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General: Wishful Thoughts on Better Disclosure
Stradden
Managing EditorMember CommonPosts: 6,696
In this most recent column, Richard Aioshi tackles the questions of developers insist on providing players with virtually meaningless player number statistics rather than giving them something useful.
We've all seen at least some of the huge registered account numbers that various free to play games have racked up. In my case, I know I've seen 50 million and more. Maybe even 100 million and more. I don't really remember.
The primary reason such figures don't stick in my mind is that they really aren't very meaningful. The total number of accounts created - ever - isn't much help when the piece of information that most interests me is a game's current level of popularity. In that regard, what does it matter whether 100 kajillion accounts have been opened since a title launched if I jump on a server and find the world only sparsely populated? Or if I simply look and see that there are only two servers available for the entire North American market?
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Jon Wood
Managing Editor
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Comments
"It might also help address some of the knocks against it. As a case in point, how often do we see statements about how it's impossible to advance at a decent rate without paying a lot of money? Sure, it's a generalization since all games are not the same, but without adequate data, it's effectively impossible to gauge how much of a simplification it actually is. Realistically, I think few people whose minds are already made up would change their opinions."
But we have seen that they won't. I don't see how you can say "without adequate data" when dozens of developers have repeatedly stated that these games are monetized by approx 10% of the playerbase. Any player can hop ingame (because it costs absolutely nothing at all to do so) and ask the existing players about their level and how much they spend on the game.
It's not that data and the truth aren't out there. There is a vocal minority who has their minds made up, and no amount of data or truth will change that.
As for the registered users thing, I'd say it's a marketing thing. In an arena where people use the anomaly (WOW) as their gauge for the norm, your numbers really need at least 7 digits to grab someone's eye. PCU is rather meaningless to most people, and can be rather meaningless in and of itself. To pitch a PCU, most MMOs would have to qualify that with the numbers of servers that have or other data. I mean, if a game had 40k PCU in March what does that mean? How many servers do they have? How often does that occur?
Now the other part of that equation is the perception of the numbers. People think in terms of subscriptions when look at these numbers, which is why the 7-digit numbers are used in the ads. You could pitch a PCU that is twice the per server size of AOC or WAR, but when people see the number they are looking at a number lower than 300,000 or whatever the current sub numbers are for each of those games. The reader isn't going to see 40k or 60k or whatever as cool. They are going to think the servers are dead or the game is failing because, again, they came into the ad/article thinking in terms of subscriptions.
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Interesting article this time.
A MMO that shows this kind of information for the potential consumers earns a new level of respect in my opinion. Do they care? I guess not, but I support EVE in the way they have the balls to show the number of users online at all times, also with graphs of past days for comparisons.
When you can throw out a number in the millions, why even bother trying to come up with any meaningful numbers.
This industry will not change when it comes to announcing numbers, bigger is always better in their eyes.
I loved that DaoC would show the numer of users online for their servers as well. You couldn't tell which realm was more populated but the overall totals were good in my opinion. They let me pick a server that wasn't overcrowded but had a healthy population.
I wish all MMO's would show us that info. There is a reason why they don't take for instance LOTRO who everybdoy says they love however some guy used the my.lotro.com and came up with a total of 150k accounts from their xml scanner.
It is one of the reasons why i recently went back to eq2, not enough content or folks to play with
Well going with the Free Realms example...
Making announcements of millions of accounts does, unfortunately, work. It generated news and even made a number of people hype it up. It is also cheap to generate such news and does not reveal the actual situation of the game should it be performing poorly in terms of active or paying accounts.
So as long as it works, by generating news and interests, we'll keep seeing more of them.
And that is why...
Conservatives' pessimism is conducive to their happiness in three ways. First, they are rarely surprised -- they are right more often than not about the course of events. Second, when they are wrong they are happy to be so. Third, because pessimistic conservatives put not their faith in princes -- government -- they accept that happiness is a function of fending for oneself. They believe that happiness is an activity -- it is inseparable from the pursuit of happiness.
i too wish like the author:(
I agree as well. It is very nice to be able to see the population on a server. I would also like to see it listed which servers are US and such. I say this cause I tried out one game and I swear I don't think anyone spoke English. There was like four servers at the time and only one that had a fair amount of english speaking peeps on it. This also would be very useful to know.
Gikku
I understand the context of the article is wishful thinking.....but isn't every product ever marketed the latest breakthrough in innovated design? Every car ad I've seen for the last 25 years indicates that god himself has crafted this particular car and the meaning of life can be obtained forthwith.
We will never see honesty in marketing, it will simply never happen. It would be nice to know how many people are playing UO or EQ or the latest game but I tend to support games that I enjoy based on the game, not on its popularity. I do not think how popular something is is a yardstick to measure anything, but that is just me.
I don't want to detract from the article because I think it was meant to by hypothetical, having said that I think truthful disclosure would only end up hurting the people who have crafted a game with god's hands.
actually I think truthful marketing would help to give people a more realistic view of what to expect from any product, which might actually help the industry.
I think this false marketing hype is what causes players to not only be disappointed but to go even further down the spiral of bitterness and angst. How many times will players get burned by hype before they just give up on the mmo genre as a whole?
