top line from 330 billion Won and 39 billion Won in operating profit from 20 billion Won.

The primary reasons for the increase in profits are: (i) better-than-expected sales for the world’s leading MMORPG franchise Lineage, Lineage II, and City of Heroes/Villains, (ii) decrease in major costs such as payroll and advertising, and (iii) the one-time write-off of Auto Assault-related expenses in Q2, which amounted to roughly 11.2 billion Won.

It's actually odd because as written above the two Lineages are holding well, but they hardly seem doing "better than expected", so there must be something going on behind the scenes that I cannot find with this superficial glance.

For retrospective it's also worth going back to the beginning of the year and give a better look at that "performance":

First report of the year: earnings guidance 353 billion Won, down from 396 - operating profit 50 billion Won, down from 66
Second report : earnings guidance 330 billion Won, down from 353 - operating profit 20 billion Won, down from 50
Third (and last: earning guidance 339 billion Won, up from 330 - operating profit 39 billion Won, up from 20

In 2005 the sales were 338 billion Won and profit much higher, 76 billion Won (-49%).

The drop in the second report was due to not so good results of Guild Wars and the Auto Assault write off.

From the second report:

In North America and Europe, NCsoft will launch multiplayer online games such as Dungeon Runners in Q4, 2006, followed by Exteel and Soccer Fury.

Tabula Rasa will enter a limited closed beta testing stage during the second half of 2006.

A bit behind the schedules. I wonder how far Tabula Rasa is from release. Maybe May 07?

With Nightfall out I'm now waiting for the first reports about Guild Wars spring's expansion. It will be interesting to see in which direction they will go. The game needs a "shift", something that can rise some hype.

Eve-Online at 150k

Mon, 04 Dec 2006 19:41:08 -0800

It was confirmed on the boards, so I take the occasion to report it.

Eve-Online had 145k this November (it was at 142k at the beginning of September, so it's sitting more or less on the same level) and it's fair to assume that it gained at least another 10k with the release of the latest patch/expansion.

The number of concurrent players seem to confirm this as they hit another record this Sunday, bordering 33k online at the same time.

I was also trying to compare Eve numbers with City of Heroes numbers to see if I could find a pattern in common, as it's another game we have detailed statistics about. But I noticed that CoH has a very odd and irregular behaviour with the subs/concurrent user peak ratio. Maybe I'll comment about this later.

Eve-Online IS still growing

Tue, 05 Sep 2006 10:18:18 -0700

Yesterday Eve-Online had more than 30k players active online (30.538).

Active subscribers are currently at 142k.

I wish I could say the same about DAoC.

In the meantime I'm waiting CCP to actually develop and show something. They patched recently but it was just a whole lot of work on the backend in preparation for Kali (performance improvements are always great, though). I was expecting that patch to come for the end of July, instead it arrived for the end of August. Still no mention when we'll finally see something done. What about the Battleplan?

I cannot avoid to think to Mythic everytime. They are like one the negative image of the other. Eve-Online has a great direction, a growing, dedicated team, but still cannot manage to develop things at an acceptable pace and respect deadlines (but, despite this, the growth of players is rewarding them even if development is super slow). Instead DAoC has a bad direction, a costantly shrinking dev team and ambition to "feed" Warhammer, but they always respect deadlines (but the players feel directly that the project is just being left behind and are trickling off).

When is Kali One coming, you ask? I'd like to see it in the end of September, but Dragon still needs maintenance on TQ, so we can't assign as many resources over to the final push of Kali One as we wanted.

The communication through the dev blogs is excellent, though. Thanks a lot. That's the VERY BEST communication I've seen in this industry so far.

If someone from CCP passes here: could we have a "dev tracker" page with links to dev posts on the forums? That would be nice.

P.S.
That blog from Tuxford about fleet battles is great (you can still see in the dev blog with the title "post vacation thoughts"). Good ideas as well. Reduce the range of ships, formation flight, AoE weapons and directional defences. All great. The problem is to get them in the game in the foreseeable future. Should I remind you that formation flight was promised for release? ;p

Usually the large battles are completely ignored in game design and nothing is made to make them more fun and interesting.

WoW still growing?

Sat, 02 Sep 2006 04:47:39 -0700

Raph does SirBruce and found another investor presentation from Vivendi.

