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Can't have 12 million when...
ThomasN7
87.18.7.148Member CommonPosts: 6,690
Asia has no subscription model. According to Blizzard anyone who purchases a game time card is considered an active subscriber. In Asia you pay buy the hour, not monthly. So there is no way you can count them as subscribers when the rest of the world pays monthly. Someone in Asia can purchase only 2 hours of gameplay and not play for the rest of the month but yet can still be considered a monthly subscriber according to Blizzard. By Blizzard's wording it fits correctly but lets not kid ourselves, there is a huge difference between paying monthly like NA/EU does and paying for game time. Anyone with the least but of common sense knows paying by the hour is not the same as paying a monthly bill.
World of Warcraft subscribers include individuals who have paid a subscription fee or have an active prepaid card to play World of Warcraft, as well as those who have purchased the game and are within their free month of access. Internet Game Room players who have accessed the game over the last thirty days are also counted as subscribers. The above definition excludes all players under free promotional subscriptions, expired or cancelled subscriptions, and expired prepaid cards. Subscribers in licensees’ territories are defined along the same rules.
Comments
Don't the pre-paid time cards expire after a while?
What would be the difference between a subscriber who played 2 hours in the last month and the Asian player who played 2 hours in the last month?
Ok, I'll bite. What is your point?
Does this make the game you play better or something? Do you have a personal agenda to bring the big bad corporation Activision-Blizzard down to its knees? I think its pretty clear to people with common sense that WoW is the most played MMO in existence. To suggest otherwise is a little silly.
Who cares, it's still the most successful western MMO. Without the asian players they still probably have 5-6 million.
And they're still paying to play the game.
I believe the pre-paid cards are 30 days of game time where you pay whatever the cost of the card is. Over in Asia they pay by the hour, something completely different than pre-paid time cards.
Ok then... they have 5 million subscriptions from the western audience alone. That blows every other MMORPG out of the water by far.
Blizzard is once again the massive beast that it has always been.
Shit...does it matter if they have 12 million?....Even if they had 3 million it'd still be 2,900,000 more than what we play LOL.
PLAYING: NOTHING!!!
PLAYED:FFXI, LotRO, AoC, WAR, DDO, Megaten, Wurm, Rohan, Mabinogi, RoM
WAITING FOR: Dust 514
No doubt WoW would be still the mostly played but the point is whey spew out the number 12 million when common sense says you really do not have 12 million. If they turned around and claimed WoW has a hybrid business model then I doubt anyone would ever question the subscriber numbers. Though Blizzard still insists that they have 12 million because their definition of a subscriber works with internet cafes. Common sense says otherwise because there is no way paying by the hour is the same as paying monthly.
And this is hurting you how?
PLAYING: NOTHING!!!
PLAYED:FFXI, LotRO, AoC, WAR, DDO, Megaten, Wurm, Rohan, Mabinogi, RoM
WAITING FOR: Dust 514
No skin off my back whatsoever but why ask me that instead of sticking to the topic ?
I dunno...curious to find out as to why this seems to bother you so much...
Regardless...WoW is raping the MMO industry by far WITH OR WITHOUT the Asian playerbase
PLAYING: NOTHING!!!
PLAYED:FFXI, LotRO, AoC, WAR, DDO, Megaten, Wurm, Rohan, Mabinogi, RoM
WAITING FOR: Dust 514
Well, the topic of WoW subs comes up fairly frequently, so I suppose the question really moves to: How do you measure Asian subs? Do you say "X Million Subs + X Number of Hours"?
I can see why Blizzard accounts for them the way they do. I mean, in order to login, someone must have paid, or be withing some sort of grace period. So, it is pretty straight forward to get something like: COUNT Players WHERE LoginDate < 30 days. Obviously, that is a very rudimentary illustration, but otherwise, they're going to end up paying a guy full time to maintain these stats given the various global pay models and how you count a person.
I think you've only hit the tip of the Iceburg though. I mean, if you look at NA subs alone, I would wager that woman should only count as 2/3 of a person. So that further deflates these numbers. (kidding of course).
-mklinic
"Do something right, no one remembers.
Do something wrong, no one forgets"
-from No One Remembers by In Strict Confidence
Put it this way In the past month, 12 million people have payed to play WOW. By the way, you read something wrong, they EXCLUDE people who have bought the box and are still within their free 30 days, and those who are playing for free in other ways. My definition is most accurate. They count people only who have payed something.
I'm sorry your game tanked and is falling apart. But look at it from ANY business perspective. They have 5 million western subscribers that pay 15 per month, then they have asian servers who pay differently. Remember, this is a press release, of course they want to make the number sound good and will include china players who have PAID in the last 30 days. The only other way they could do it is to completely IGNORE chinese players who have paid and release the 5M number. This is not a financial statement, it is a 'current players' statement... and I'm willing to bet that for every chinesse player who played 2 hours last month, there are 5 other who played 40 or more hours. These guys are crazy addicted too, they have raid progression very similar to US servers. They have people getting to 9000 acheivement points etc.
That said, lets show some other 'hype' that has come out of other companies. First, let's take Funcom, when they put out a press release saying 1.25M boxes were shipped to retailers, but worded it to sound like they sold 1.25M boxes.
Or how about Warhammer, when during the first 4 days, they announced 'accounts created', which included a ton of people who were playing for free thanks to the fact that you could pre-order the game without paying anything and create an account. They made the huge announcement, then when they turned off the feature, all those free accounts disappeared. Of course, that was AFTER they sent out the press release talking about huge number of players who have already 'created accounts'.
