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Aion could potentially have more subs then WoW
According to this IGN article, Aion "since its launch in Asia in March, has built up 3.5 million subscribers." 3.5 million subscribers and the game has yet to be released in Japan, Taiwan, Europe, North America, and Australia.
Now, it is unknown how exactly they are counting subscription numbers and whether or not they factor in open and closed beta numbers, but if these early numbers are any indication, then the game is rapidly expanding.
Now, the majority of world of warcraft's playerbase comes from Asia. Last year, they represented 5-6 million of the total playerbase. This playerbase has had years to build up. At the rate Aion's playerbase is growing, it may surpass the 5-6 million mark within this year. Of course Aion is not as popular to the western market as it is the Eastern market, but the Western Market will definitely add considerable numbers to Aion's playerbase.
Now we've all heard the term WoW Killer in the past: we heard it right before Vanguard came out (lol), we heard it right before AoC came out, and we also heard it right before Warhammer came out. Yet all those games failed to live up to the hype that this community gave them. Now, here comes Aion, which, in my opinion, has considerably less hype then those other games, yet already has more subs then those other games..combined.
On a side note: I think WoW is a great game and deserves all its success. Im just trying to get across that the king may be dethroned in the near future.
Comments
The thing with Vanguard, AOC, and Warhammer is that they delivered the game without features that were going to be there, major performance issues, an overall buggy experience, and lack of content, balance issues, and so on. And we bought into it at first, realized it, cancelled our subscriptions and the hype died down because of it.
Aion is going to be shipped out as a completed project. The launch won't be one of the results for failure and with the game having been out so long in other regions, I don't feel the lack of content, balance issues, and such are going to be an issue, either. We already know there's really no major performance issues and with the geniune gaming experience it does offer it will do well. Kill WOW? Who knows, don't care much, tho, as long as there's enough people playing Aion I couldn't care what the WOW population is.
Lol. I do have to admit though, AION does have something more than WoW
About 1000 times more bots.....
Boba Fett-"Reality doesn't care if you believe it."
Yea I agree with you, and to be honest, I kind of like Blizzard being the King of mmorpgs (California ftw). One thing I see that could potentially hurt Aion is the fact that people, especially the western market, view it as just another lineage 2, asian mmo grind. NCsoft is taking steps to "localize" the game for the western market but who knows if that will be enough.
+1, i mean im not too far into Aion yet, but its the first game in a long time that has me looking for ways to stay home. I look forward to each new level, they did the game right in that aspect. Its almos as if they staggered armor/weapon and skill upgrades to every other level, if i dont have any new skills coming up there is a good chance i can get some nice new gear to appease me for awhile.
The game has pretty much nothing broken about it and delivers on everything it has stated plus more, there is enough skills to diversify the fights moreso than most other games do. The graphics are spectacular and run smooth all over, the system requirements are absolutely perfect for the technology of this time, older rigs can run the game pretty well, average rigs can run the game pretty much maxed on everything. Overall im having a great time playing the CN version and am getting a couple friends to join it with me.
How could i forget the flight which just adds a whole different level and feel to the game, i have just run running and gliding down hills to get a little bit of a speed up. The speed buffs to make running not so monotonous, the transformation scrolls the stigma system the shards to increase attack damage... just all the little things and things that i dont even know about yet that make this game have another "level" so to speak.
And apparently hacking in the chinese servers...
patch 1.2 is suppose to remedy this situation somehow but it is only available for the korean servers atm.
That's because china doesn't ban the accounts only the characters.
Besides we have yet to see how NCWest will handle it here.
I doubt the gaming culture of the West will warm up to anything that's even remotely grind-heavy and PvP-centric - ever. And since I doubt NCSoft will make the type of investment that's really going to be needed to make Aion competitive in America, it will more than likely remain grind-heavy and appear shallow in the eyes of Western gamers that are accustomed to WoW.
I'm sure Aion is going to continue to do Gang Buster's in Asia and possibly even capture the crown over there one day, but I doubt it will ever sustain any kind of subscription count greater than the kinds of numbers Warhammer Online is doing in the US and Europe.
Different strokes for different folks and all that.
AoC was the only one of the three (AoC, Warhammer, and Vanguard) that was a tremendous upgrade visually. AoC had tremendous sales on this fact. However, the game was far from being ready at launch so many customers got burned and left. Most customers will not wait around till you fix the game.
I do not see this happening with Aion. NCSoft has a proven track record and lets face it the game already has been released in Korea & China. The main issue will be NCSoft's stand on bots. Western players tend to get turned off by games that are loaded with bots. I hope that NCSoft makes a hardline punishment for bots.
Yea I agree.
I mean I always laughed off all the previous "WoW killas", as it was so obvious it wasn't going to happen. I don't think WoW is a great game, and I don't think Aion is the best game ever... But it's going to be insanely popular, and that's obvious as well. It's got better WoW elements than WoW, much better PvP than WoW, much better graphics and music, it's new, it's polished, it's easy to get into, it's good looking, it scales perfectly, and it's only going to get better.
So yea personally, I think it could happen. I don't think it's KILLING WoW, but it's definetly going to be the second game to have a few millions of players.
Did i read this correctly? WOW gamers dont want a "grind heavy and shallow" game?
HA..the lore is already known if you would have read anything about the game, you would know this already.
Damn, I wanted to say this at his first post. Oh well
Zorndorf has now entered the ring.
1.6M is actually pretty accurate. Shanda announced at the end of April that they have 1M subs. The number of Chinese servers are almost double the number of Korean servers. So there you go. Around 1.5~1.6 M subs.
If they could gain an extra 2 millions in less than a month than I would have nothing to say
Like I said: I don't see it being sold as the number one PC game for the next 3 years. That would be needed to achieve Wow like numbers and that simply wont happen for a non Blizzard game with a Korean themed lore.
