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For those who say the devs don't care...

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  • celdridgeceldridge Member Posts: 188



    Originally posted by baff

    The december figures for COH had it at 193,000 players.
    That's the best yet.
     



    Could you tell me where that info came from? I usually use MMOGCHART.com but the site has not been updated since October.


     

  • baffbaff Member Posts: 9,457

    They release all the figures in the quarterly investor reports you can find them for download in the investor section at http://www.ncsoft.com/eng/nccompany/ir_data_report01.asp

    My mistake the number they give is 194,000

    Lying to investors is punishable by prison just about everywhere. I'm pretty confident that they are telling the truth.

    There is also a nifty little list of all Statesman's bosses on that report. Great people to slag him off to. I graced them all with my opinion of COH tech support a few times. I bet they all have me on their email spam filters now! Bless 'em.

    @jdun1

    I'm not very confident about DC's superhero game yet.

    What has me more worried than SOE's involvement is that it's also being released on the PSP. If the PSP version links to the same servers as the PC version, the game must be pretty low spec. It will be intresting to see what they come up with.

    And while COH is most definitely dead for me, subscriptions seemed to be at a record high after the COV release.They were losing customers during the summer of nerfs, while Statesman was busy claiming they were gaining them almost 10% had dropped out from June to September. But COV seems to have been a hit.

    I'll be intrested to see if they have maintained the subscriptions this quarter or if COV was just a blip as per my predictions of doom. (Or if they fail to declare them completely as they sometimes do).

  • triketrike Member Posts: 83


    I'll be intrested to see if they have maintained the subscriptions this quarter or if COV was just a blip as per my predictions of doom. (Or if they fail to declare them completely as they sometimes do).

    I'd like to see a breakdown of subscribers per region and per game. Since that 194k includes both US and Europe as well as CoH and CoV, it's difficult to tell how many people are playing what and where. In the US, it seems as if most of the action is in CoV, but there's no way to determine that from the supplied figures.

    People playing CoH/US are using the term "ghost town" to describe many of the servers, so it would seem that CoV has the greater number of players. With Issue 7 focussing primarily on CoV content (like 98% of the new content), that would tend to back up that assumption.

    If there are new nerfs in Issue 7, that would definitely be a huge blow to the game's popularity. Despite the assertions of some of these rabid dev supporters, there is zero evidence that any of the major nerfs (Global Defense Nerf, Suppression, ED) were ever asked for or suggested by the playerbase.

  • SerlingSerling Member Posts: 662

    FWIW, all I have to go on is anecdotal evidence. My brother and his son both have subscriptions, but they hardly play anymore. When I talked to him this morning, he said the game wasn't as fun as it usd to be.

    My other brother left the game shortly after I did in July of 05. All of us were in an SG and had level 50s.

    When I went back in January to check things out, the CoH servers were nowhere near as busy as they had been on a Saturday afternoon just a year earlier. Many people I chatted with in-game said whole super groups had folded and people were still leaving the game.

    I'd just like to point out that subscription does not equal player. While subscriptions may have spiked, the game isn't holding the players the way it used to before all the nerfs. That - IMHO - is the biggest red flag that the game is dying. Further, more than a year ago (January 2005), I was one of those players that had 2 subscriptions running concurrently. Other people I knew had 3 and 4. When my brother's and his son's finally lapse, that will be 2 more gone.

    When Jack finally achieves his "balance vision" of "3 white minions = 1 hero" that will be the final nail in the coffin. No one plays a game about superheroes to get their a$$ kicked by 3 guys throwing rocks at them.

    On another note, my bro sent me DDO to check out. He said it's very cool, just as he raved about CoH when it was first released. Looking forward to checking that out next week.

    In the meantime, Cryptic pissed this former customer off for the last time.

  • exchangerateexchangerate Member Posts: 9

    Has anyone bought anything from lootpal.com?

    I have started to hear good things about them from others. Any opinions?


    image

  • YeeboYeebo Member UncommonPosts: 1,361

    One thing that i think folks tend to lose sight of is that any game that runs at a net profit is in fact succesfull. 150-200K subscribers might not seem like many compared to 6 million, but it's more than enough to support ongoing development and keep the game going with a tidy profit. I seriouly doubt the ongoing cost of running and developing for CoH exceeds 2-3 million per month. Saying that a game that doesn't have 6 million subs is a failure is like saying that Paris (2 million) isn't a real city because is doesn't have as many inhabitants as Mexico City (25 million). That's completley dumb.

    I've seen estimates that a game has to pick up around 200K subscribers near launch to make back development costs, and that it needs around 50K to remain profitable once it's going. While obviously an oversimplification*, it sounds reasonable to me for something like CoH that was only indevelopment for a few years and didn't have a really huge team. Once CoH gets down below 50K subscribers, then we can start talking about it being a finacial failure, imo. And I seriously doubt that will happen anytime soon.

    *Trivia fact: I recently read an article that put the development costs of WoW at around 40 million. In other words the game needed to be much more of a smash hit than something like CoH to recoup development costs in the first few months after launch. The person being interviewed speculated that if WoW had been a big flop, it would have actually hurt the MMORPG market because publishers would have been unwilling to risk that kind of money on future projects.

    I don't want to write this, and you don't want to read it. But now it's too late for both of us.

  • TorchwoodTorchwood Member Posts: 76
    My beef with Jack and the game.  With the comic books and ccg, it feels like the game is only meant to showcase how great the Charactors used by the Devs are.  Statesman and the like.  The players feel like sidekicks, not heros.  West Coast Avengers.  The no-names in pro wrestling.  Sure your in the game, but your never going to be a hero.

    ruat caelum

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