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whats a decent sub number for a MMO?
geemonkey
Member Posts: 91
As the topic suggests.
what do you think is a good number of subscriptions for an MMORPG/FPS to have to give the players the feeling that he is truly playing in a world that is densly populated and yet at the same time profitable for the Devs?
dont all vote for the highest one, i want to know what minimaly is good for a company.
...and no 2 million+...thats ubsurd.
I'd have to guess anywhere betwen 300,000+
give a personal oppinion as to what you think as long as voting on the poll, its there for a convinience...not to be used as a reply.
Comments
I doubt theres more than a couple of MMO's that have more than 100k subs apart from EQ and WoW on each continent.
Your number ranges should go up in powers of 20 thousand. 0-20k, 20-40k etc.
I used the term "decent" MMO, as in a game that is well heard of and is reletativly successful. and besides even games like Runescape have 100,000+ subs all active playing (not that i play it any longer just last time i checked which was about 1 month ago that was what the server message said).
perhaps your numbers are off? or you play some really old MMO's.
Oh, and just to prove my point, a game as low quality as Runescape has 104,967 subs pplaying at 12:02 Am (eastern time) so...
And if your refering to "continent" as a server...ya i havent seen a server hold more than 20,000 simply because...they cant!
I am simply asking OVERALL subscribers...not servers.
I don't think how many Subscribers a game has really matters at all unless we're talking about EVE since there is only one server. How many people per server is what you should be asking, and I promise you it won't be anywhere near 100k per. Then again besides EVE I don't know any games that actually show how many people are playing on a server in numbers.
Anyway, i'd say a good subscription number is around 200K+. At that point the game should have a pertty well established community depending on how long its been out. In fact I would prefer a game with around 200k subscribers over one with 8 million.
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100k is good. It mean over a million in profit every month and the sold boxes that add on them.
200k is great.
500k+ is legendary.
20k-50k can be fine, although relatively modest, depending on how much it cost to create and many various factors.
- "If I understand you well, you are telling me until next time. " - Ren
If 500k is legendary.
Then what the hell is 8 million?
I think it depends on the size the game was built for...
This game i use to play called astonia 2.. the game was full when there was 100 people online. And the game was packed at that point... peope everywhere. It was because everything took place in 1 city.
Now for a game with very large open areas you need way more people to fill the space. Runescape for example fills up each of its servers with 2,000 people each. When the servers are full there are people everywhere in cities and training spots might be hard to come by.
When i played eve trail there may have been 100k subscribers but I didn't see anyone else... in my whole 3 days of playing i might have seen 50 people... whereas in astonia a game with only 100 people playing i could have seen 50 people in 10 minutes by just walking around.
Its all about how many people the game is designed for.
If 500k is legendary.
Then what the hell is 8 million?
GODLIKE
Short answer: Almost every big MMORPG right now is between 100-200k subscribers in NA. This includes EQ, EQ2, FFXI, CoX, DDO, SWG, DAoC, and maybe EVE.
Ridiculously long answer: It really depends on location.
In terms of North American subscribers (I include the US, Canada, Australia, and a handful of far west Asian nations, as these groups are usually lumped together for NA servers and NA sub numbers), the biggest is WoW. The last official figures I read (that was about eighteen months ago) said that NA subscribers make up about 20% of their total, so if you want to use that percentage, they probably have around 1.6 million now. Before WoW, the biggest NA releases came close but didn't quite top 500k. A possible exception is Runescape. It looks to have around 750k subscribers, but I really have no idea how many are in what areas. Aside from those, pretty much all the big names in the market are hovering at around 100-200k NA subscribers. This includes EQ, EQ2, FFXI, CoX, DDO, SWG, DAoC, AC (just kidding, it's as dead as UO), and EVE. Out of those, almost all are in decline. The only exception is EVE. The last eighteen months seems to have been pretty hard on the industry outside of Asia, but I suspect consumers are just getting tired of the current generation of MMORPG's.
If you look at Europe, the picture changes drastically. Very few MMORPG's have had any kind of success with European localizations. I believe the top before WoW was something like 50k concurrent subscribers among all European localizations for a single game. That might have simply been because many American and Asian games didn't localize for European nations, something which has proven to be a huge mistake on their parents. WoW now has around as many European players as NA players, which is something I consider amazing. I don't really know much about native European MMORPG's, though.
Once you go to Asia, numbers inflate rapidly. The majority of WoW's 8 million accounts are here. Lineage and Lineage 2 were the old kings, but they're now old news in many ways. Even so, they're still both comfortably over one million in terms of Asian players alone. That's not even exceptional in that market. To give you an idea, the best number I can find pegs total subscription revenues in Korea at 0.533 billion USD in 2004. Given the meteoric growth rate of their market, it's probably somewhere between 0.7 and 0.9 billion USD now.
Well, I always felt I had much more companionship playing Anarchy Online, with its less than 100K subscribers and only two servers than WOW.
Its not the number of people to be honest, its how they are distributed.
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
Hemingway
"This is not a game to be tossed aside lightly.
It should be thrown with great force"
100k+ subs is a success for a mmorpg, but it always depends on production costs.. WoW maybe would be not a success with such less subs, on the other side, every mmorpg from a small studio is a success with around 50k subs.
