Raph's Website » The five biggest subscription worlds?

The five biggest subscription worlds?

May 9th, 2008 (Visited 1654 times) Tags: coh, ffxi, game business, lotro, runescape, WoW

Edit: In North America!

NPD has a new report out, where they are starting to track subscriptions. As part of it, they list these as the top five subscription worlds:

1.) World of Warcraft
2.) RuneScape
3.) Lord of the Rings Online
4.) Final Fantasy XI
5.) City of Heroes

I think the thing that sticks out most here is how much a hit-driven curve that is; CoH is reported as being around 136,000 subs as of December, and WoW is sitting at around whatever fraction of 10m are in North America (NPD’s numbers are US only). Maybe a 20 to 1 gap?

The headline everyone is reporting is that this plus casual and console gaming subs works out to $1 billion in revenue a year, proving there’s plenty of life in the subscription market still. Presumably, this includes things like XBL subscriptions, Pogo, and the like. In aggregate, it represents 11m total subscribers.

One depressing thing:

“While the majority of gaming website players are females over the age of 35, MMOG players are largely males under the age of 35. The variety of content available to play games on the PC clearly can draw a diverse audience.”

Subscription MMOs are failing to capitalize on their potential diversity, I think. Certainly if you branch out to other business models, I don’t know that this will hold quite as true.

Finally, the grace note here is that the PC market excluding the above categories is, well, smaller than this. Under $1 billion — more like $910m.

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MMO Clerks » The top five subscription MMOs in the US wrote on May 9th, 2008 at 6:17 pm:

[...] by PC gaming beyond what is reflected in retail sales.” Veteran designer Raph Koster reflects on the numbers at his personal site, noting the huge leap between the US percentage of WoW subscribers and the 136,000 users playing [...]

Massively wrote on May 10th, 2008 at 12:15 am:

“Now that NPD can estimate the value of the subscription market, it’s clear that there is a sizable chunk of revenue being generated by PC gaming beyond what is reflected in retail sales.” Veteran designer Raph Kosterreflects on the numbers at his personal site, noting the huge leap between the US percentage of WoW subscribers and the 136,000 users playing City of Heroes. This hit-driven curve is another challenge for the genre, and should be kept in mind as we move into the launch windows of

Economics of Virtual Worlds wrote on May 21st, 2008 at 9:56 pm:

list seem particularly striking for being so stratified. The drop-off of 9.9 million subscriptions between the #1 and #5 spots suggests a high degree of market concentration at the top, with many smaller players at the bottom. Ralph Kosters has a goodposton this large disparity. The public part of the release had two additional nuggets of information. The first is demographic. According to NPD spokeswoman Anita Frazier: While the majority of gaming website players are females over the age of 35,

Eolirin said on May 9th, 2008 at 10:35 am:

Raph, that grace note makes me more depressed than anything else. ><

MMOGs are great and all, but we’ve really lost or losing most of our traditional games on the PC. I find it hard to see that as anything other than sad.

Course, stuff like the proposed copy protection schemes on Bioware’s Mass Effect for the PC and Spore probably doesn’t help. Much as they might like to think they’re trying to combat piracy with that, I actually am having strong issues with purchasing Spore now because of it, even though that means I’ll not be able to play one of the games that I’ve most anticipated being released in a long long time. But I cannot bring myself to support a copy protection scheme that has a very very high chance of causing huge amounts of frustration for legitimate purchasers. I can’t in good conscience support something that treats me like a criminal and punishes me for something I haven’t done, and the only way I can make a statement against the damn this is with my wallet. Really really sucks.

Details can be found here. http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/52547
And I really shouldn’t need to point out to anyone why this is an absolutely horrible idea and is very very likely to break in very terrible ways when exposed to the projected number of sales for a game like Spore.

Ben said on May 9th, 2008 at 11:36 am:

Hey Raph,

NPD’s list is wrong. If CoH is really only 136,000 subscribers, then it’s well behind EVE Online, which has over 220,000.

http://www.virtualworldsnews.com/2008/02/ccp-predicts-25.html

Raph said on May 9th, 2008 at 11:52 am:

NPD only covers North America — I bet the difference could be explained by territory.

Eolirin said on May 9th, 2008 at 1:47 pm:

Raph, it’s also based on a survey of customers according to the article and not official numbers from actual companies, which probably further muddles things, and worse, there’s a level of self selection mentioned, which would further slant the results.

But the article says 136k users in the US and Europe, something that struck me as odd. If that’s true, then unless those figures are heavily skewed so that there are barely any Europeans in CoH, and EVE is skewed the other way, it seems kinda strange. I think it’s much more likely that the methodogy of the stats are just plain busted for the smaller end. Even the article points out that the lack of “kid” games on that list may be more representative of the fact that the survey respondants aren’t subbing those games than the fact that the games aren’t being subbed as much if not more as the ones on the list.

Eolirin said on May 9th, 2008 at 1:49 pm:

… Oops, I just realized, CCP has an Asian market, and CoH doesn’t. That could make the difference. The Chinese server probably has a decent chunk of that 220,000 too, which would allow European numbers to shift the US vaules below that.

mandrill said on May 9th, 2008 at 2:21 pm:

As I understand it, CCP has two different servers, one of which has 220,000 subscribers. The Asian players of EVE have their own server, I don’t know the numbers for that one.

Eolirin said on May 9th, 2008 at 2:27 pm:

Is that how they’re dealing with their population figures? That would be a very odd way of reporting them, since usually you want those numbers to seem higher rather than lower.

I am aware that there are in fact two servers, but I would question that any comments about the total number of subscribers are separated like that. If they did in fact say that though, that’s one thing. Can you provide a link to someone official saying that?

Wolfgang Wozniak said on May 10th, 2008 at 4:59 pm:

Good to see FFXI up there!

Rick said on May 12th, 2008 at 6:57 pm:

Eve’s population has big Russian, Scandinavian, and European factions. I’d suspect those three groups outweigh total US subscriptions, so yeah, I can see where US Eve subscriptions are under CoH’s numbers.

I’m pretty surprised EQ and EQ2 would be listed as lower than CoH, though. Sir Bruce’s April charts had higher sub numbers for both of those games than for either Eve or LoTRO.

I guess it’s all how you count subs. Numbers can say anything you spin ‘em to say