That's another big issue. The numbers would be used against a game. Let's say a game has 400 PCU average on each server. It has a great community and, for the game that it is, it has an active server. Well, if everyone else has 1,000 PCU or if the general perception is that 1000 PCU is "needed" then your average MMO gamer will summarily write off the 400 PCU MMO because the servers are dead. This in turn contributes to the reduction of new blood coming in which is exacerbated by the normal trend of established players eventually leaving the server, the server getting more 'dead' and it just cascades down.
Honestly, if the numbers came out for each person's favorite MMO, many of them would be "OMG that game is sooo dead!" or "What happened to the community?" Most MMO gamers will put the perception of a number and arbitrary expectations above what they are actually experiencing. We see that consistently.... an MMO needs X amount of subs to be a success.... a server needs y amount of people or it's dead.... a game needs z amount of revenue to survive. The numbers are based on a perception of what should be as calculated by data pulled from the collective asses of the forum going masses. Anything above the perceived number is a success (or hype/lies from the developer) anything below is "fail" or "dead."
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Richard Aioshi ! keep on a good work
Love your articles. Just wanted to say this.
Eve:Online on their opening screen had information on their servers, such as "15,000 active users" which would update every several seconds so that you could judge peak times and so forth before you began to play. Through this system many sites could keep their own track of how many players were playing and not how many accounts.
"However, what about those who haven't decided - perhaps because they feel they don't have enough information to make an informed judgment?"
I think you answered your own question as to why companies don't provide disclosure. If people are in the dark, they may take a chance and spend money on your game, whereas if they know no one is playing it, they won't. Companies don't want people to have enough information to make an informed judgment, because in most cases, that judgment would be that the game is either a) low population, or b) likely to require more than they want to spend to be successful.
Of course this isn't the case with all games, the really successful ones probably could disclose their information with little adverse affect. The majority of games that are simply struggling to survive really don't stand to benefit from letting people see behind the curtain.
dunno, but i personally have never cared about any stats on any mmo, its either fun or it isn't to me. am i supposed to care that wow has a bazillion users if i think the game sucks? is that number supposed to make me change my mind or something?
if the premise/mechanics/graphics/story of a game get me interested, then i'm in, anything else matters only tot he bean counters.... well, and the sheep i suppose.
This is primarily a western issue, most Asian companies release these figures, an example is Perfect World, we don't know the breakdown per territory, but we do know they do have 50,000,000 active users and a peak concurrent users of 650,000, with an average spend per paying user in a month of about $25.
I'm going to assume the VAST majority of those people are playing in China, but never the less, it gives some good indicators of the free to play market, as whilst tastes differ between territories, those drawn to the game will generally be similiar across all territories.
Now I ask you this, given these impressive albeit vague figures, if another company published anything LESS, would it damage their chances of gaining new players?
Isn't the community sufficiently fickle that they will be swayed by peer pressure? Big numbers, flashy images and elaborate feature lists are what get people to TRY games, even if it is the game itself that makes them stay or leave.
Can companies afford to have less people try their game because they have published uninspiring or low figures?
I don't think they can, I've not seen any sign that import free to play MMOs can match the figures they achieve in Asia or any of the figures you get from a good subscription game.
Looking at the list of available free to play games, I'd say Runes of Magic is perhaps the most popular on that list in the west, but judging by number of servers and visible in-game population, I doubt it matches the figures of Lord of the Rings Online or Warhammer Online, and I suspect the average spend per paying user is sufficiently more than the price of a subscription per month for those who do spend in it. So why would you publish the figures?
I have to say Mr.Aioshi finally got one of his F2P topics correct.Yes it is all about FAKE subscription numbers and yes ,it does not mean anything.The funny thing,is that even the P2P games do the EXACT same thing.One has to remember stock market,shares,HYPE,it all adds up to more POTENTIAL players and more money down the road.If a game releases factual numbers like say 100k players,then everyone wil lsay that is nothing compared tothe OTHER games,and it will lose hype and popularity fast.
I think as far as item mall helping advancement,i would say in all of my experience,it DOES.Most games offer MANY ways to make your game advance faster and easier and safer.The other bad part,is that MOST F2P games need a much larger monthly cost to reach the standards of a P2P game.It is obvious as to why this is,it is because it's a system designed to bring in masses and have the rich pay the way for the freeloaders
Back to the FACTUAL sub numbers topic,the "real" thing that matters is how many are supporting the game with money,because that is all that matters and how much does it cost on average to get everything a REAL P2P game offers?
I would say the answers to both are around 5% pay money supporting the game and 50+a month to reach anything close to a P2P games standards.So the F2p game sreally have a nice setup to draw i nthe numbers ,so thje game looks busy,and yet still make a decent profit from the people that spend 50+ a month.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Some interesting articles I found which do give some real statistics on subscription and freebie+microtransaction model mmos.
1) The subscription mmo market is, despite cries of "global financial crisis" growing, and that growth is also on the rise outside of World of Warcraft.
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=23003
2) Maple Story gives statistics saying they have 6 million registered users and that equates to an income of approximately 100k subscribers.
