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Player Populations for each MMORPG.
fraudemonax
Member Posts: 25
Curiousity just overcame me. I would like to know general player populations for each MMORPG. If anyone reading this message might have some info or a link that might answer my question please let me know. Don't get me wrong... I think this website is a good resource for MMORPG players, but I think it would be helpful to know the demographics. I know that some of the more extreme fanbois give every game but their own zeros on this forum... so it would also be helpul to have some concrete statistics (if the numbers are accurate, they never lie).
fraudemonax
Comments
http://www.mmogchart.com/
Nice site.
Interesting data. One has to ask about the accuracy of the charts though. Traditionally gaming companies are not quick to publish data about their subscription numbers.
The site gains some credibility in my eyes because the numbers published matched pretty close to some I had already heard.
Looks like Lineage II and WOW are still on the top for server populations. I wonder if I even gave Lineage II a try. I can't even remember now. LOL. I'm sure I played it sometime or another.
I wonder why the field is overwhelmingly dominated by Fantasy genre. Is it because players prefer it or because producers think the players prefer it?
My personal feeling is players love MAGIC.
I think it's because the fantasy genre was how it all started. What was the very first online PVP game? Neverwinter Nights on AOL? It was an excellent game even though the graphics were horrible, the pvp engine was incredible. I still miss that game.
Read the FAQs on the site.
The numbers are somewhat distorted by the fact that the way Lineage II's subscription plans work in Asia is very different. It's really not comparing apples to apples when you compare what Lineage II does there with what WoW has done for example. Lineage II has most of its subs in Asia, and most of them in Korea, and many of those through internet cafes where people play for a certain period of time and pay for it that way. It's really a very different model of subscription plan than the typical Western one of individual users playing in their homes and paying a monthly fee. Against that background, I think that WoW's numbers, regardless of what one wants to say about the game itself, are astoudingly impressive because most of them are the monthly subs in Western countries ... there's never really been an online game that has managed to get that many people willing to pay a monthly sub, even EQ (and again, I would not count Lineage or Lineage II because their sub plans work very differently and are focused on how people game in Korea, which is different from the West).
In terms of why fantasy predominates, I'm not sure that it is because it is inherently more popular than sci-fi. If you go to a bookstore or flick on the TV or movies, there's really just as much, if not more, sci fi out there as there is fantasy. I think that it is a lot *harder* to do sci fi in an MMORPG setting, however, than it is to do fantasy, because there are established RP models for fantasy (beginning with the grandaddy of them all D&D), with roles and expectations and an entire canon on how things should work, while there really isn't the same thing for sci-fi. As it turns out, it's hard to match people's sci-fi expectations because they are so broad ... a lot of folks like space-based games (and a game like EVE fits that bill or E&B tried to), some like futuristic ground-based environments (Anarchy Online tried that but never got as popular as the fantasy ones, SWG is an example, but that has the benefit of coming with an established "canon" of its own about different kinds of character types and the like) and some like a mish mash of both, but the point is that there isnt the same kind of established canon for sci-fi RPing as there is for fantasy RPing, which makes it easier to match expectations when making a fantasy RPG than a sci-fi RPG ... it's more or less another take on an established model, whereas a sci-fi game has less to work with in terms of an established model (unless you have a model pre-made like SWG has with the entire SW canon behind it), so whatever model is picked tends to attract fewer fans. Take EVE ... it's a great space game, but it turns out that a lot of people like to also have their characters under their physical control, and not just ships, and the people who like games with just ships like to have more manual control over their ships than EVE allows ... so you really can't win with the sci-fi genre. As a result I think a lot of developers have stayed away from sci-fi genre games ... why bother with something risky like that when you could do another take on the established fantasy genre and have a huge market ready and waiting for you, and whose expectations are relatively easy to gauge?
In further support of this perspective you can also foist up AO's greatest period of success came with their Shadowlands expansion, which drove the game far closer to the classic Fantasy genre than the Sci-Fi genre. Shadowlands was, to paint a broad abstract, EverQuest on Rubi-Ka.
The numbers are somewhat distorted by the fact that the way Lineage II's subscription plans work in Asia is very different. It's really not comparing apples to apples when you compare what Lineage II does there with what WoW has done for example. Lineage II has most of its subs in Asia, and most of them in Korea, and many of those through internet cafes where people play for a certain period of time and pay for it that way. It's really a very different model of subscription plan than the typical Western one of individual users playing in their homes and paying a monthly fee. Against that background, I think that WoW's numbers, regardless of what one wants to say about the game itself, are astoudingly impressive because most of them are the monthly subs in Western countries ... there's never really been an online game that has managed to get that many people willing to pay a monthly sub, even EQ (and again, I would not count Lineage or Lineage II because their sub plans work very differently and are focused on how people game in Korea, which is different from the West).
In terms of why fantasy predominates, I'm not sure that it is because it is inherently more popular than sci-fi. If you go to a bookstore or flick on the TV or movies, there's really just as much, if not more, sci fi out there as there is fantasy. I think that it is a lot *harder* to do sci fi in an MMORPG setting, however, than it is to do fantasy, because there are established RP models for fantasy (beginning with the grandaddy of them all D&D), with roles and expectations and an entire canon on how things should work, while there really isn't the same thing for sci-fi. As it turns out, it's hard to match people's sci-fi expectations because they are so broad ... a lot of folks like space-based games (and a game like EVE fits that bill or E&B tried to), some like futuristic ground-based environments (Anarchy Online tried that but never got as popular as the fantasy ones, SWG is an example, but that has the benefit of coming with an established "canon" of its own about different kinds of character types and the like) and some like a mish mash of both, but the point is that there isnt the same kind of established canon for sci-fi RPing as there is for fantasy RPing, which makes it easier to match expectations when making a fantasy RPG than a sci-fi RPG ... it's more or less another take on an established model, whereas a sci-fi game has less to work with in terms of an established model (unless you have a model pre-made like SWG has with the entire SW canon behind it), so whatever model is picked tends to attract fewer fans. Take EVE ... it's a great space game, but it turns out that a lot of people like to also have their characters under their physical control, and not just ships, and the people who like games with just ships like to have more manual control over their ships than EVE allows ... so you really can't win with the sci-fi genre. As a result I think a lot of developers have stayed away from sci-fi genre games ... why bother with something risky like that when you could do another take on the established fantasy genre and have a huge market ready and waiting for you, and whose expectations are relatively easy to gauge?
Spoken like a true prodigy Nova...well said indeed.