As for Asian numbers, there are already publishers there who say they have 100 million accounts. Yeah sure.
Um Like I said: I see it having more than a million subs in NA/EU. Not WoW numbers, but it will definitely have millions of players world wide, which it already has.
100million accounts? Lol I'd love to read this article. Can you link it please? The last number I read yesterday was 3.5million current subs.
LOL..X-Fire numbers are way off on most mmo's, so you can stop using that tired old excuse.
The only thing I know is that this game is going to be very interesting to track.
The number of Chinese servers are almost double the number of Korean servers. So there you go. Around 1.5~1.6 M subs.
113 servers in China, 41 in Korea, that's nearly triple the servers in korea.
www.aionsource.com/forum/news-announcements/14369-ncsoft-released-q1-earning-report.html
Did i read this correctly? WOW gamers dont want a "grind heavy and shallow" game?
WoW players consist of a few different groups. The first are questers use to a company that highly polishes their game. The phasing engine in WoTLK is simply amazing in the way it makes you part of the story. WoW has a huge number of quests in the game. WoW hides its grind behind repetitive quests many of which use some humor or drama to draw the player in.
The second group of WoW players is the pvpers who like the speed of WoW's combat. WoW's combat is fairly fast paced with some allowance for latency. These players are hidden from the grind by each match being unique.
Beating WoW numbers is not an easy feat. You make not like the game, but the game is extremely well polished at hiding the grind.
Even better, NCsoft will make sooooo much more money off the west with the monthly payments than the east.
60%? or so of wow is asian players (could be more, I can't recall exact numbers) and that % will rise when WotLK is released over there. Needless to say they don't make nearly as much as 11.5mil x 15 like people think.
I think this is a good point to make.
AoC and Warhammer shipped trash. Both of these titles were not finished on release. Aion was a more finished game during it's open beta than either of these titles. That's what gives it an edge. There honestly isn't half as much risk in buying Aion as there is in buying most mmo releases these days.
Almost everyone who is going to buy Aion already know what they are getting into.
However, the biggest percentage of Blizzard's earnings from WoW come from the asian market.
Aion might be a hit, but I doubt it will acheive WOW like popularity.
Game is just not well known enough by the casual gaming market, where most of WOWs' current subs reside.
But I will agree, it probably will kill in Asia.
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Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
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"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
LOL..X-Fire numbers are way off on most mmo's, so you can stop using that tired old excuse.
A sample of 1000 people is enough to predict the exact elections result within a 2.5 % error rate of a state with ... 6.000.000 people.
Now Xfire is NOT a simple sample. It is an ON line 24/24 Hour sample based on PC play on the internet.
Meaning it is at least as accurate as all other used tools to sell TV time in commercials. The only difference is that the sample in the TV industry is based on ... 600-900 people.
The only program that could fall beyond the Xfire range is PC games that actually block Xfire ports, but most popular mmorpg's don't block Xfire.
So the SAMPLE of 200.000 to 250.000 Xfire people show a very accurate picture of what is being played on PC's on the internet. in the WESTERN world.
Tx to it we now know a lot more about the REAL number of players of all games and don't have to rely on false propaganda of newly launched mmorpg makers. Just look at RoM, War and even the number of western guys playing ... Aion at the moment.
Just remember that to have a good sample, you need at least around 600 Xfire players (or the error gets bigger than the results). But all above 600 Xfire players are very accurate in real player numbers for that game.
www.xfire.com.
The fact it is being used 24/24 hours shows it samples are right on top btw.
Im not %100 sure what you are trying to get at but I went to xfire.com just now and looked up warhammer.
2,700 players per day.
The number of Chinese servers are almost double the number of Korean servers. So there you go. Around 1.5~1.6 M subs.
113 servers in China, 41 in Korea, that's nearly triple the servers in korea.
www.aionsource.com/forum/news-announcements/14369-ncsoft-released-q1-earning-report.html
Tx.
That would simply mean they have a MAXIMUM capacity now of 154 servers.
Times 10.000 users:
That's slightly above 1.500.000 players. The moment the servers will reach 100%, they will add others.
But in no way they can host 3.5 million for the moment because they would at least need 380/400 servers to host that number.
Yep, there's no way they can host 3.5million.
However I think they've added quite a few servers since the Chinese launch. I remember it broke the 1million mark barely a few days after release, and these numbers I posted were from a few weeks ago, ones they have included in their Q1 2009 report apparently.
Zorn,
The only thing that can be concluded from any XFire statistic is that X number of XFire users are playing that game for that amount of time. You can't apply statistical inference to XFire, because XFire data isn't gathered correctly (in regards to how you're attempting to present and use it in your argument) - in fact it's the exact opposite type of data you'd require.
First, the polling needs to be truly random. In this case, and in the case of Gallup polls, the survey respondents would have to have been sampled at random from the population (meaning they are selected one at a time, with all persons in the US being equally likely to be picked at each point). As you can imagine, data gathered from XFire obviously does not match this profile.
Next, the polls you cite are accurate because they cut down on the margin of error. The margin of error depends inversely on the square root of the sample size (right here we can disregard XFire because we know it isn't a random, fair sample). I.E. a sample of 250 will give you a 6% margin of error and a sample size of 100 will give you a 10% margin of error - which is not helpful. It would provide only vague data, such as "somewhere between 40 and 50 percent of gamers are playing WoW each week". But again, XFire is a insular demographic of specialized (if you will) computer users and not a random sample of PC gamers at large. So instead of explaining why the larger number, in this case, is actually bad, and why statistics in this case operate in that fashion, I'll move on.
I could go on, and cite some sources (all off the top of my head, however, from days of yore (college)). But you get the jist, I think.