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=24557
3) Some detailed statistics from Puzzle Pirates, which has both a subscription and freebie+MT version of the game.
http://www.mmorpg-center.com/story-479-The-Revenues-behind-the-Free-MMORPG.html
4) Not an article, but a poll started by a Champions Online forum member, to get a feel for potential players' reactions to CO's controversial decision to charge both a subscription and have a microtransaction shopping mall. The pattern of results paints a fairly clear picture that mixing these two models has low appeal.
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/243937/A-preferred-payment-model-poll.html
I know many MMO's present these nonsense numbers but WoW is truly to blame for this. I mean they still spout off about 11 million accounts/copies sold but how many players are playing right now ? That's what I want game devs to disclose and its why I join high population servers whenever I play a game because a medium or lower brings the risk of dying popularity and then nobody to group with making me quit too. There should be some kind of rule passed that they should disclose subscriber numbers or amount of accounts tied to a certain server (not character amounts if one account can have 8 characters on a server).
If you are running an MMO Game would you disclose that your game having a huge decline of number of users? Will you say "We have 100k registered player but only 1K are active players, and 99k are composed Inactive and Duplicate accounts.."
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I have consistently pointed out to Mr Aioshi that his wild claims about how well F2P/RMT’s are doing in the West are based on no data.
Now he seems to have worked this out for himself, bravo. But I am sure it won’t be long before he his telling us once again that F2P/RMT is making enormous inroads into the western market and so on. No one really knows, MMO companies are tight lipped so why make these wild statements?
No - WOW surpassed 11 million subscribers, not boxes sold.
http://www.blizzard.com/us/press/081028.html
Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. announced today that the subscribership for World of Warcraft®, its award-winning massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), now exceeds 11 million players worldwide.
No - WOW surpassed 11 million subscribers, not boxes sold.
http://www.blizzard.com/us/press/081028.html
Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. announced today that the subscribership for World of Warcraft®, its award-winning massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), now exceeds 11 million players worldwide.
That is correct, because in Asia, subscriptions to WoW are free. They pay an hourly fee, and as long as they have paid for an hour, are considered active.
We all know at this point that China alone was 5M subscriptions, but when you add in Korea, and the rest of Asia, you can easily see that ~3M are what you would call 'normal' subscriptions.
Publishers use numbers for marketing purposes... the REAL measurements are those presented to the stockholders/board... revenue. This is why F2P is the 'hot ticket' currently, because all the P2P publishers have been seeing the REAL measurements, and want a slice of that pie.
I think the very last thing they want to do is give us any idea about how much money they make off of us, even in smaller games. If we knew they were making a mint, we would be much less likely to tolerate rate increases or the inclusion of RMT / MT plus subscription models.
I'm positive these companies make good, if not obscene amounts of money off MMOs, yet they are trying their hardest to include business models that will multiply their profits. Giving us hard numbers would reveal the greed and piss us off. Or even worse, we would question why these games aren't a hell of a lot better considering their profit margins. It would likely show that they re-invest as little as they can get away with while the executives pocket the rest.
With PvE raiding, it has never been a question of being "good enough". I play games to have fun, not to be a simpering toady sitting through hour after hour of mind numbing boredom and fawning over a guild master in the hopes that he will condescend to reward me with shiny bits of loot. But in games where those people get the highest progression, anyone who doesn't do that will just be a moving target for them and I'll be damned if I'm going to pay money for the privilege. - Neanderthal
No - WOW surpassed 11 million subscribers, not boxes sold.
http://www.blizzard.com/us/press/081028.html
Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. announced today that the subscribership for World of Warcraft®, its award-winning massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), now exceeds 11 million players worldwide.
That is correct, because in Asia, subscriptions to WoW are free. They pay an hourly fee, and as long as they have paid for an hour, are considered active.
We all know at this point that China alone was 5M subscriptions, but when you add in Korea, and the rest of Asia, you can easily see that ~3M are what you would call 'normal' subscriptions.
Publishers use numbers for marketing purposes... the REAL measurements are those presented to the stockholders/board... revenue. This is why F2P is the 'hot ticket' currently, because all the P2P publishers have been seeing the REAL measurements, and want a slice of that pie.
How very interesting.
http://gigaom.com/2006/08/29/world-of-warcraft-2/
Perhaps the most extraordinary figure behind World of Warcraft’s success is its 5 million registered players in China alone. But unlike US and EU players, who each pay a subscriber fee of about $15 a month, Chinese pay to play by the hour, and what they pay isn’t much: the yuan equivalent of $.04/hour. And while they play a lot, this also means total revenue from China is just 15% of WoW’s Western market. ($30 million versus $200 million, in 2006’s second quarter.)
But the whole free-to-play being a hot ticket - it's not that free-to-play games are achieving higher revenues, rather they tend to have very low development costs.
Looking at revenue, most of the top 10 for 2008 were triple A subscription mmos, and the market for these games continues to grow.
http://www.fatfoogoo.com/2009/02/free-to-play-maple-story-ranks-among-top-moneymaking-mmo%E2%80%99s-of-2008/
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=23003