To the europe part, before WoW, DAoC was a big success in europe(most successful mmorpg), and one of the first full localized mmorpgs here in europe, and with 100k+ subs just in europe, and over 60k subs just in germany.
However, as a lot said before, WoW is really far from any normal subscriber amount, and can not really be count.. and i predict, that it will take some time, before another mmorpg in NA or Europe will have just a similar high subscriber number.
About what talk you here? A normal mmorpg? or Eve like game?
The normal mmorpg server is usually limited with around 3k-5k player at the same time.
DAoC as example was capped at 3,5k, in WoW it is a similar number.
How much player fit into one server depends a lot on the mmorpg and the size of the world, and nothing else.
Well at the last official count [november] Eve had 180,000 subs and around 24,000 people online at there highest peak on one server And an average online numer of 18,000.
So i voted based on that.
It is wothy noting tho that the Peak number is now 33,000 and the average has gone up to 19,000.
As to the main subject you dont need any more than 100,000 people to make a good successfull mmo as this kind of cash ensures the mmo will survive and will have enough profit to occasionally have hardware upgrades and repairs which will be needed.
Concerning eve's subscription numbers i wonder what they will be like when we can walk around outside ower ships on the stations and planets of EvE
About what talk you here? A normal mmorpg? or Eve like game?
The normal mmorpg server is usually limited with around 3k-5k player at the same time.
DAoC as example was capped at 3,5k, in WoW it is a similar number.
How much player fit into one server depends a lot on the mmorpg and the size of the world, and nothing else.
And how many players do you think are on a server to fill it with 3.5k at one time. 3.5k subscriptions and everyone is on 24/7? or above 3.5k and people are on at different times of the day? If you put average playtime for a person at 6 hours, you will need 4 times that amount to fill the server for 24 hours If you count on 3.5k a server, that would be 14k subscriptions ot fill the server with an average playtime of 6 hours. I am counting on a lower average playtime, since evolution of MMOS show an increase in casual players, raising that number a bit to somewhere in the 20k area per server.
Or... I just pull numbers out of my arse, and you had really counted on your "numbers straight from the server selection screen". You decide.
"This is not a game to be tossed aside lightly.
It should be thrown with great force"
*shrug* question is a bit daft, from the owners POV, more subs = better. from the players point of view more subs = who cares, as long as my server is around the ideal population.
About what talk you here? A normal mmorpg? or Eve like game?
The normal mmorpg server is usually limited with around 3k-5k player at the same time.
DAoC as example was capped at 3,5k, in WoW it is a similar number.
How much player fit into one server depends a lot on the mmorpg and the size of the world, and nothing else.
And how many players do you think are on a server to fill it with 3.5k at one time. 3.5k subscriptions and everyone is on 24/7? or above 3.5k and people are on at different times of the day? If you put average playtime for a person at 6 hours, you will need 4 times that amount to fill the server for 24 hours If you count on 3.5k a server, that would be 14k subscriptions ot fill the server with an average playtime of 6 hours. I am counting on a lower average playtime, since evolution of MMOS show an increase in casual players, raising that number a bit to somewhere in the 20k area per server.
Or... I just pull numbers out of my arse, and you had really counted on your "numbers straight from the server selection screen". You decide.
Ok, i understand, and yeap, it is like you said it. I counted just the players on the server at the same time, but of course you need 4-6 times of this number as subscribers.
I couldn't talk with any authority on how many accounts a games company needs to make it worthwhile. I guess that all depends on the overheads (paying staff, servers, marketing...).
From a player's point of view, I usually prefer a smaller population. Other players everywhere would be as unattractive as an empty world to me. For me, a good community is one where it's possible to get to know most of the regular players, or at least have heard of them and know them by reputation. I guess if I was to put a number on that, it would probably be less than 3000 on a server, accounting for casual gamers. I can't be too sure of that figure, because you also have to allow for new players coming and going. So let's say a number in the hundreds on at any one particular time of day.
If it isn't a greedy company as Blizzard and SOE my guess would be:
50 Developers
$5.000 in monthly pay
3 years Development(Minimum)
= $3.000.000
So if the company charges $60 for the game, and $15 in subscription
You would need far from 50.000 people to even buy the game... and as soon as the game is done, you dont even need that high income to keep 10 developers active. And the maintenence of servers and silly GMs... If your game really is that buggy it requires 5000000 Game Masters, as WoW has.
But in the terms what _I_ think a good MMO should have of subscribers, it really depends on the game world, and the activity of the community. But i don't think i would settle for less than 50.000 subscribers... As the ideal game would be all on the same server, and 50k subscribers should keep plenty of activity on a single realm
))
Futilez - Mature MMORPG Community
Correcting people since birth.
I find it amazing that by 2020 first world countries will be competing to get immigrants.
Provided we limit ourselves to true western style subscriptions, 50 000 is enough to keep a game going. 100 000+ is enough to make most games a financial success.
If we are talking about Chinese subscriptions you need a lot more because the financial model is different. For example China makes up nearly 60% of all WoW accounts but only generates a couple million $ per month for Vivendi.
If it is a good mmorpg that doesnt consist of way to much land just to grind I would say 5000 players is enough to make it massive.
When interaction is the main theme of the game then you really don't need numbers over 100k