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Seems like the game has peaked on XFire - Part 2
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http://www.xfire.com/cms/stats/#
Unfortunately the stats go only up to 2009, after that XFire stopped releasing info.
Lol, Xfire, are people still using it? I thought it had been replaced by Raptr by now
Anyway, when I did some checking up on EVE in the beginning of the year iirc EVE had something like 1250-1300 players in the weekend online and I think something like 5.5k hours. Don't know how it is for the past month though. I do know that xfire numbers for EVE and WoW were a whole lot higher a year or 2 ago, but would have to do a search to find out in what order of magnitude.
SWTOR and WOW are in freefall. I have a hard time believing that Aion is so close to SWTOR, outside of XFire. WOW will mostly recover once MOP arrives. SWTOR can only be further hurt by GW2 and TSW unless 1.3 brings a lot people back. Even with all of its problems, SWTOR is FAR more appealling than TERA and Aion to me.
This is just a sample of player activity being measured by XFire. While SWTOR probably still has more active subscriptions, it's not being played all that much, relative to the number of running subs. Hopefully for them server transfers will help them salvage what is still there, or not, no skin of my teeth.
Remember that Aion is Free to Play in Europe, I could imagine that it might even have more active EU players than SWTOR does. Just like EA/BW handing out free subscriptions doesn't mean that everyone who got them is even remotely interested in playing the game, let alone pay for it.
Freefall is one way of desecribing what the XFire number of players suggests has happened - just over 1500 now. The other word is 'single player game'. OK three words but people play a single player game, complete it maybe and then stop.
You don't call a single player game good or bad because you have finished it - you simply put it away. If there is a sequel and it was 'good enough' you might buy that.
And that is what sums up SWTOR so I suspect the SWTOR number will go down even more.
From their own comments it seems doubtful that EA will recover their costs; and it doesn't look like SWTOR is going to be above the 500k break even point either. No way of proving that at this point in time but the XFire number is close to being 1/10 of the maximum. It suggests that it is very bad indeed. Can't see SWTOR being a top 10 product for EA next quarter; can't see them mentioning it in their prepared comments to be honest.
And introducing mega-servers. It won't, imo, help the game because the instancing will still be there but it will make it very hard to compare the 'old' server stats to the new. Almost certainly impossible. The old discussion about the server cap being increased. "SWTOR only has 1 server so it has lost zillions of player" .... "no, no its a mega server it can hold as many as they ever had". Sure.
SWTOR. OK single player, poor mmo, poor business model.
As for WoW it doesn't matter. Going forward there are now WoW+D3 subscribers. Clever move by Blizzard as it was when SoE introduced their all access pass.
? I can be wrong because I'm not following it, but I think that D3 subscribers aren't paying an average 10-14 dollars/month for the game like players do for WoW.
Suppose that 2 million WoW players less are playing WoW - figures suggest a decrease of 50% but I don't trust Xfire since all games in it are trending downwards, even the ones that're supposed to be stable - then that's 30 million dollar less revenues a month. I'm sceptic whether that's covered by D3 sub revenues.
Only Blizzard have the exact figures of course but what they have done is moved to address the 'apparent' decline in WoW subs - more accurately the decline in WoW subscription revenue.
Everybody knows that WoW subs are in decline yes - but are they? What Blizzard have said is that people are burning through content faster and therefore playing less. Taking Blizzard at face value this means that - using noddy numbers:
If WoW had 24 million customers and each if these used to subscribe for an average of 6 months then the headline sub number would be 12 million and Blizzard would earn 12 million x 12 x $15 less discounts for multi-months.
Today however those 24 million customers are ripping through content faster and as a result they only subscribe for, say, 5 months. The headline sub number will then be 10M and Blizzard would earn 10M x $15 less discounts.
Now there will be people coming and going all the time so it won't be this simple but what this example shows is that WoW could have exactly the same number of customers but Blizzard's revenue from them has gone down.
With the annual pass offer what Blizzard have done is charged an annual 12 month sub of $150 for which subscribers also got a $60 copy of D3; if they wanted an upgraded edition they could etc. $150 - $60 = $90 which means that these annual subscribers are paying $7.50 a month. Sounds bad until you realise that Blizzard get this for 12 months.
Using the noddy example it essentially means that someone who was paying for 6 months on average ($90) but dropped off to 5 months ($75) is now paying the same as they were previously ($90). And Blizzard sold them a copy of D3 to boot - probably reasoning that some people who bought D3 would drop their WoW sub anyway so $7.50 is better than $0. And if people can access WoW they are more likely to resub downstream. Wonder what renewal offer Bliz will make?
Now as I said this doesn't mean that Blizzard are getting as much revenue. It doesn't mean that WoW 'customers' are not declining - clearly people drop in and out of WoW. It does mean that it is a lot more complex and that you now have the WoW+D3 subscriber. And its the $7.50 is better than $0 that makes it really clever.
(And your comment about all games in XFire trending down could eaily be due to XFire numbers going down - people have said it is and with the growth of e.g. Steam it could well be. Over a few month period though - the short period that SWTOR has been tracked in this thread for example it will be stable enough. Trying to use it to compare WoW subs today to 2005 to take an extreme example would be bad; the longer the time period the worse it will be. A few months however in which there has been no bright shiny product like Steam chat say it will be OK.
Ah, you mean the annual subscribers that got D3 for free in the process. Yeah, I thought that was a damn ingenious thing of Blizzard to do for several reasons.
Here goes the graph for last week. Added EVE as suggested by RefMinor.
