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Measuring MMOsJune 1st, 2006 |
With the release of the latest edition of SirBruce’s chart of MMO populations, the debates have once again erupted over not only the validity of the numbers, but also over the how to even talk about the populations of these virtual worlds. It’s a discussion that has come up before, of course.
With recent versions of the charts, Bruce has started to include stats such as “peak concurrent users” and “average concurrent users.” With the rise of non-subscription services, the industry is having to adapt to different metrics altogether. Services such as Blizzard’s have had to attach statements to their press releases to gain credibility for their figures, after much skepticism from competitors.
World of Warcraft’s Paying Customer Definition
World of Warcraft customers include individuals who have paid a subscription fee or purchased a prepaid card to play World of Warcraft, as well as those who have purchased the installation box bundled with one free month access. Internet Game Room players having accessed the game over the last seven days are also counted as customers. The above definition excludes all players under free promotional subscriptions, expired or canceled subscriptions, and expired pre-paid cards. Customers in licensees’ territories are defined along the same rules.
The original metric people used, of course, was subscriptions. This is a great metric for assessing how much revenue a game is getting, but it does have a few oddities in terms of determining the popularity of a game.
- Players often have multiple accounts. And when I say “often,” I mean “really often.” While we know that price sensitivity for users can get pretty high, enough so that a client purchase and any fee at all is a significant barrier to most people, we also know that that among the hardcore, it’s almost nonexistent. It’s not uncommon to hear anecdotes about the people who own 10 or more accounts; this leads to an overcounting of actual people on the service.
- Even game operators have a fair amount of uncertainty around the actual incidence of this, because accounts get mapped to credit cards. The average US household has many credit card numbers — I have heard figures from 7 to 14 cards per household. On top of this, uncertainty goes in the other directions as well: multiple accounts on one card, with no sense of how many people it maps to — one head of household paying for three accounts for her kids, or maintaining them for herself? You can try minor cleanup on this by mapping against addresses as well, but even a minor typo will noise up the data.
Because of this, there have been estimates that the average accountholder in subscription based MMOs actually accounts for two or more accounts. In other words, half or more of the subscriber base isn’t real. This is something that operators need to take into account when they assess price sensitivity and commitment to a game; a change might cause those players who run 10 accounts to choose to axe 9 of them, while retaining one to keep a toe in the water.
- Quasi-subscribers also complicate matters. At any given time, assuming a game with decent inflow, there is a fairly large proportion of the userbase that is playing for free, based on promotions, loyalty programs, free months provided by the box, and so on. These are folks who are able to play the game, but aren’t necessarily paying for it, or paying for it directly. The most obvious one of these, and the one that causes Blizzard to have so much stuff in their subscriber definition, is game time cards (which in Asia are often sold on shorter blocks of time than a month), but there’s also PC baang license arrangements and other such complications.
- One example of this is aggregator packages which offer access to multiple games for one fee; you can break apart the numbers to try to determine which game they were playing, but at what point do you count them as equivalent to a subscriber?
- The most interesting quasi-subscriber figure is that surrounding people who just don’t log in very often. At any given time, you can expect the number of unique logins over a month to be drastically lower than the number of subscribers that month — by as much as 20%. In other words, at any given time, 1/5th of the subscriber base won’t have logged in during the last month.
- A lot of people forget to cancel. It’s hard to tell how many of these there are either. The 20% figure mentioned above is not really representative, because a lot of those are folks who maintain a sub, but simply doesn’t use it very often (or extra accounts for muling or special purposes, or whatever). The number of people who simply forget to cancel is likely in the single-digit percentages, I’d guess.
- Plain old noisy data also has a small effect. For example, someone can enter the service, get registered, but bail before putting in a credit card number. Are they a subscriber? They’re not actually able to play the game, but they are an account. There’s a surprising number of people who register, pay, and then don’t log in — their machine couldn’t handle the game, perhaps.
Of course, subscriber metrics, despite these problems, are still a damn sight better than registered users, which typically
- include everyone who ever created an account, whether or not they have ever even logged in. This is a decent metric for penetration of sampling, but lousy for determining the population of a given world.
