Some MMOGChart Conclusions
SirBruce recently released an updated version of his MMO subscription charts, which are available on MMOGChart.com. I love looking at statistics and trying to draw conclusions from them. I have a few pieces that I wanted to post here, all of which I already knew, but it’s nice to have data to back the conclusions up. Proceed beyond the break for all of the goods.
Major releases do impact existing games, especially if they are in a similar genre. Dark Age of Camelot and EverQuest purged subscriptions when World of Warcraft and EverQuest II launched. Interestingly, Star Wars Galaxies started seeing a steady decline right around the same time, a full year before the NGE.
Niche games tend not to be dramatically impacted by the launch of other titles. They tend to start small and slowly but surely increase, without major spikes in either direction. EVE Online and Tibia are both great examples of this, with EVE probably being the best example given its traditional subscription model.
Marketing amplifies the effect of any release, in both directions. A huge marketing blowout will have a major adverse impact on a game if it doesn’t live up to the hype. This can be seen with Vanguard, but it’s probably even better exemplified by EverQuest II. I’ll admit that the game wasn’t particularly good when it launched (though I assert that it is now). The major hype brought in a ton of subscribers, but a ton of subscribers also left the game very quickly thereafter. I also believe a game cannot ever fully recover from an overhyped but underwhelming launch.
Marketing and hype also dramatically amplify the success of a game that does live up to the hype. This can be seen better than anywhere else with World of Warcraft, which is arguably the most financially successful massively multiplayer game of all time. Had it been so hyped and failed to meet expectations, it would have been the biggest bomb in history.
I’m sure there are some other conclusions you can draw. I toyed with the idea that games that start small have a stronger community foundation and can therefore become prolific for longer, and will generally see an increase in subscribers pretty consistently over time (because nothing is more respected than word of mouth). But, I dismissed that line of thinking because there’s not enough data to back that claim up.
What conclusions can you make from the charts?
Another conclusion is that most expansions have a relatively minor impact on subscriptions. Mostly they simply keep a fresh SKU in the retail chain, give the media something fresh to write about and review, and so on, but it combats churn more than bringing in (more than what you were already) new subscriptions. That does make some sense; anyone who was going to play WoW probably wasn’t waiting for a raise in the level cap to start playing. Expansion may *seem* to make a game more popular, because a lot of people who had idle characters they weren’t playing much suddenly come back to check out all the new content. So you should see a spike in peak concurrency, and maybe this will encourage those people to *stay* subscribed.
In a few cases there’s actually some evidence of an increase in subscriptions 1-3 months *before* an expansion comes out. I don’t have much explanation from this, unless people are re-subbing to inactive accounts in anticipation of the expansion. Or perhaps all the previews of the upcoming expansion work like free advertising. But post expansion, there doesn’t seem to be a big effect on subs.
I resubscribed to WoW ~4 months before the Burning Crusade because some friends of mine were starting a new theme-based guild that sounded like fun. It was fun, but the grind quickly wore us down. I did end up keeping my account open in anticipation of the release of Burning Crusade, and I’m still playing now, over a year later.
I mentioned before that I found the differences in growth for the various distribution models interesting, but there was one other thing that I noticed; WoW made other MMOs take a hit, but not that big a hit.
For a while, I’ve that WoW didn’t steal everybody else’s subscribers, but rather that they introduced huge piles of new players to the genre. The charts basically confirm my thoughts (although I didn’t think they were that far fetched to begin with.) and also makes me believe that we won’t have another MMO with WoW’s success for a long time. We will have one, but it’ll probably be years in the future as the overall subscriber pool increases in size gradually over time.
If you keep an eye on retail outlets, just prior to a new expansion releasing, usually around 2 months before, the price of the original game, if they have stock, will drop. Lower price + knowledge of expansion coming = people willing to get off the fence about playing and try it. It gives them the lowest possible entry price, and the promise of new content quickly should they decide to stay subscribed.
WoW certainly stole subscribers from other MMOGs, but you’re right that they brought in a lot of new subscribers as well. They also “stole” new subscribers from other MMOGs, too, so that contibutes to their decline since they can’t replace lost subscribers with new ones as quickly. So WoW certainly has hurt their competition, but at the same time it grew the market and gives new MMOGs coming online a much bigger pie to take a slice from.
Yeah, I really think Jason is correct about the increase in games before an expansion.
Let me tell you what, though. I’ve had more fun playing EVE than I have with WoW, and it has earned a long-term subscription from me.
Let’s just be honest about those numbers… None of the current MMOs can match WoW in accessibility (even a 3 year-old computer can launch WoW) and it’s easy to learn and very intuitive to play.
Vanguard? Was nice to play for a few weeks but it didn’t really touch me… Some nice ideas but the graphics were not very iconic / unique (except those that were based on that paintings of that artist who died during the development process), etc.
Pirates of the Burning Sea? Really liked the open beta but I personally found the economy (front, rear, side hulk anyone?) too complicated, ship combat was fun for a while but not for long,…
WoW certainly has several design flaws, but I can just log in, beat alliance players up for a while, enjoy the iconic / comical graphical look… That intuitiveness / easy-going pick-up play / unique graphical style hasn’t been matched so far by competitors. I’d really like to have it different but we’ll all need to wait for a few more months until there may be two MMOs being able to scratch on Blizzard’s throne (Age of Conan and Warhammer Online).
WoW did take a chunk out of other games, even humble M59. Most people denied it since any decrease is seen as a bad thing, especially since it can be hard to make up that decrease. Even though WoW didn’t obliterate other games, this decrease is worrisome: all the previous big game launches actually helped everyone. This is problematic because it means the Warcraft/Blizzard brand is so powerful it was able to rip people away from previous games that were hesitant to leave before. Why is this troublesome? Because it took Blizzard nearly a decade to build that reputation, so no other fresh game company will be able to duplicate that success. It’s further frustrating since people only look at overall numbers and any game that isn’t in the same realm as WoW is considered a “failure” despite how profitable it might be. Finally, this might also be a sure sign of that “saturation” thing that lots of people were warning about in the past. It just took someone with really deep pockets to get the last little bit of people playing online games.
My thoughts,
For me, games are more fun to play in the beginning. When (most) everyone is still learning the game. You don’t have huge numbers of farmers or people power leveling friends. Groups are easier to find. Crafted items are easier to sell. Unless a game can offer new servers regularly like WoW does(or did, it’s been a while), it’s hard to attract new people. Not so much fun when everyone you meet has 1 or more max level characters already.