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Population Estimate: 55,000-159,000 Players
Gurtelrose
Member Posts: 191
Thanks to DeathZeroII from Gamespot for this calculation.....
www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/ageofconanhyborianadventures/show_msgs.php
I bring this up again on news that Funcom is planning to merge the servers after a record four months after the game's release. On one hand, the fanboys are saying "My server's fine, I have a lot of people in my guild and never have any trouble finding a group." On the other hand, Funcom wouldn't merge the servers if they weren't lacking in players, because the effort to do so and the negative publicity it will generate wouldn't be worth it unless it was absolutely vital.
Funcom has only released two population figures (as far as I know) thus far. They were:
May: 800,000
August: 415,000
Since then, they have left customers and investors in the dark. So where are we now?
My estimate is somewhere between 55,000 to 159,000 players. Where did I come up with this range?
The lower bound:
1) Warhammer: Online has 500,000 subscribers according to Mythic:
www.warhammeronline.com/pressreleases/20080926.php
2) Xfire Activity Figures:
Warhammer: Online has 46,742 logged hours among Xfire users (#5 overall). Age of Conan has 5,099 logged hours among Xfire users (#40 overall). Thus, we get this equation:
46,742/5,099 = 500,000/X
What it means is, if Warhammer: Online has 500,000 users and a total logged hours figure of 46,742 hours, then if Age of Conan players are logging 5,099 Xfire hours, the total population should be around 55,000 (rounded to the nearest thousand). Of course, Warhammer: Online is a new game, so each player is likely playing it more than each Age of Conan player, so it's just a lower bound for our range rather than the correct answer.
The upper bound:
1) Funcom's Q2 2008 Report:
www.funcom.com/funcom/frontend/files/CONTENT/Funcom_Q208_report.pdf
In this report, Funcom states they had 800,000 players in May, and 415,000 players in August. This means the game is losing roughly 128,000 players every month. If this trend continues for two more months into October, we get 159,000 subscribers. This number is the upper bound because Funcom's numbers may possibly be inflated a bit to assuage investors and customers, and their methodology may have neglected other factors (such as people who still had active accounts but canceled the renewing subscription).
Thus, we can estimate with fairly good accuracy that the current amount of remaining Age of Conan subscribers lies somewhere between 55,000-159,000. The average of the two bounds is 107,000, which sounds like a realistic number given the current amount of activity in the Age of Conan community.
Feel free to dispute my methodology if you wish (in fact, I invite criticism), but thus far it's the most accurate subscription range we're going to get unless Funcom decides to announce their own figures.
I know that statistics aren't always correct, But I think that deathzero have a good point.
Spoils of War - The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.
Comments
Although I personally dont think this estimate is far from the truth(somewhere between 150-200k), The methods in which he used to get these numbers have very obvious flaws in them and by no means can be used to predict the amount of subscribers. Also who cares how many subscribers there are(Aside from Funcom) as long as there are enough to make the game fun. You can only have a few thousand per server tops at any one time anyways.
Yeah, I'm with Ganton on this one. Using an incorrect formula and incorrect data just means you guessed what most of us know... 100k subscribers. Also in your secondary formula, you used linear subtraction of losing 128k players per month. You would be much better off using a percentage decrease every month rather than a flat number. Like.. AOC lost 50% the first month, then 50% the second month etc etc. The 50% model also mirrors xfire. So if AOC had 415k subscribers in June, then xfire lost 50% in July, and another 50% in August, you can put AOC at 100k at the beginning of September. The dynamic has changed since then though, AOC only lost 30% in the begginning of September and appears to even be reducing that the last two weeks. The 3month subscribers have already left, the Warhammer people have already left.. there's not much reason for current players to leave in masse any more.
You can't really use Warhammer numbers because of the very reason you stated. War is a new game and it is being played more hours per player than a AOC. Warhammer also is not at 400k currently, probably closer to 300k. Warhammer ANNOUNCED that number, but has shown a rather significant decrease over the past two weeks (15%) and will drop significantly once the free month is over.
Why not use WOW xfire numbers and WOW at 5M subscribers (NA/EU). If you do the math, you'll get the same number (100k) but you removed many more variables.
In any event. AOC is at 100k +/- 25k
That's fewer than EQ2, I somehow doubt that. Played EQ2 a lot on different servers.
Most of AoC players are PvE players and tey don't often use X-fire when they are not raiding.
WARs players are mainly PvPers and there is X-fire more needed.
Also the game is losing a lot less people lately then it did the first 3 months, the last month 1 of my guildies have quit (we are a bit over 100). A few monts ago things were a lot worse. If you continue with the curve and only use the 2 reference ponts then the game would be dead in 30 days, that sounds very unlikely.