- include people who stopped playing, and therefore are always going o rise, because they are an accumulation stat.
- frequently double-count expansion account keys.
A lot of the early skepticism of Korean figures arose because registered users was a common figure used.
Korea in fact has a fairly open numbers policy — there are ratings systems that measure peak concurrency for the various games kind of like Nielsen measures concurrency for television shows in the US. This has led to popularity charts being fairly available, but it of course ignores the fact that concurrency is also a bad metric in a number of ways, even for measuring popularity.
- First off, concurrency follows predictable weekly patterns, fluctuating up and down noticeably based on the day of the week. Because of this, an individual peak isn’t really reflective of the overall usage.
- When people do use average concurrency numbers, they vary the trailing date length. For example, Second Life uses 60 days, other companies use 30 days, and yet others in Korea use 7 days.
- Most importantly, concurrency ignores session length.
Do the thought experiment. Let’s say that there is a game with 24 users. The game permits only one session per day, and it mandates that said session last exactly one hour.
If the users all log in at peak time (unlikely), the game will show a peak of 24. But more likely they will log in spread out across the hours of the day, with peak time showing a bulge — perhaps of 10.
Now change the session length to 24 hours. All of a sudden, the peak is 24 again, because everyone overlaps.
Now change the session length to 1 second. The peak drops to 1, because nobody overlaps.
This is shown most dramatically in the difference between MMORPGs and more casual games. Peak concurrency for the RPGs, which demand multiple hours of play time in a session, is always significantly higher than that for the new breed of “casual online games” such as Kart Rider. Even more casual RPGs will exhibit this; SWG and Planetside, for example, had a much shorter session length than the EverQuest games, and so would not get similar peaks.
- This means that our tie ratio rules of thumb are obsolete. Once upon a time, the rule of thumb was to take your peak concurrency and multiply it by 4 or 5 to get an estimate of the userbase’s size. But in the more casual games, such as Kart Rider, you actually need to multiply by ten because of the brevity of session lengths. The fact that Kart Rider held the #1 spot on the Korean charts despite its userbase being underrepresented by half speaks to its popularity.
Now, this is of course the point at which the more business-oriented developer chimes in and suggests using revenue instead, such as “ARPU,” which stands for Average Revenue Per User. This is often broken into ARPU/Hour, ARPU/Month, and so on.
But even this figure is often misleading. For example,
- the casual games boast figures much higher than the figures for subscription games; it’s not uncommon to hear of APRU in the $30/month range. But that’s often “average revenue per paying user,” because the free games get millions of players who don’t pay a dime. Here the revenue per user is being inflated by not counting every registered or active user.
- Yet they still incur costs on the many players who are playing but not paying. Without access to profit and loss figures, we cannot tell whether a high ARPU is really a success or not, and it’s entirely possible for a low ARPU to be immensely profitable, if the operational costs are low enough.
- Of course, there’s also the sunk costs in development that ARPU does not take into account. You could have a great ARPU, but if you overspent prior to launch, still not be very successful.
- Lastly, you could be a game like Achaea, which has a relatively small userbase and a great ARPU. Very successful business, but we’re not learning a lot about how to compare it to other games; it mines its niche very well, but doesn’t scale (and doesn’t particularly want to). It’s going to be axiomatic that with a niche audience, you can mine it for more dollars because the fans are likely to be more hardcore and you can target their desires very precisely. But you aren’t going to get a good sense of the total revenue picture from ARPU alone; a lower ARPU traded for massively more users may well be a better business (and in fact, generally seems to be).
Revenue in general is a tricky thing. People keep taking the 6 or 6.5m users reported by Blizzard and multiplying it by $15 to arrive at astronomical revenue figures. But in practice, they probably only get less than a dollar per user in China. Their partner, The9, only reported total revenue for a quarter at $22m last year; comparing that to the frequently cited figure of “well, take 2m times $15 a month” and you can see the gap. Blizzard also doesn’t get all of the revenue, of course, some of its goes to the partner.
