5 Million Accounts - Japan Expo

[AlphaFox]

I'd like to say yay too, but how many of those are just bots and sellers?

[KisaiTenshi]

I'd like to say yay too, but how many of those are just bots and sellers?

Not a huge amount, at least compared to freemium games.

A more interesting point is that gamers don't switch games, they abandon them. A while ago, we had a bunch of threads about "trying to get WoW players" by making the game have less story. Turns out that wouldn't get WoW players at all. People either like "that game" or they don't, and they don't switch MMO's like they would switch brands of soft drinks.

World of Warcraft market
A good example here would be the success of World of Warcraft that, as analysts explained to us ten years ago, has “vastly expanded MMORPG market beyond all expectations”.

Except it didn’t. It created a new market, World of Warcraft market, gathered new audience from other games in different genres, attracted quite a few people that haven’t played before, but haven’t expanded MMORPG market much. There were no big successful MMORPGs after World of Warcraft not because WoW took all the audience, but because there were never too many people in “MMORPG but not World of Warcraft” market to begin with.

I think when you start thinking in terms of audiences for individual games instead of broad vague “MMORPG crowd”, “MOBA crowd” you’ll start to realize that sometimes a huge success of one big title doesn’t mean much for everyone else. It doesn’t expand existing market or destroy it, it creates a new one.

So gamedevs need to quit cloning other games.

The fact that Square-Enix keeps FFXIV subscription means the game has a viable audience. All the Freemium games are can only hold their audience long enough until it's too frustrating to play without the cash shop and they abandon it the moment something they like better comes along.

[Vrath]

-snip-
A more interesting point is that gamers don't switch games, they abandon them.
-snip-

Really? I've personally switched MMO's a couple of times, and I know others who have.

I'm not calling your data into question, or anything; I'm just saying it doesn't match my experience. I could easily be in the minority, though.

[Kaurie]

Really? I've personally switched MMO's a couple of times, and I know others who have.

I'm not calling your data into question, or anything; I'm just saying it doesn't match my experience. I could easily be in the minority, though.

It doesn't match my experience either. If I get bored of an MMO, I usually head to mmorpg.com and see what other MMOs are out there and test a bunch. I did this near the end of last year and landed on FFXIV as my choice (after checking Tera, Wildstar, WoW and leaving GW2).


As for the registered accounts vs subs, I think it's pretty obvious that subs is a more telling number of success. Plenty of people could have purchased the game and realized it wasn't for them and then cancelled. I did this exact thing with Wildstar (for example). It includes lifetime sales, though it's difficult to tell if that includes 1.0 sales?

Not many industries which have subscriptions show registered accounts numbers. Most MMO's will display subscribers or active playerbase. Cell phone companies will show current subscribers, not the total number of accounts created. TV Shows will show a viewer count per episode, not a tally of how many people have ever watched it etc.. It's just more valuable information to see how it's doing over time.

That said, we as consumers do not require this information. It is simply interesting information to know when looking over various MMO's, as having an active playerbase points to two things 1. usually quality content and 2. a populous world to play in.

[Makeda]

A more interesting point is that gamers don't switch games, they abandon them. A while ago, we had a bunch of threads about "trying to get WoW players" by making the game have less story. Turns out that wouldn't get WoW players at all. People either like "that game" or they don't, and they don't switch MMO's like they would switch brands of soft drinks.

Almost everyone I've met in every MMO I've played has played at least 1 other and quite often several MMOs. Most common among them WoW, of course. And I constantly meet people in other games who started with WoW, City of Heroes, Everquest, or Guild Wars 1. In about that order of frequency (The City of Heroes players show up so much despite it being a smaller game because the game was killed by its parent company right while it was going strong).

I really disagree on this idea that gamers don't switch games. I've very rarely met anyone who had only played one MMO. Save for WoW during its heyday. But now in WoW, or at least last time I was in there about 4-5 months ago - everyone I encountered had been in some other MMO for a while or concurrently. What I find now is a lot of people cycle through MMOs when patch cycles are long or not going the way they wanted them to.

That said I do agree that very few accounts are bots / sellers. Almost none actually. Hackers on the other hand tend to steal people's accounts, but even this is a very small number. It doesn't take that many to create a very visible problem. One person online at a peak moment going through the list of players and macro spamming everybody and suddenly people will think there is an army of spammers...

More likely is that the hackers had a few hundred accounts, but only use 1 to 2 at a time... and when those get blocked, they can just slip into somebody else's account and go at it again. Its another reason to ALWAYS have a two-step authenticator (what this game calls the One-time password thingy), and a unique password / email combo.