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Free Realms Closing In On 5 Million - SOE Haters On Suicide Watch?
Needasow
Member Posts: 7
Comic-Con 09: SOE's Free Realms 'Close To' 5 Million Users
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=24557
Can see it breaking 10 million once it hits the millions of PS3 out there. Even going with a modest estimate, Sony has to be racking in the profits from the in game sales just from seeing the large percentage of people in the game with paid for items.
Comments
If it was a P2P game I'd be impressed, but it's not so I'm like
I made an account at release where I played like 20 mins maybe, never to play again as of yet. I just couldn't get into the game, and it pretty much made me feel like a douche seeing how much it's aimed at kids.
And yet, if they were so successful, they would be hiring people, not the opposite.
5 million accounts that have tried it because it was free.
What I'd be more interested in is how many people play each week and how many people actually spend money in the game.
Not even that, you don't even need to download the client to create an account and become part of the 5M crowd. All you need is a browser.
LMAO, that's the best thread title i ever read.
"The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand."
- Lewis Thomas
When I first read this reply, I thought "Man, did I already reply to this thread?"
But then I saw your nick, and I realised you weren't me. But that's exactly how I felt.
This post is hilarious. I wonder if the OP reads the news at all, like SOE laying off 5% of it's workforce?
Just to get you up to speed in the f2p industry, they announce anyone who has ever breathed on their website as a registered user. So essentially those numbers are completely meaningless.
The telling post is SOE laying of people, that tells you the Free Realms is not the panecea that SOE was hoping for and that there are few paying customers, which in the end is the bottom line.
Oh and you used the word "hater" which immediately qualifies you as a verifiable troll. Critic would be the proper word, learn to use it.
I think the OP is not only conveniently ignoring the recent SOE layoffs but is also failing to connect a few of the dots in this article.
Free Realms is approaching 5 million registered users - that only tells us how many people have signed up for what amounts to a free trial.
And going by the statistics reported for Maple Story, we'd estimate that at best this only gives Free Realms an income equivalent to approximately 100k subscribers.
He credited his company's successful introduction of the MMO Maple Story to the West. With Maple Story's revenue accrued in 2007, microtransaction revenue provides the equivalent of about 120,000 monthly paying users in more traditional subscription-based games. The game reaches over 6 million free and paying registered users in the United States with little marketing effort so far.
An educated fact filled comparison. Unfortunately it doesn't fit the OP's agenda and will be dismissed by them.
lol its summer you wont get me in mmo while bikini babes are raging on the beach lol,i bet everybodys the same ,but i can say when september comes it will reach 10 million easy this is one if not the best family game
An educated fact filled comparison. Unfortunately it doesn't fit the OP's agenda and will be dismissed by them.
So, 1.5 million dollars a month in revenue is a bad thing? If anything, green's post supports the OP's position.
- RPG Quiz - can you get all 25 right?
- FPS Quiz - how well do you know your shooters?
Registered user's mean NOTHING for a free to play MMO. Somone on here already posted a screen shot of the server menu where all but 2 or 3 had light populations. Seeing as Free Realm's servers aren't that big, that isn't good.
Tried: LotR, CoH, AoC, WAR, Jumpgate Classic
Played: SWG, Guild Wars, WoW
Playing: Eve Online, Counter-strike
Loved: Star Wars Galaxies
Waiting for: Earthrise, Guild Wars 2, anything sandbox.
An educated fact filled comparison. Unfortunately it doesn't fit the OP's agenda and will be dismissed by them.
So, 1.5 million dollars a month in revenue is a bad thing? If anything, green's post supports the OP's position.
Not really. 100k subscribers is by no means bad, but it is by no means the raging success SOE is trying to proclaim it to be with these announcements.
Tried: LotR, CoH, AoC, WAR, Jumpgate Classic
Played: SWG, Guild Wars, WoW
Playing: Eve Online, Counter-strike
Loved: Star Wars Galaxies
Waiting for: Earthrise, Guild Wars 2, anything sandbox.
An educated fact filled comparison. Unfortunately it doesn't fit the OP's agenda and will be dismissed by them.
So, 1.5 million dollars a month in revenue is a bad thing? If anything, green's post supports the OP's position.
100k subscribers is not a runaway success. Since it's an inferior quality cashshop game which costs less to produce, it is profitable, but those numbers will shrink as all new games start off with higher values at first because of looky lous.
Obviously Free Realms isn't making enough money to support the 5% workforce dead weight released from all of SOE's other failed games.
An educated fact filled comparison. Unfortunately it doesn't fit the OP's agenda and will be dismissed by them.
So, 1.5 million dollars a month in revenue is a bad thing? If anything, green's post supports the OP's position.
Maple story is offered in a dozen languages in as many countries around the world. I don't think they are a fair comparison at this point, especially since free realms isn't localized for the eastern market where rmt is more widely accepted.
It doesn't matter how many free accounts a game can register on a website when this is the heaviest loads the servers see.
Free realms can claim all the millions of user accounts it wants, but at some point those have to materialize into people who log in and play the game. Otherwise they are just millions of people who don't spend money on the game.
Think of it this way. If warhammer online claimed roughly 500,000 new players sign up for the US trial each week (which is the same as soes claims for free realms), but they only had 1 heavy population server and 1 medium population server, would anyone believe that warhammer was a raging success by those numbers?
What happens when soe releases another statement that free realms has hit 6 million registered users, but still only has 1 high population server? What about when they claim 10, 11, 12 million users?
As far as I can tell free realms has the worst retention rate in the mmo industry right now.