Or maybe not. In fact it the same I already commented, but I was somewhat fooled and went analyzing again the whole thing.

Here is some extrapolated data/best guesses I taken out from the graph, comparing it with the other official sources.

March 05 - 1.4 western [graph] - 550 eu - 850 na [March 17 press release, 500k eu - 800k us]
June 05 - 1.8 (+4) western [graph] - 850 (+3) eu - 950 na (+1)
September 05 - 2 (+2) western (+2) [graph] - 900 eu (+0.5) - 1.1 na (+1.5) [August 30 press release, 1M us]
December 05 - 2.4 (+4) western [graph] - 950 (+0.5) eu 1.4 na (+3)
March 06 - 2.7 (+3) western [graph] - 1.1 (+1.5) eu - 1.6 na (+2) [January 19 press release, 1M eu]

March 05 to 06 - (+1.3M) western - (+ 550) eu - (+750) us
March 05 to 06 - (+4M?) eastern
March 05 to 06 - (+5M) worldwide

However the graph seems a bit imprecise. If we follow the progress of the official press releases this is what we have:

March 17: 1.5M worldwide
June 14: 2M worldwide
August 30: 4M worldwide
November 8: 4.5M worldwide
December 20: 5M worldwide
January 19: 5.5 worldwide
February 28: 6M worldwide
May 10: 6.5M worldwide

The substantial jump between June and August is because of the launch in China. If we follow just the data coming from the press releases this is how the graph would look:

The red line is the progression shown on the graph, the blue line the progress shown through the press releases. They are similar but I guess they tried to make the graph and the progression look more uniform.

In November they launched in Taiwan. Now my suspect is that the graph was slightly rigged to show better numbers for the western market and impress the investors. I believe that the curve is flatter than that and that the ratio could be more unbalanced toward the eastern market if we consider all the elements.

Let's have a glance at the future. The trend of the red curve is rather stable, so it's possible to extend it ideally. Well, if nothing changes we would see the subscriptions climbing at above 8 million just by the end of September. But, hey, it IS September and no other press releases arrived from Blizzard. No 7M worldwide being surpassed. If we also take into consideration the last quarters +2 or +3 on the NA market we would also have the subscriptions for NA dangerously near or above 2M. While if we take the progression from March to September of the last year we would have instead a +2.5, putting the NA subscribers at around 1.8/1.9M *right now*.

If that's true it would be a safe bet saying that the NA subscribers will climb above 2M BEFORE the launch of the expansion. Again, I doubt it. We'll see if I'm wrong but I'm not so sure that the NA subscribers are even above 1.5M. That would disprove the data we have now, though. But that's my suspect.

I'll wait to see if there will be new announces about our market in the next few months that disproves my theories.

--
Honestly, I wasn't expecting the NA market to show that kind of growth between the summer of the last year and now. I thought that the european market would have surpassed it at some point. Instead, if the data on that graph is correct, not only it is still smaller than the NA one, but also growing more slowly. While my estimate gave the NA players at around 1.3M right now, nearly at zero growth. Instead the game is still growing.

It would be interesting to see the results of the 2Q and 3Q 2006 on that graph as it is much more interesting to see how things are going right now that the game is launched in every major region, with the expansion still months away.

I agree with what Raph wrote here:

Given that curve, we can see that WoW likely has not yet stopped growing. It has a tremendous amount of headroom in Asia, and maybe another couple of quarters worth of growth in the West. It looks to me like WoW will crest around 3.5m in the West. Asia is anyone’s guess; the curve can be severely “kinked” by the appearance of a major competitor, and Asia is more likely to create one of those than the West, in my estimation.

With the difference that I think that a major competitor could appear in Asia, but affecting exclusively asian players as I don't have even an ounce of faith that one of those mmorpgs in development such as Huxley, Sun and all those new titles popping up every day is going to draw much attention in our market.

But hey, there's Warhammer. It plugs right in a kind of gameplay that is completely screward in WoW: the PvP. So it could become a better answer to a demand coming from the players. DAoC in the last years has been more popular in europe than in NA. WoW demonstrated that the european market is at least as big as the NA one, you just need the right offer. Moreover it seems to me that european players are much more inclined toward a PvP game and the Warhammer brand has always been stronger here.

Ideally Mythic *could* be Blizzard's most serious competitor.