250K sounds likely anyhow. +-50K
I agree with this number also.
We have seen an influx of players though who came back after WAR as people realized it was all the same old mechanics all over again...albeit slower even for combat.
And visually WAR also did not work out. as even though it has muddy looking graphics, people are having a lot of texture issues and what not...bizarre.
Now, all Funcom needs to do is get Patch 3.0 out by the end of October, offer a return in November or December, and try to fix the stupid mess they made (thanks a lot Gaute...you idiot!@)
OP, great work trying to make your post sound official somehow. LOL..
Now lets see..... Gee... I think I gonna say 382 000 + 54000, - possibly 75000. How did that sound?
The methodology is garbage, but the guess is probably pretty accurate. Realistically it's going to be on the lower end of the scale, 100K or less.
My question is.. who cares? I mean whats your point? Are you just another aoc hater? I mean damn.. that shit is old now!
Well I am a newish player (started in August) and judging by the New Player chat channel I am not the only one. I am not a raid player, but rather a roleplayer and have never used X-fire. Really the only regret I have is not pre ordering . While the game does not deliver all that was promised at release it is fun imo and does get better each update. The last update really boosted performance. Coming from ddo I think I can safely say the game will do fine as a nitch game even under 100,000 players. Server merges maybe needed, but hey does it matter how many server you have if the ones you have are healthy?
-Dailus
Meh, must be dozens of ways to try and interpolate the data using statistics and other methods, but in the end they all come down to nothing more than an educated guess.
We won't ever know for sure unless Funcom posts the figures, and about the only thing I'm sure of is if they fail to do so, they probably aren't something to brag about.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Woa! i know is just a calculation but I like it. Good point to DeathZeroII.
They did post the 415K numbers after 3 months even though they lost half the subs. They probably post another in 1 month.
They did post the 415K numbers after 3 months even though they lost half the subs. They probably post another in 1 month.
Nope they actually said they would not post subscription numbers in 3rd quarter guidance. And as far as I know they have not said one thing about current sub-numbers. Now when a company dodges these types of questions, its generally because they are avoiding the question due to the fact that the answer is not good. Think about it - if there really was a HUGE surge in resubs and numbers were up, they would brag about it.
WOW announces the sub numbers pretty often. What does wow have thats different? Their sub numbers just keep going up.
-Lum
My 2 cents on this:
Lower bound should be higher. As you say, one must assume higher activity compared to the customer base in the early days of an MMOG, and shortly after major content updates and expansions. I'd guess this "content rush" factor adds about 20% on the activity numbers, thus the lower bound would be about 66k.
Higher bound is too harsh. A dropping MMOG loses customers fastest at the beginning, moving towards the stabile number it will keep for probably a long time. Again I'll make a guess, going for about average half the drop after August 15th as before, so around 290k now.
Interesting arguments nonetheless, and it's up to each to invent what factors they think are likely (we all know what the guys with the "clever" avatars will say).
Another comparison, since this already uses XFire; AoC peaks at about 7500 each week there now, while LotRO is around 9500. I think AoC has more XFIre-gamer appeal than LotRO does. Where does that put AoC (and LotRO) on the customer numbers? :-)
When they announce their 3Q numbers in November, it will be very easy to calculate the total number of players.. probably to within 5-10k.
Their total revenues from other games will be about 800k, this has been pretty consistent for the past 6 quarters. Their total contribution from box sales will be very very small (they haven't been on anyone's top 100 for months).
Total Revenues
- 800k (for other games)
-100k (for Box sales)
divided by 45 ( $45/per subscriber for the 3 month period)
This will give you the average number of players from July 1 til Sept 30. You then do a 50% above/50% below to find out the subscribers at the end of September
For instance. Let's say total revenues for the 3Q comes in at 10M... this is a reasonable number
10M - 900k(other games +box sales) = 9.1M from AOC subscriptions
9.1M / $45 = 202k average subscribers
Since this is the average, the subscriber rate at the end will be 50% below this, or 100k.
Now lets look at what Funcom was counting on back in early June. They gave guidance of 16M for the 3quarter
16M - 1.2M (other games and box sales) = 14.8M from AOC subscriptions
14.8M/$45 = 350k average subscribers
Even at launch, when things were looking good for funcom, they were only planning on 350k subscribers, which was a fairly safe bet.. It's also what the financial people at EA are estimating for Warhammer.
50k-60k is a good estimate yup.
thats what ppl say anyway. the problem is that with this rate there will only be a residual player population by the end of november and game done.
