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How many subscribers does it take to keep an MMO going?
lgnki
Member Posts: 66
How many subscribers does it take to keep a game like say, DAoC alive and turning a profit. What happens to a game (inevitably) when people are still playing but not enough to keep it afloat? Has this ever happened before? How will games like guild wars support arenaNET with no advertising or monthly fees in the long run?
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Comments
Well, simply the game will just discontinue if there are simply not enough subscribers, I'm pretty sure this is what happened to Motor City Online, which I wish I knew about, since it sounded like alot of fun.
Actually that's the one I heard of too, and I also wish I had heard about it, since there doesn't seem to be any good vehicle based mmos on the market yet save auto assault.
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well guild wars is a good question... one way it could which from what i see they will be doing is just releasing games that continue the plot that has more...
the world preview event was packed and each person there who buys it is 50$.. add it up... thats alot of cash... and the longer it grows in popularity.. the more people that will buy it...
but you never know...
True, but it goes both ways. The more people that buy it, the more bandwidth/server capacity they will need, and the more people will demand faster/ higher quality content releases...
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The $50 will add up in the end, but they wont be getting an absolute cash flow like all of the other games, BUT this attraction that there is absolutely no monthly fee will (or at least planned to) attract many others that do not want to pay a monthly subscription. I think its a great idea, I just wish it'll stay free.
I think it will be interesting to see how it pans out. One thing however, don't expect any sort of GM events/Live in-game support, as a flat-rate cashflow would not allow for many salaried employees.
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We shall see. Here is something that can you give a slim idea on how many subscribers there are roughly in the MMORPG world.
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If everything goes out just as planned, I'm pretty sure they'll do alright in the end. They've got themselves a great game, no monthly fee, nice graphics, and many (im sure) antsy players wanting it to just come out. At least, I'm one of those antsy people, but I'm not losing sleep over it or anything
. lets hope for the best!
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Asheron's Call is beginning to be on their last leg. The Sims Online. Other than that, I dont see many, if any MMORPG's to just die and disband. Its just if your making enough money or not.
It's not even close to inevitable. Many players keep more than one account open.
ok but theres only so much money the mmorpg playing population has to put into games and the games just keep coming and coming...
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Tacklebury --}>>>
Explorer 93%
Achiever 53%
Socializer 33%
Killer 20%
Tacklebury --}>>>
would be interesting if there was a site to track these type of things
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Okay, I guess I should come forward with a little info that some might find offensive. I've played on free UO servers and know people that have run them. Most of these servers don't usually have more than 200 to 500 accounts and during peak times they can have about 150 to 300 people logged on at once. This isn't anywhere near the load of say a single server on OSI EQ but it does give you an idea of the bandwidth needed for a really popular server. There are also a large number of Neverwinter Nights servers that can handle 100+ players at a time.
Long story short, I could run a small UO server from my desktop over my cable connection. Now ramp up the connection to a T3 line and a decent server and you'll find that these companies are making a killing every single month. If these free UO servers charged $5 a month to every subscriber, they could make upwards of $1250 a month and run the server off of MUD host for around $40 a month.
As a final note, GW only maintains the servers for different zones that lead to missions. When you group with others and go on a mission in GW, the host goes to the player with the highest bandwidth. Thus the cost of running GW is about the same as it would be to run a lobby server for a regular game.
haha why would that offend anyone?
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WWII online only has like 10k players and they are still going.
Don't forget the start up costs. Most of the initial profit goes into paying crediors and then future development. I am not saying that an mmorpg cannot or is not a profitible buisness, but it is not as easy and cheap even to maintain as people think.
The MMORPG market is saturated. The only way for new games to succede is to kill off older games or attract a mass of new subscribers to the genre. WoW is lucky in that it already had a fan base to build off of. Many games have been pulled from the market, the most recent that I recall was for the Xbox. Earth and Beyond closed about 6 months ago.
As for which ones close it all depends on how big they have gotten and how much the company is dedicated to it. EQ may have a decreased number of active players, but most of them have not canceled so SoE still gets money. DAOC is also suffering from a lack of current players although the subscriber numbers are still very high. If one of these games lost about 2/3 of their subscribers then maybe they would think about it, but both have enough resources and dedication to the game that they will continue on.
The games that have to worry are the smaller ones that are not holding stable. AC, AC2, Horizons, and maybe Shadowbane I would say are possibilties. AC was hurt by AC2 and even though Turbine now has control and not Microsoft their development is on other games so I would not be surprised about those being closed after they have achieved success with another game. The latter two are possibilities.
EVE and AO while not necessarily growing have a very stable population around 50,000 I believe and that is more than enough for them to keep developing the game and making a profit. But both of these games were much smaller in scale.
This is more of a guess than anything, but keeping a stable population between 20,000-50,000 is what is needed to keep a game on the market and profitible enough for good customer service, in game help, patches, and expansions. Less than that it is probably not worth it.
I'll bet COH doesnt keep 50k subscribers, or at least they won't soon
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Search Key: 84218