NCSoft - Q2 2006 report

Fri, 11 Aug 2006 07:45:58 -0700

Third article in a series, this time also F13 gave a quick glance at NCSoft subs numbers and financial results.

The .zip file with the original pdf document can be downloaded here.

To begin with, the official words about the results and their plans for the near future:

We have reduced our previous earnings guidance to 330 billion Won from 353 billion Won on the top line and to 20 billion Won from 50 billion Won in operating profit. While Lineage franchise sales remained steady, this revision in guidance reflects Auto Assault’s poor sales performance and lowered Guild Wars sales projection as compared with our previous forecast.

Guild Wars Nightfall, the third and latest campaign in the Guild Wars franchise will launch globally in the second half of 2006.

In North America and Europe, NCsoft will launch multiplayer online games such as Dungeon Runners in Q4, 2006, followed by Exteel and Soccer Fury.

Tabula Rasa will enter a limited closed beta testing stage during the second half of 2006.

Summary:

- Unsurprising bad sales for Auto Assault (as SirBruce anticipated)
- Not so good as expected sales for Guild Wars recent standalone expansion
- Dungeon Runners out before the end of the year
- Tabula Rasa still not near release (as anticipated)

There are so many numbers in these reports that it's not so easy to draw conclusions but Auto Assault is actually the main reason why they reported a net loss. F13 says that the net loss was of ~US$230,000, while there would have been a net income of ~US$12.8 million without the Auto Assault write off. Oddly enough 1 million Korean Won is about the same of 1 million dollars.

The subs numbers are something I can digest better. Extrapolated data:

Lineage
1,399,909 subs worldwide
9,685 in the US

There was a huge drop of 800k in the first quarter of this year. The negative trend continues but not as bad as it was, the game loses only another 100k or so in the last three months. F13 says the subs are decreasing but still better than how they were a year ago, but from what I see this isn't true. Exactly one year ago Lineage exceeded 1.8M of active subs. So 400k more than what it has right now. To notice that in December of the last year it had more than 2.2 millions. It basically lost 1 million in six months. In the US the game is stable around those 9k.

Lineage II
1,138,928 subs worldwide
83,221 in US + EU

The game lost 200k from December to March, now it loses another 200k from March to June. During the last year this game lost half of the players it had in Korea and now the numbers don't look anymore all that crazy as they were. It was holding well because of the launch in China, but even there it went from 700k to 200k in the span of a year. Even in this case I don't see how the claim on F13 is correct since the game had more than 1.8 millions during the same period of the last year, that's 700k less, not more. It's also interesting to notice that in Korea the highest concurrent users peak has remained relaitively constant, even if the game went from 1 million of subs to 500k.

City of Heroes
171,000 subs worldwide (that is US + EU only)

The game loses 1k. There was a rumor again coming from F13 saying that the subs fell to just something more than 100k. I didn't bite the leaf and it looks like my guess was correct, the game is holding well for the moment. After the release of City of Villains it lost something and that's probably even the trend for the future. The game doesn't seem to have a very good stickiness and the players need a motivation to continue to invest on this game. I didn't see any announcements about a future expansion or new developments, so I suspect the game will start to leak subs at an increased rate if they don't find ways to rise the interest again (and the patch cycles are abysmally slow).

Auto Assault
?

Uhm.. No subs numbers for this game. NCSoft considered it a failure and I think noone is surprised. Till we don't have any better source I'll stick with that 10k guess.

Guild Wars
2M boxes sold worldwide.

That number is almost all about the US+EU market since the game didn't sell much in the other countries. After seeing the last expansion constantly on top of the charts I was expecting to see the total number of boxes sold at around 2.5 millions, instead it looks like it sold only 400k or less. I still think the game is doing rather well and proportionately to its "worth", overall. I'll write some more about this below.

--
General considerations: there's one aspect in what F13 wrote that is correct, while the subs in Korea for Lineage and Lineage 2 dropped consistently, it looks like the "sales" remained quite constant. So here I really don't know what to say since I have no clue about how things work and how it can be possible. The game doesn't look that popular anymore but it seems that NCSoft still gains from it. The two games together represent still 70% of NCSoft total income (of which, 55% just in Korea).

