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Seems like the game has peaked on XFire - Part 2
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1793 on a Saturday, 2032 on a Sunday!
Another free weekend as well which is why - I suspect - the average hours played increased to nearly 5. (People on a free weekend trying as much as possible etc.). Which suggests that the mid-week numbers - which as mentioned are usually lower - will be ' lower still' unless lots of the people who tried the game have bought it.
In crude terms the recent drop is large and quick - from the 2900s down to the 1793-2032 range. There should be an explanation. What about the 30-day free folk dropping out? Would this sound right?
The jumps mentioned. Well Terra is easy - it launched! The other small jumps (up to the 2900s for SWOR) could be down to the various May Day holidays depending where people are in the world; timing looks right. (6th May was the first Monday in May.)
Been a rough month.
All the games experienced a jump. I would have to look at the numbers, but my eyeballs say that each game jumped in hours relative to the number of XFire people playing the game.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Also notice how GW2 reached Tera just in one day of stress test. I think these guys are into something good. Wouldn't surprise to see them above SWTOR.
An honest review of SW:TOR 6/10 (Danny Wojcicki)
I'm not going to be surprised when a number of MMOs pass SWTOR. You can't sustain a viable population with a 20%/month churn rate (exponential decay) and constantly declining (about 20% per month expontential decay) sales.
Mostly free month over. We are getting to realistic numbers of subs and it may settle from now on.
1700-1900 seems good "settle number"
around 1/6 of what they had on start of chart.
Somewhat 20% retention rate, so if they had 1,5m at start 20% is 300k.
TERA has had pretty bland numbers for a newly released game.
Currently Playing: World of Warcraft
Interesting. That's looking really bad for SWTOR. It almost certainly is going to go below Aion and TERA at some point in the next two months.
Yes.. it's always losing a bit more than Aion. Yesterday the difference was just 450 players.
An honest review of SW:TOR 6/10 (Danny Wojcicki)
The galaxy in this universe seems to be shrinking.......
Bioware layoffs
http://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/bioware-ea-announce-star-wars-the-old-republic-staff-layoffs/
http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/05/22/bioware-austin-loses-staff#disqus_thread
http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/05/22/star-wars-the-old-republic-hit-with-layoffs/
I think it is to early to talk about a settle number. If SWTOR plays more like a single player game with co-op elements then the population is eventually going to map to new sales - could be very low indeed.
Mapping the % of XFire users to subs is obviously dangerous but the number of players is now 1/5 or 1/6 or even 1/7 of the peak. And whilst the margin of error is unknown even if its 50% you are looking at sub 500k. Below the break even point (better cut some staff perhaps!) and well, well below the 1M mark talked about.
Yeah. One little mistake in your computations. That was March. This is the end of May. End of March it was 5000ish. So, if 100% of the 1.3 million were active (which I doubt) it's 1.3M/5000 = 260 subs to log-in ratio. 260 * 2000 (current log-ins) = 520,000k (current projection).
But remembering when it was early in the game and people were logging in like crazy and the accounts were virtually all active, we had 1.7m/12000 = 142. Which would give us 2000*142 = 284,000.
I suspect that somewhere between those numbers is the likely active-account player base. Especially as there are now just four (North America) servers that spend 50% or more time in standard (or higher) and 64 in perma-light status.
I don't know exactly. I think toward the bottom. Remember, EA said 500K to be profitable and 300Kish to be break-even... And now they just laid off 200 people in the development team.
I really suspect we're at the bottom of the range. I can't prove it without getting into EA's data. But that's where it points.
EDIT: Ooops. Didn't finish my point. To make it short: New gamers play a lot more and distort the XFire numbers. I doubt both ends of the implied ratios, but I'd tend to go toward the lower end of the implied range for SWTOR simply because of other indicators like TORStatus and some basic understanding of subcription accounting. 260 is too high. The numerator of 1.3 million subs is over-stated vis the actual active player-base behind them due to accounting rules and the lag in tolling.
They said the SAME THING in the Age of Conan forums! http://forums.ageofconan.com/showthread.php?t=112390
Imagine that. Age of Conan isn't dying! XFire sucks! Trollolololol....