An honest review of SW:TOR 6/10 (Danny Wojcicki)
I don't think going F2P would get them back to the 4000 or 5000 player mark at this point. The game is defintiely not as bad as those numbers, but it's also not what people expect in modern MMOs. You really get one chance. 2.4 million people gave it a chance and they are likely down below 1 million subscribers after the free month expires.
This is just a sample of player activity being measured by XFire. While SWTOR probably still has more active subscriptions, it's not being played all that much, relative to the number of running subs. Hopefully for them server transfers will help them salvage what is still there, or not, no skin of my teeth.
Remember that Aion is Free to Play in Europe, I could imagine that it might even have more active EU players than SWTOR does. Just like EA/BW handing out free subscriptions doesn't mean that everyone who got them is even remotely interested in playing the game, let alone pay for it.
There is no way to correlate the XFire numbers and subscriber numbers. Looking at trends for multiple games just makes it apparent. It also shows that all the games follow the same trends*. They all go up, they all go down. The only difference is right after a game launches.
If you added some recent single player games, you would see some of the same trends. I would be willing to bet those games rise and fall with the MMORPG as well.
It's just a horrible tool. It's an advertising platform.
* This is yet another assumption, but why not? This whole discussion is full of them.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
The only thing horrible about xFire is that we don't know how many active daily users there are... We could figure this out - if we we added each game's total daily users... then displayed the # of users playing each game as a %.
For now, we assume that overall # of users of xFire - at least on a day to day and week to week basis is pretty similar - so... YES... you can make comparisons between games and get a pretty solid data on the trends in play activity.
Can we use that to tell us the exact # of subscribers? Not exactly. That would require more info about player behavior... but again, aI think most of us feel pretty safe to say that less activity on a game does translate into less subscribers.
And lastly... xFire data is just ONE indicator out of several that give us an idea what is going on with TOR... and they are all pointing in the same direction.
Having the number of XFire users isn't any better than the number of XFire played hours. There's no way to get from "XFire Stat" to "Game Stat" without making assumptions. You're saying "for now" you're assuming "made up stuff". There is never going to be a time when you're not assuming "made up stuff". You will never be able to get from XFire numbers to real numbers.
XFire numbers are just garbage data. They say the same thing about every single game on the site. When it releases it'll have a lot of players. After awhile it will have less players than when it started. Finally, it'll reach a steady state where the number of played hours and number of players rises and falls on a weekly basis in the same pattern as nearly every other game on the website. It's garbage data.
XFire is an advertising medium. It is not in there best interest to give anyone other than their advertisers actionable data. The information is garbage and it will always be garbage because it's in their best interest to keep it that way.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
To those bashing the XFire data, it seems we're not the only ones using it.
The guy running MMOData.net seems to think they're pretty useful too.
"What it does show me is that the Xfire numbers are a good indication to base estimates off, purely based on Xfire I would have estimated 1,2m".
He's wrong.
** edit **
About XFire. I have no idea about the rest of what he's doing.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
I have been playing MMO's since about 2001. I have never used xfire. I have been in countless guilds in the past 11 years.... I have never been asked to use xfire or talked about xfire in guild.
I know I'm just one person, but I'm just saying, most players I know or have played with... do not use xfire. There's only ever about 300 people on this website at any given time. That's almost as small of a sample as the groups I play with...lol
Statistic 101: Sample needs to be random and large enough, but it doesn't need to be significant compared to whole population. Same sample size gives same accuracy whether you're trying to trying to find out statistics about Milkwaukee's population or China's population (assuming the sample size is significantly smaller than Milwaukee's population).
You don't need to have used X-Fire, none of your friends need to have used it. If there are two million players and one in a thousand uses it that'll allready give X-Fire sample of 2 000 and statistical margin of error of only a few procents. But if the game is very small, let's say Mortal online, the statistical margin of error would be large even if 50% of Mortal Online's players used X-Fire.
You don't need to have used X-Fire, none of your friends need to have used it. If there are two million of players and one in a thousand uses it that'll allready give X-Fire sample of 2 000 and statistical margin of error of only a few procents. But if the game is very small, let's say Mortal online, the statistical margin of error would be large even if 50% of Mortal Online's players used X-Fire.
You left out the whole bit about the sample being carefully selected to not show a bias, or barring that, randomly selected from the population. Neither of these applies to XFire's users.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
I admit that it's not random or carefully selected to not show bias. I was just trying to say that the sample is large enough, not that it wouldn't have other problems.
With no way to calculate a margin of error, the samples are either 'good' or 'bad'. We don't know the population for most of the games, so we don't know the sample sizes' relation to the overall populations. SWToR is a possible exception, but you would have to believe Bioware's numbers. We do know that the samples are not randomly selected and they are not selected to eliminate bias. XFire's samples are just 'bad'.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
God... not this discussion again...
An honest review of SW:TOR 6/10 (Danny Wojcicki)
I officially declare this a Groundhog Day thread.
Please everyone keep holding the same discussion and arguments over and over again, and ignore the doubtful twinge of deja vues you'll keep experiencing, it'll pass if you just doggedly keep on going forward
Onward to 'Same Thread - part 3', you can do it!
http://www.gamebreaker.tv/mmorpg/star-wars-the-old-republic-overunder-swtor-subscriptions/
Hmm the wagering has reached a new level. And these guys are super pro-SWTOR
Survivor of the great MMORPG Famine of 2011
It could be worse. It could be spread out into several different threads, each with a slightly different discussion.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
I find the numbers interesting on their own. It's not garbage data if you just want to know how a given subset of users is playing the game over time. It certainly has been consistent with the announcements. I also doubt you'll find XFire number trends be the opposite of reality.