Now what I'm noticing with some very rough math is that 40% of Lineage 1&2 subs (1 million of subs) is coming from countries not listed in their region graph:

By region, Korea stood at 55% of total net sales, North America at 18%, Europe 11%, Japan 9%, and royalties accounted for 7%.

This is what NCSoft is cashing, right? If this is true it basically means that 40% of those subs only consist in 7% of the net sales, which tells a lot about how much money is actually coming back from those countries. Apply this reasoning to WoW and all those millions of subscriptions coming from China and you can see how the success of the game needs to be recalibrated (and we already knew how cheap is playing games in those countries).

I mean, the net sales for both of those games in Korea are 47 billion Won, only 0.2 billion Won are coming from other games. But 40% of what we consider subscribers for those games aren't directly property of NCSoft but come in the form of Royalties. Well, these royalties only bring in their pockets 5.7 billion Won. So those 40% of subs only bring a "real" 12% income.

About Guild Wars. As I wrote above I think the success of the game is proportionate to its worth, even if I was expecting this last expansion to sell more. Now the point is that the expectations of both Arena.net and NCSoft were consistently more optimistic. I don't know if I read all these numbers correctly but Arena.net still operates at a loss. Despite the latest sales it still loses more than one million won this year (and I really don't know how to read the charts, are those numbers cumulative between 2Q 06 and 1Q 06 or they need to be summed?). If we look at what happened before we see that it lost 11 billion Won in 2004 and another 4 billion Won in 2005 (even here, it's 15 billion total or the chart is progressive?). When exactly are they expecting to see profits instead of losses?

They surely have a great technology but it's still unlikely that Guild Wars will see an increase of sales (if I read those charts correctly). Each expansion will likely sell less than the one before just because the game and technology they sell is still essentially the same, but still sold at full price. I still think that the game IS successful. It is one of the few at the top of the charts and sold more than two millions of boxes. Now the point is to consider if the business model they tried was viable or not, because, again, the game performed rather well.

At the same time the "operating profit", that is the net sales less the operating costs is still positive everywhere. So Arena.net is leaking money or not?

Payroll costs in overseas consolidated subsidiaries were 9.1 billion Won, up 7% QoQ. This is due primarily to staff increases at the company’s ArenaNet studio in NA.

Total headcount for NCsoft and its subsidiaries was down 1% QoQ.

In North America, revenue increased thanks to the successful Q206 launch of Guild Wars Factions.

A mystery.

I also wonder were are counted the costs of Tabula Rasa development.

Of those 330 billion Won they are "predicting" for the end of the year, only 110 they have collected in this half. So they expect to reach 220 (100% increase) in the next six months? How? The only two games coming out are Dungeon Runners and the new expansion for Guild Wars.

CoX and Auto Assault subs

Sat, 24 Jun 2006 01:31:37 -0700

SirBruce on Q23 about the subscription numbers of CoX and Auto Assault, related to yesterday's layoff news:

The rumor reported on f13 is just flat out wrong. An unnamed source close to the games in question has indicated to me that CoH is at about 160K right now, and that AA is over "a little higher" than 10K.

I'm reporting this because it makes sense.

You can see my report for Q1 06. CoX had around 180k by the end of March, it's just not possible that it lost 40% of the subscribers in a couple of months. Not even with a total revamp gone completely wrong.

About Auto Assault, well, they were just clueless if they were expecting something else.

Plus some infos about Guild Wars that were known:

Guild Wars sold 1.5 million of it's initial game, and about 500K so far for the expansion. It certainly doesn't have 2 million active players. Even if everyone buys the expansion, you're still not going to make anyway NEAR the money would would have with an MMO. I mean, an MMO is basically like selling a .5 - 1.0 boxes per month per subscriber. You just can't compete with that revenue stream with a non-sub title unless your MMO does really poorly.

Guild Wars was an experiment, and although it's sold well for a PC game title, it's not produced anywhere near the MMO levels of revenue NCSoft wanted. The idea was to see if 5-10x as many people would play an almost-MMO as a non-MMO, if there was no monthly fee. Answer: No.

Not really agree with his analysis, though. Guild Wars isn't a mmorpg that could have gathered millions of paying subscribers and, in fact, I believe that the 1.5 - 2 million boxes sold ARE 4-5x the number of active subscribers it could have brought along (if not less).

Even here it wasn't smart to expect much more. If they were.