Xfire charts will never be rock solid support for anything if you go by their graphs. Usually when someone bring up xfire a few people ask what is it
LoL "cold hard facts" whatever helps you sleep at night
QFT Seriously, people, just because it's on the Interwebz doesn't make it true!
All that in more. And for all the denial, AoC was dead in three months with just over a 50% crash in subs after the first. Just like XFire demonstrated...
ME!
EDIT: Also, I can't be completely sure on this, but I use Xfire, and as far as I'm aware, I'm a real person.
People keep taking XFire numbers and declaring the number of subs that games have. There's no way to actually do that...you can't calculate the number of subs a game has with XFire numbers. You can't calculate a margin of error. Comparing games to each other is a waste because you can't tell what the relationship is between the numbers for each of the games.
XFire doesn't add anything to discussions about games and their populations except noise. They have purposely obscured those numbers so nobody can pick them apart.
Yes, XFire shows trends. The trends are not really a surprise though, are they? If you compared every single game on XFire, with very few exceptions*, they would all follow the same general trend. XFire adds nothing except advertising.
* WoW and Eve.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Damn, I find myself constantly looking for a "Like"-button!
Hey if you want to believe that more people are playing san andreas than skyrem be my guest.
Currently Playing: World of Warcraft
I think you missed the part where xfire is meant to show trends, not represent the actual total number of players playing. I think about 4 billion people in this thread and many, many threads before it have tried to explain that. I suppose some people will just keep trying to think of it as total number of players no matter how many times people explain it.
Yah, evidence of EA marginalizing SWTOR and layoffs at BW point that they dont see even 500k subs, and 1+m is a pipe dream.
Pretty much free month for everyone -> if it doesnt work, still below break even number -> layoffs and cutting expenses is contingency plan for scenario "its doing badly".
All are going down
An honest review of SW:TOR 6/10 (Danny Wojcicki)
It's stuff like this that makes me wonder why people put so much faith in XFire. You can see the same type of thing with Steam's numbers. I suppose it's OK to pick and choose the numbers from XFire that you want, so long as it proves your point on an internet message forum.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
I don't even put a lot of faith in Xfire numbers because frankly outside a broad sense of depicting trends I think they're useless. However, I gotta say not sure why the San Andreas thing is hard to believe. I have friends that think "video games" suck generally speaking yet amazing still play a select few one being the GTA series. Game has a lot broader audience appeal than a game like Skyrim will ever have. Christ, I knew two schmucks that played the shit almost every day just running around fucking shit up and never even bothered with any of the actual story content.
So in short, while I have no idea for sure one way or the other can't say I see why it would be considered not to a realistic possibility.
1. For god's sake mmo gamers, enough with the analogies. They're unnecessary and your comparisons are terrible, dissimilar, and illogical.
2. To posters feeling the need to state how f2p really isn't f2p: Players understand the concept. You aren't privy to some secret the rest are missing. You're embarrassing yourself.
3. Yes, Cpt. Obvious, we're not industry experts. Now run along and let the big people use the forums for their purpose.
I don't even put a lot of faith in Xfire numbers because frankly outside a broad sense of depicting trends I think they're useless. However, I gotta say not sure why the San Andreas thing is hard to believe. I have friends that think "video games" suck generally speaking yet amazing still play a select few one being the GTA series. Game has a lot broader audiance appeal than a game like Skyrim will ever have. Christ, I knew two schmucks that played the shit almost every day just running around fucking shit up and never even bothered with any of the actual story content.
So in short, while I have no idea one way or the other can't say I see why that would be considered not to be a realistic possibility.
San Andreas is 7 years old and Skyrim is less than a year old. If the 'trends' are to be believed, then San Andreas would have a minimal population (even with 22 million units sold), and Skyrim's population would dwarf it (even with only 11 million units sold in a year).
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Eve would be an interesting one to add in.Eve would be an interesting one to add in.
Some single player games and some co-op games would be interesting to see as well. What would really be interesting is if XFire released long term information that people could play with in spreadsheets.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.