[...] here. but anyway, no disrespect to you Kendrick. From Raph Koster’s blog, Septermber 1, 2006 Raph’s Website » Vivendi’s investor presentation [...]

[...] WoW still growing? Submitted by Innsmouth on September 2, 2006 – 13:47. Raph does SirBruce and found another investor presentation from Vivendi. [...]

[...] http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/09/01/vivendis-investor-presentation/ Une présentation financière présentée à la SEC (organisme de régulation américain) donne quelques infos sur WoW. – Cout du dev: 64M de dollars ($64,160,177.07 pour être exact) – 1300 game masters – 9000 serveurs_________________AC1 SC / AC2 FF: à la retraite CoH/CoV : @Quickette sur Freedom WoW FR : Sargeras – Deos (Hunter) – Cancelled [...]

[...] Raph does SirBruce and found another investor presentation from Vivendi. [...]

I went and started to write how WoW reached “zero growth”, wrote a whole post about it and then I noticed that it was all wrong… ARGH!

Anyway, after my breakdown I guesstimated NA players at around 1.8M right now, as the European players seem to be slightly behind (1.3/1.4M).

But I’m also skeptical about some of the data.

I surmise that the North American population is likely under 1m, given an even split with Europe?

Uhm, how?

If the graph shows 2.7m for western customers and you hypothesize an even split, that would be more like 1.3m each. Or not?

Whoops. I was thinking 1.5m, I think, and wrote 1m.

Uhm, how?

If the graph shows 2.7m for western customers and you hypothesize an even split, that would be more like 1.3m each. Or not?

What am I missing?

In any case, the WoW numbers and Raph’s breakdown support a hypothesis I’ve had that they could hit 10mil subscribers. It’s not them hitting that in general though. Rather, I think they’ll hit it this year when Burning Crusade launches and compels back so many ex players.

Acording to MMORPGChart there are 12.5 million active subcriptions now, and 10 million a year ago… which implies 2.5 million new players over the course of a year.

I made a mistake when I assumed that 12.5 million active subscribers meant 12.5 MMORPG players. I suspect (and people can tell me if I’m wrong) that many/most MMORPG players aren’t subscribed all year round, but (for the sake of simplicity) are only subscribed for 6 months out of the year (on average). The other 6 months are spent waiting for a potential MMORPG to come online. A new MMORPG player, for simplicity sake, subscribes for 12 months in a row, not necessarily the same MMORPG.

That means that there are approx. 10M old MMORPG players * 12 months / 6 months + 2.5M new players = 22.5M MMORPG players, which means that only 40% of MMORPG players have actually tried WoW, which would mean that WoW could still tap into some residual of (a) (from my previous post).

Of course, these assumptions could be wrong.

Area under curve is about 6.5M x 1.5 yrs / 2 = 4.9 M-yrs. 4.9 M-yrs / 7.5 months = 7.84 M. But that’s only a rough guestimate; there are some flaws in my mathematical model which would make this number lower than the real value.

Another approach (also flawed) is to say that any player that was playing 7.5 months (or more) ago is no longer playing, and that those that started within the last 7.5 months are included in the 6.5M. 7.5 months ago is 4Q05 and before, with a peak 5.5M, +6.5M => 12.0 M people have played WoW.

12.0M is probably the high side, while 7.84M the low side.

MMORPGChart.com shows that there are 12.5M subscribers, which implies that just about everyone who plays MMORPGs has tried playing WoW. (I don’t necessarily think this assumption is correct, but I could easily believe that 50%-60% of all MMORPG players have played WoW.)

In the past, WoW has been able to draw players from (a) people that already played MMORPGs, and (b) players that have never played MMORPGs. I’d guess that (a) is already exhausted. To use a trendy term, is (b) past its “peak oil”?