This business equation is going to vary in every territory. Revenue is, of course, immensely important ot measuring the success of virtual worlds as businesses, but just as in any other business, revenue is not the only story: reach, costs, growth trends, and so on also matter a lot.
The figure I prefer isn’t publicly given out by anyone, and that’s average weekly uniques. Basically, instead of counting how many people are online at one time, or counting how many are paying, doesn’t tell you how many are actually playing. But counting how many people logged in each given day, and then averaging that out across the week to smooth out the daily fluctuations will give you a very good sense of how many people are actually playing.
The other nice thing about uniques is that you can treat it as a percentage of the paying subscriber base to determine the stickiness of the game.
One of the flaws with the other metrics is that they are often difficult to compare across multiple games. Peak concurrency doesn’t work because of the session lengths. Subscribers are counted differently by different providers — and sometimes even by the same provider within a stable of offerings. But you can compare uniques percentage to determine which is the game that kepss more of its users coming back day after day.
A fall in uniques will also presage a fall in subscribers, often by weeks; you can see when people are losing interest and failing to log in regularly, and that will generally be a very good leading indicator of cancellation. A high uniques percentage in a week (80% or more) is likely to indicate a growing game, whereas one with only, say, 50%, is likely to be shrinking.
Most telling is graphing uniques over time, and then marking on it the dates of significant events in the game’s history: every patch, every expansion, every promo, every marketing push, every scandal. You’ll be able to objectively assess whether those changes made players want to play more or less, and use that knowledge to guide your future decisions.
Of course, Bruce isn’t likely to be given the uniques percentage by any company, which is a shame, because I think it’s the only really good way of measuring MMO populations.
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limitations of the design, so far, although time will tell. (I know! It’s a beta!) [IMG Barbiecolour_2] Course, this is just registered users, not returning players, and as Raph will tell you, quite rightly, registered users hopeless for measuring popularity. It’s returning users you want to measure, and the article over at Scientific American doesn’t mention that…
[...] Revenue in general is a tricky thing. People keep taking the 6 or 6.5m users reported by Blizzard and multiplying it by $15 to arrive at astronomical revenue figures. But in practice, they probably only get less than a dollar per user in China. Their partner, The9, only reported total revenue for a quarter at $22m last year; comparing that to the frequently cited figure of well, take 2m times $15 a month and you can see the gap. Blizzard also doesnt get all of the revenue, of course, some of its goes to the partner. This business equation is going to vary in every territory. Revenue is, of course, immensely important ot measuring the success of virtual worlds as businesses, but just as in any other business, revenue is not the only story: reach, costs, growth trends, and so on also matter a lot. The figure I prefer isnt publicly given out by anyone, and thats average weekly uniques. Basically, instead of counting how many people are online at one time, or counting how many are paying, doesnt tell you how many are actually playing. But counting how many people logged in each given day, and then averaging that out across the week to smooth out the daily fluctuations will give you a very good sense of how many people are actually playing. The other nice thing about uniques is that you can treat it as a percentage of the paying subscriber base to determine the stickiness of the game. One of the flaws with the other metrics is that they are often difficult to compare across multiple games. Peak concurrency doesnt work because of the session lengths. Subscribers are counted differently by different providers and sometimes even by the same provider within a stable of offerings. But you can compare uniques percentage to determine which is the game that kepss more of its users coming back day after day. A fall in uniques will also presage a fall in subscribers, often by weeks; you can see when people are losing interest and failing to log in regularly, and that will generally be a very good leading indicator of cancellation. A high uniques percentage in a week (80% or more) is likely to indicate a growing game, whereas one with only, say, 50%, is likely to be shrinking. Most telling is graphing uniques over time, and then marking on it the dates of significant events in the games history: every patch, every expansion, every promo, every marketing push, every scandal. Youll be able to objectively assess whether those changes made players want to play more or less, and use that knowledge to guide your future decisions. Of course, Bruce isnt likely to be given the uniques percentage by any company, which is a shame, because I think its the only really good way of measuring MMO populations. Link: Measuring MMOs 150)?150:this.scrollHeight)”> __________________ The tools suck! — Raph Koster [...]
