The success of MMORPGs

[Malison]

I found this link while browsing some message boards:

http://pw1.netcom.com/~sirbruce/Subscriptions.html

Its a graph of the success of the various MMORPGs.  The guy who compiled it did a pretty good analysis.  

EQ has nearly 500k subscribers, damn their addiction!  And Ultima Online, a game that is 6 years old, is doing better than DAOC.  In fact, the only time DAoC has done better was a brief 3 to 6 month period.

I miss that game.

[Caohmin]

His numbers are based on company PR annoucements and aren't really hard numbers.

"Firstly, I rely on the companies and employees themselves to provide the bulk of the data.  The numbers they give could be completely made up, and as Enron taught us, even financial reports could be misleading."

It's a great chart to see general subscription trends but I'd have to take the accuracy of the data with a grain of salt.

"Secondly, there’s no universal consensus on what constitutes an active subscriber.  Some companies may count players currently on their traditional first “free month” as a current subscriber, whereas others might not start counting them until after that period and the customer actually chooses to subscribe.  Although the accounts that don’t subscribe get “subtracted’ a month later, such accounting could create a continuous effect of inflating the overall subscription total."

This coupled with the fact that some players own multiple accounts and the numbers get a little more muddied, but again it is an interesting chart.

[Bolldar Bloodaxe]

I thought EQ now and for quite some time had hid t here player numbers? This happened about the time people started leaving for DAOC. I got two EQ accounts which are active though I havent played them in 6 months.

[Malison]

Never underestimate the power of EverCrack.   I think addiction is the strongest thing EQ has going for it.  After that would be a ton of content, and pretty strong social groups.  If Knights of the Red Dragon played like Fires of Heaven, or even Vis Maior from my old server, Albion would have every relic.

The last 2 expansions for EQ looked pretty nice, added lots of things people had been asking for.  I couldn't get back into it though.  I played to level 5 on my friends account and said "what, I have to go get my corpse still?" "I have to spend 5 minutes putting my spells back on my quick bar after every death???"  "What?? I can lose my level!?"  Needless to say, they didn't change the core things I hated about it.

DaoC IS a better game, I hope no player ever doubts that. They just need to add more easily accessible content targeted at 1 or 2 groups, and get the friggin class balance and realm balance more in line.

[Gueuze]

I never played EQ, and I'm glad, because...

<<"I have to spend 5 minutes putting my spells back on my quick bar after every death???">>

would have absolutely driven me up a friggin' wall.

[Zutroy]

Interesting to see DAOC lost about 50,000 subscribers between August and October of last year. I wonder if it was the release of the expansion that managed to level the drop off?

[Amberryl]

Quote: from Gueuze on 11:01 am on May 10, 2003
I never played EQ, and I'm glad, because...

<<"I have to spend 5 minutes putting my spells back on my quick bar after every death???">>

would have absolutely driven me up a friggin' wall.

4 of my quickbar panels are spells, 1 is macros, and another is tradeskillz. If i had to reorganize those everytime i died, (and i die A LOT) I would have tried to stab myself with the keyboard...