I made an account and played for around 10 minutes. Am I one of those 5 million? Hells no=)
An educated fact filled comparison. Unfortunately it doesn't fit the OP's agenda and will be dismissed by them.
So, 1.5 million dollars a month in revenue is a bad thing? If anything, green's post supports the OP's position.
Not really. 100k subscribers is by no means bad, but it is by no means the raging success SOE is trying to proclaim it to be with these announcements.
Eh... you got a point.
- RPG Quiz - can you get all 25 right?
- FPS Quiz - how well do you know your shooters?
Ha ha ... WOW has more hours than all the other MMOs added together. I agree. Maple Story & ROM are not doing too badly.
This 5 million number for Free realms is stupid.
Everyone knows you can;t possibly consider sign ups into your sub number in a f2p game.
If anything FR has about 100k users that give sony money maybe less.
Playing: EvE, Ryzom
Anyone who has played the game would understand just how small the gameworld is and just how few people it would take to fill up all the real estate in the game to the point of over crowding. I'm not saying you have not played, but I thought it worthwhile to add to your comments in general.
If you stood at the center of the game world and walked in any direction, you would run out of gameworld within 5-6 minutes of average unmodified run speed. There is so little gameworld to live in, even a decent amount of players would overwhelm the gameplay area. Really it is just a little bigger than hellfire peninsula in wow.
Even running around to most populated server and there is plenty of area where you will not see another player. The other servers are ghost towns. There are a few games with 100k populations, larger game world area for players to occupy and they all have far more populated servers than this game does.
In order to have 100k paying users, there would also be another number of free playing users which I can only guess would be sizable to the paying customers. 10 servers would struggle to support that alone even if they had more than 1-2 servers with any population on it. I doubt the game even has 100k active players, let alone paying.
Fisherprice reports biggest sales figures in ten years! Lamborghini owners on suicide watch?
Not relevant. If this forum consisted mostly of Kingdom Hearts players, it might be.
Anyone who has played the game would understand just how small the gameworld is and just how few people it would take to fill up all the real estate in the game to the point of over crowding. I'm not saying you have not played, but I thought it worthwhile to add to your comments in general.
If you stood at the center of the game world and walked in any direction, you would run out of gameworld within 5-6 minutes of average unmodified run speed. There is so little gameworld to live in, even a decent amount of players would overwhelm the gameplay area. Really it is just a little bigger than hellfire peninsula in wow.
Even running around to most populated server and there is plenty of area where you will not see another player. The other servers are ghost towns. There are a few games with 100k populations, larger game world area for players to occupy and they all have far more populated servers than this game does.
In order to have 100k paying users, there would also be another number of free playing users which I can only guess would be sizable to the paying customers. 10 servers would struggle to support that alone even if they had more than 1-2 servers with any population on it. I doubt the game even has 100k active players, let alone paying.
Well even with 100k active members you wouldnt see all of those players at once.
with 100k you would probably see 15k players on all servers at once at the most.
Hell a couple of years ago when WoW had around 4 million NA and Euro players the most you would see on at peak times were around 700k it averaged out at 400k normally.
so if they had 100k I think their servers could handle it.
Playing: EvE, Ryzom
100K isn't a bad number but that is just for people paying the 5 bucks a month. I'm willing to bet a game likes this makes a lot more money through impulse purchases for pets/clothing etc. So granted 100K is nothing, they are most likely making a good buck on the item mall side of it.
Also the 5% might not represent how Free Realms is doing since it just launched not long ago. Cutting 5% of your work force probably took some time getting that together and it finally came down after launch.
I wasn't trying to imply that all 100k would be on at the same time. I also agree that the most you would see in normal prime time is 15-20% of the total user base as several developers have said is the norm for games of this type.
15k players spread across all servers would be 1,500 per server. Could the server hardware support 1,500 players logged into a single server, maybe, but that doesn't matter. The size of the gameworld itself just could not handle that, because it is so tiny. People would be jammed around every little bit of content to the point it would stripmine the game. Imagine 1,500 people in hellfire peninsula every single day.
Not to mention that would be a common occurance on all 10 of the games servers, which clearly isn't the case. You can log on most of the servers and have entire zones to yourself right now. That just would not be possible if there were 1,500+ players logged in.
Just for perspective, according to the soe press releases of each million user milestone the average is over 6,400 new players joining every server every day. That is how many players would have to log into each server, every single day to keep pace with the user announcements by soe.
Just logging into the game shows that is not happening.
I'd say at this point, SOE's marketing department is really struggling. This seems to be the only game that they are bragging about in terms of subscriptions. Now don't get me wrong, if it were a pay to play game - one would have to admit that they are doing well. But no, this is a different beast altogether.
The free to play kids genre is a revolving door of players. My kids have tried their hands at nearly every one out there and heck, even reregister sometime due to lost passwords. Do they pay a dime? Nope. And this seems to be the case with others as well as I know quite a few parents whose children behave in the same patterns. They play for a bit, move on, come back and play, move on and so on. Most importantly, we parents know this behavior and rarely if ever pay for any of it. It isn't worth it and would be money lost or wasted.
Five million free accounts still amount to nearly Five million people not paying. Sure there is a marginal few who will but its still doubtful that they could generate enough money to cover the development and future staffing of the game. I see these so called Insane subnumber reports as a cry for help. You have to make it all seem like everyone is going there and thus by playing the numbers - eventually they will find the right sub total that will yield profits.
Oh and suicide watch? The only danger is for us to be drinking soda at the time of reading posts like these. Coke coming out of one's nose is quite painful. Even if you are laughing...