[...] Raph Koster wrote an interesting post talking about the numbers on MMOGChart.com. He points out how different companies will use different metrics, the weaknesses of the different metrics, and what he thinks would be the ideal metric (unique connections per week). [...]
[...] Kressilac Smack-Fu Master, in training Tribus: Louisville Registered: February 24, 2004 Posts: 138 Posted document.write(”+ myTimeZone(’Thu, 01 Jun 2006 20:16:49 GMT-0700′, ‘June 01, 2006 23:16′)+”); June 01, 2006 23:16 Interesting blog post by an insider that gives insight into just how complicated things really are.Raph Koster’s Blog [...]
[...] Comments [...]
[...] Raph Koster weighs in on how to measure MMOs. Great stuff. Bruce [...]
[...] MMOG guru Raph Koster has posted an excellent write-up on his blog on how to measure MMOs. I wanted to provide a link to here because it provides a very comprehensive overview of both the advantages and shortcomings of using subscription numbers to track the market. Not only are these numbers imperfect, but they also dont provide a complete picture. They are only one of a variety of metrics that could be used, if such data was actually made available by those in the industry. We may even be moving towards a point where subscription-based MMOs will be a thing of the past. [...]
[...] Raph has chimed in on the problems with comparing MMO populations to each other. It’s excellent, and touches (and improves upon) many things I was thinking about posting, so I’ll just thank him for saving my time. [...]
[...] Again, as Bruce pointed out at Slashdot, these numbers are very stretchy. Any way you slice it, though, Blizzard has won the Massive market. Raph talks more about these numbers, of course. Weekly uniques would be nice. My big fear is that in winning the war, Blizzard has broken the battlefield. With that kind of success … what’s the point? [...]
[...] menus = document.getElementsByClassName(’menu_container’,’site_menu’); menus.each( function(element) { new Dropdown(element.id,{width:150,display_trigger:’mouseover’,group:’site_menu’,use_submenu:0}); }); Measuring MMOs Araman posted on 6 Jun 2006, 12:14 PM As a followup to our previous story covering the fact that WoW has secured 50% of the MMO market share, Raph Koster, a name now synonymous with the MMO gaming industry, has a very interesting and detailed writeup on the mechanics behind the metrics in measuring MMO revenue and popularity.Those following the trends of todays MMO gaming industry, and even people who are interested in a little more insight as to what makes up the playerbase should head on over to Raph’s official website. News from WarCry.com [...]
[...] http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/06/01/measuring-mmos/ [...]
[...] Raph Koster wrote an interesting post talking about the numbers on MMOGChart.com. He points out how different companies will use different metrics, the weaknesses of the different metrics, and what he thinks would be the ideal metric (unique connections per week). [...]
Original post:Measuring MMOs by at Google Blog Search: credits cards people bad credit
[...] Register Measuring MMOs http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/06/01/measuring-mmos/ With the release of the latest edition of SirBruce’s chart of MMO populations, the debates have once again erupted over not only the validity of the numbers, but also over the how to even talk about the populations of these virtual worlds. It’s a discussion that has come up before, of course. Submitted by prognosticator on Jun 02, 2006 11:25:02 CST (more) (comments) karma: 0 / clicks: 75 / comments: 0 To post comments, please login. [...]