When I play I can do a search for people and come up with like 40 on the whole server. The subs have to be between 30-75k. I could NEVER get a group with people around my level. I had to grind my ass off to get to 80. I cancelled for the lack of people.
--------------------------------
Darkfall: December or vaporware!
Good calculations, but this part is only correct if you're assuming they lost half their subscribers in September. For August to be the average you can assume July to be 20% higher and September 20% lower (slower decline), or 70% (steep decline), or even 30% the other way around (significant growth).
Age of Conan is dead - who cares? let us wait for the next developmers who steal your money
I don't know how many times this has been covered, but a second quarter report of any year covers info from April 1st to June 30th (which it states in the report). The report was released in August. AoC had 415k subscribers as of June 30th, i.e. -10k subscribers a day at the time. Based on a stock valuation I read a while back and their actual price, they could be as low as 30-35k subscribers.
"The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion." -Edmund Burke
Who will rise up for me against the evildoers? or who will stand up for me against the workers of iniquity?"
(Psalm 94:16)
Reviews are actually saying that despite the game saying the server is high it is pretty much a ghost town.
Spoils of War - The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.
Expecting people to return a game that banned them for simply stating all the things that we now know lead directly to the removal of the game director is pretty arrogant. I mean they released crap and then disenfranchised users to avoid having to admit this fact. Now they want us back? I mean screw me once shame on you - Screw me twice? Nope not gonna happen.
-Lum
What?! You mean they are not booming?!
This article is drivel. The numbers may be about right (Although my guess based on reading reviews on the forums would put active players at less than 50000. A lot less.)
Still, be that as it may, why guess?
Funcom's quarterly figures are due out very soon. Even if they don't show subscriptions they will show revenues and a far more accurate guess can be made from that.
And where does he get the "record 4 months" from?
IIRC PotBS did it sooner than that?
Nothing says irony like spelling ideot wrong.
Its a old issue....... copied and pasted!.
Since funcom didn't release any data on accounts retained after the end of the first free month, i decided to gather some data myself (since at level 80 my free time suddenly inflated) not on total population, which would be absolutely impossible without official communication by Funcom, but on what really concerns us players, concurrent characters logged in each given server during primetime.
Unfortunately Funcom made it quite difficult to gather this kind of data. The limit of characters available to each account is excessively low and for some absolutely obscure reason players lower than level 5 can't access the character search function. This means that polling each server takes around 15-20 minutes, and the character needs to be canceled imediately after to make room for the next.
The data you'll find in the charts below has been polled by creating a character in each european server of Age of Conan, reaching level 5 to access the search player function and doing a search for players of levels 1-80. The pages have been counted and multiplied by 50 (there are 50 characters per page in the list) and then the characters on the last pages have been manually counted and added to the total.
The polling was done between July the 1st and July the 3rd, 2008, in a timeframe included between 6.30 PM and 9 PM CET to make sure that the data is consistent enough.
Of course the statistical value of the data is debatable, but should give a pretty good idea of the number of characters logged in each server during primetime, to identify which servers have an high population and which turned into ghost towns. In any case you know how the data was gathered and when, so you're free to draw your own conclusions from them. Click the links below to see the table and charts.
Link: www.flickr.com/photos/abriael/2634834540/sizes/o/
Link: www.flickr.com/photos/abriael/2634834704/sizes/o/
Link: www.flickr.com/photos/abriael/2634834902/sizes/o/
Link: www.flickr.com/photos/abriael/2634834800/sizes/o/
As I said, feel free to draw your own conclusions.
My conclusion is that AoC isn't a disaster yet, given the grand total of 32000 people logged on at the same time during primetime (only for europe), and can still make a pretty penny to funcom, expecially if they can inprove it fast enough. What i'm sure about is that they greatly overstimated the number of servers needed to split their population it, and need to do something about it. Too many servers are ghost towns during most of the day, and this hinders the gamers experience quite a lot. They need (besides making their service better, and fast) to finally activate the damn buddy codes (at least for underpopulated servers), and, if that doesn't solve it, to begin thinking about server merging.
That's my opinion, feel free to express yours, in a civil way possibly.
Orignal Link: forums-eu.ageofconan.com/showthread.php
A few days after this topic was made. Funcom disable the "search" function and set all server to "medium" pop. The numbers are very interesting. I was wondering quite a while if i can trust the press releases from funcom about the very successful release. I heard something like 'more successful like wow'.
If you look at the Amazon Top 100 List Age of Conan is not sold that good. Somewhere at rank 40-50 here in germany.
edit: source miss, minor typo, grammar.