Finally, let's talk about EVE. The game where it is legal, and fairly easy, to pay your subscription fee using ingame currency or where there is no time limit on free accounts. Every time EVE announces something, it is always about 'players online concurrently'... they never talk about subscriptions, yet, people always quote their numbers as 'subscribers' when a large percentage of them are playing for free using ingame currency, or are on free accounts.
Blizzard has two options when they make this press release, they can count all the people who have paid to play in the last month, or they can announce all the people who have payed $15/month to play. But of course, WOW/Blizzard ruined the genre, so they have to be held to a higher standard when it comes to press releases
Regarding that part about EvE. Every bit of game time (barring trials) is paid for with real money. So, every subscription, is paid for with real money. The PLEX I buy with in-game currency game from a GTC that was bought with real-world currency. You can talk about total subscriptions and paint a picture of revenue, but it is harder to pin down "unique subscribers" in this scenario. I mean, you can try to estimate based on CC info, addresses, or something along those lines, but there will be a margin of error for sure. Point being, the accounts in EvE are free. It is more a matter of the real-life payment being shifted onto another player.
..anyhow, sorry bout the derail.
edit: added some clarity.
-mklinic
"Do something right, no one remembers.
Do something wrong, no one forgets"
-from No One Remembers by In Strict Confidence
Just a tad above EVE Online....Interesting.
So what. No matter how you rack and stack, WoW will have more peeps playing than any other NA MMO. I could give two shites less if they counted your mother's cat's dog's uncle as a subscriber because Jane Rottencrotch in BFE played in a hooka house once. I don't play it, I don't like it.
[Mod Edit]
Hey, look. 5 ton elephant in the room. Ah well.
I think everyone has a different opinion about the 12 million number VivActiBlizzard throws out, and there's a number of reasons to support or argue against the number. There's the gold farmers, for instance, who still (usually) pay for their accounts, but would be swiftly banned if they got caught.
For my part, it could be 12 million, 1.2 million, or 120 million... I still don't enjoy that elephant. Ultimately, I think that's what matters.
Today? Hmm...I wonder. I'm really interested in the objective or subjective proof that I can have to help really qualify this. I dont doubt it's sucess, but really, where it stands.
'a tad' you mean double?
And show me where EVE has released ANY information about 'paying subscribers'. The number everyone uses includes free accounts because the only thing ever released is about 'players online'. Which is the irony of this whole thread. A player accuses Blizzard of being sneaky for including people WHO HAVE PAYED TO PLAY IN THE PAST MONTH, and at the same time, we have people talking about EVE, who has never released anything about 'payed subscribers'.
So by your own definition the asian market accounts for nothing? I can throw all those Lineage 1&2, Aion, Perfect World, (soon to be) Terra and Blade & Soul numbers out the freakin door cause their way of counting paying customers is for sh-t. I guess that means that if we get another breakout mmo from the west that happens to be a hit overseas we can exclude those paying players from any further discussions about revenue right?
Just because Blizzard is supported abroad, by many eastern fans of their games do we just ignore their weight to the genre as a whole now? Wow what a rediculous notion...
"Small minds talk about people, average minds talk about events, great minds talk about ideas."
Pretty sure they released information about their subscriber count and some basic demographics (% female and things like that) during the last fanfest. I'll try to dig up a link to back it up, but I'm pretty sure they've put the information out there.
edit: http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=656 this is a devblog from last year so the information isn't exactly the most recent, but the first graph has a line indicating subscriber count. I'll add more as I stumble across them.
edit 2: everything I see is from around that time of the devblog which I believe corresponds with the last fanfest (not 100% on that). The 2010 fanfest has been pushed back along with the new expansion, so I would expect updated numbers to be released at that time.
-mklinic
"Do something right, no one remembers.
Do something wrong, no one forgets"
-from No One Remembers by In Strict Confidence
what i'd like to know is how many box game sales they've had over the years?
30+ mil at least
First off, who plays WoW for only 2 hours a month during active content? You either play it a fair amount or you don't play it at all. Also, last I checked, someone who plays 2 hours a week or month is still considered a subscriber. Perhaps you misunderstood their intentions. They were stating the amount of subscriptions they have per month, not that they make 15$ per sub or that all 12 million of them play 16 hours a day.
Either way you look at it, 2 hours a month is still a subscriber who pays to play the game. You just fooled yourself by coming up with false intentions in your head.
Everything about the asian servers indicates that they are played the same as western servers. Raid progression,boss kills, achievements etc It's kinda hard to believe that a server is full of people playing 2 hours a month, when they have 10-15 guilds clearing last-tier endgame content every week and plenty of players with 8k+ acheievement points.
Two hours was just an example , they could play for 10 hours a month and still not be counted as a subscriber because they have no subscription plan in Asia. It is all pay by the hour which is completely different. Infact when you look at it, it is more of a RMT business model Asia uses. Common sense shall set you free!
@ OP:
Almost 4 years ago you doubted the 7.5 million subs (looking through the first posts).
Now you doubt the 12 m subs. While the Activision Blizzard web page shows WOW is set to break the previous yearly record of 1.2 billion dollars this year, like all previous years they breached the revenu records.
10 hours pay a month, 100 hours pay a month, fixed pay a month: they ALL PAY.
And it shows in the bookkeeping.
Since China doesn't even know another system, it's odd you want to trash talk 1.2 billion dollars of income.
BTW: China only accounts for 9% of that income (stated in their financials in 3rdQ 2009) (due to their wages being less than 10% of western wages).
Do the count : it fits.