[...] by randal2k on 6/02/06 [comment buried, show commenthide comment] + 2 diggs take frequent crashes, 100% CPU usage, problems with Video cards (Nvidia and ATI), random disconnects, cheating and “Warden” and you have the biggest MMORPG with the MOST problems. I have been with WOW for over a year and have ended my subscription. However, not before they charged me for a month after removing my account, they said “no refunds”. There warden program causes my CPU to rage 100% during the game, lending me to believe that IT IS what is causing lag and so forth in the Game. Warden is also uninhibited in what information is sent back to blizzard… anything they want. With all of this said, i am shocked that so many people play it. then i realized… there using the same tactic as AOL. AOL, said if you signed up for a free trial your a subscriber, and they would leave you as a subscriber for awhile after you didn’t even use it.. this cooking there numbers. I don’t have an account anymore, but, i do have 14 days left on the account till it’s nonfunctional. this is considered as me having an account… then take the “Free” accounts.. and you get more players… also, do they count people who played, and now don’t since they never delete accounts? No, i think that this is just more nonsense, and not accurate numbers. this says allot about what there looking at and how it’s not 100% accurate http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/06/01/measuring-mmos/ even if it is, i still don’t get it… something that buggy … says allot for continual beta programs. [reply] [...]
[...] Speaking of games that keep on trucking and show growth when you don’t expect it, Puzzle Pirates has announced 2m registered users. Arr, Daniel, ye knows that registered users be a landlubber’s metric! Still, congratulations are in order, as it’s a significant achievement, and speaks well for the business model that Three Rings has adopted with micropayment doubloons. [...]
[...] Speaking of games that keep on trucking and show growth when you don’t expect it, Puzzle Pirates has announced 2m registered users. Arr, Daniel, ye knows that registered users be a landlubber’s metric! Still, congratulations are in order, as it’s a significant achievement, and speaks well for the business model that Three Rings has adopted with micropayment doubloons. [...]
[...] charliesangel - Glad to have you join us. You know what was surprising to me … is that SirBruce’s latest Subscription Numbers just came out … and Ultima Online has had as many or more subscribers as it had when I was playing back in 1998. (WOW is, of course, kicking the everloving crap out of everybody else.) Graphs here. Of course, Raph points out some of the misleading bits, but still… interesting data, nonetheless. __________________ I may have been married since 9/24/05, but I’ve been Janey since 1998. Woot! Baby Incoming 2/24/07 :: Blog [...]
[...] I’ve mentioned before that weekly uniques is my preferred metricf or measuring virtual world populations. You need to have an SL account to see the stats, but the announcement is here. [...]
[...] Life posts weekly uniques Second Life posts weekly uniques: “I’ve mentioned before that weekly uniques is my preferred metric for measuringvirtual world populations. You need to have an SL account to see the stats, but the announcement is here. [...]
Wars has sold over 2 million copies by this point. And while that number is somewhat circumspect because it doesn’t account for people who’ve bought multiple copies and the like the numbers for “subscribers” to an online game is likewise an imperfect measure of how many people are actually playing. My admittedly brief investigation reveals nothing further about other metrics from the world of GW. Still, it’s useful as a comparison, if nothing else, and were there actually anything close to half that
[...] For those that don’t know Raph Koster, he was UO’s lead designer, creative director for SWG, and chief creative officer for EQ2. This guy has been in the MMO business a long time and knows a thing or two. http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/06/01/measuring-mmos/ [...]
[...] So why the controversy? Critics contend that journalists don’t understand the difference between “registered accounts” and “active users,” and that execs at Linden Lab haven’t exactly gone out of their way to clear up the confusion. Because Linden Lab prominently reports more than 2 million residents, many articles have said that Second Life has more than 2 million users. Ondrejka argues that this is still accurate. “The total residents, which we have always talked about, is the right number to represent users,” Ondrejka said. He pointed out that Linden Lab also prominently reports the “trailing” number of residents who logged in within the last 60 days, which as of Wednesday was 844,310. That means, of course, that at best, fully 63 percent of registered accounts have not logged in within 60 days. There’s another issue with that figure: the game industry typically reports users logged in within the last 30 days, not 60. The 30-day number, as of Wednesday, was 534,738 for Second Life. That means 77 percent did not log in within 30 days. Ondrejka said that Second Life is different from traditional online games. He pointed to a recent study Linden Lab conducted over six months in which the company examined member usage. He said that 30 percent of users had gaps of one or two months between log-ins. And that’s why the company prefers to put the 60-day trailing number on the SecondLife.com front page. Ondrejka said it is nearly impossible to arrive at a true number of active users because of the vagaries of the credit card numbers and IP addresses employed by users, and the fact that users can have multiple accounts. “I’m open to any Internet service that has a solution to the Internet identity problem,” said Ondrejka. “We don’t know who’s at the other end of the keyboard.” Still, because Second Life users frequently return after long times away, he said Linden Lab sticks to its “resident” definition. Other virtual-world and online-game veterans acknowledge that it’s very hard to figure out how many real users there are. “With the rise of non-subscription services, the industry is having to adapt to different metrics altogether,” Raph Koster, a designer of Ultima Online and former chief creative officer of EverQuest and Star Wars Galaxies publisher Sony Online Entertainment, wrote on his blog. “The original metric people used, of course, was subscriptions. This is a great metric for assessing how much revenue a game is getting, but it does have a few oddities in terms of determining the popularity of a game.” [...]
[...] 2007/01/08 ���� 09:40:34 ���� �÷� ���� ��� ���������� ��������α���� ��? Daniel Terdiman2007.01.08 ���� ���� ����� �������� ��� ����� ��� 200������ �����ߴ�. 8�� �� ��ġ�� 100�������ٴ� �� �����ϸ� �̴� ��� ���� ��ġ��. ���� ����� ����� ������ ����� 7�ڸ��� �����ߴٴ� �Ϳ� �ǹ�� ����ϰ� �ִ�. �� ��� ������ ������ ��ΰŵ�� ���̸ӵ鵵 ���鿡 �ռ��� ����� �������� ��� �����ڼ� ���϶�� ���� ��(Linden Lab)� �й��ϱ� �����ߴ�. ���� ����� �������� ����� ��ó�� �������� ���� ���� ������ ����� �ִ�. CNET Networks. [...]
M Show 132 - Second Life Population, Evening Harder Intro - Christopher Penn from the Financial Aid Podcast News: Sirius XM merger? Second Life population more around 200k Raph Koster on Measuring MMOS Talk: Working like a dog, everone’s sick and it’s 70 degrees Impossible Dilemma [IMG]CAPOW - Marketing, PR and Advertising Podcasts - Eric Schwartzman Entertainment: Dead Rising Kevin Smith
[...] SecondLife.com ù ������� ����ڼ� ��� ����� 60�Ϸ� �� �͵� �� �����̶�� �����. �µ巹ī�� �ſ�ī�� ��ȣ ������ �����ڰ� ����ϴ� IP �ּ�, ���� ����ڰ� ������ ���� ���� �� �ִٴ� ��� ������ ��� Ȱ�� ����ڼ� ����ϴ� ��� ���� �Ұ����ϴٰ� ���ٿ���.�״� �����ͳ� �ü�� ����� ���� �ش�� ���� �ִ� ���ͳ� ����� � ���̶� ȯ���Ѵ١��� ���츮�� Ű������ �ݴ��� ���� �ִ��� ���� �١��� ����ߴ�.�״� ���� ����� ������ ����ڵ��� ����� ��� �Ⱓ�� �� �Ŀ��� ���ƿ�� ��쵵 ���� ������ ���� ������ֹΡ���ǿ� ����ϴٰ� �����.�ٸ� ���� ���� �� �¶��� ���� ����鵵 ��� ����ڼ� �ľ��ϱ�� �ſ� ��ƴٴ� �� ����Ѵ�.��Ƽ���¶���(Ultima Online) �����̳����� �� ������Ʈ(EverQuest) �� ��Ÿ���� ������ ���߾�ü�� �Ҵ� �¶��� �������θ�Ʈ CCO(chief creative officer) ���� �ڽ���(Raph Koster)�� �ڽ��� ��α� �������� �ʿ� ��� ���� �����ϰ� �ֱ� ������ ��迡���� ���� �ٸ� ������� ��� �Բ� ������ �ʿ䰡 �ִ�. ���� ����� ����ؿ� ��� ���� �����̴�. �� ���� �ϳ��� ������ ��� ����� ����� �ø����� ���ϴ� ���� ������� �ش� ������ �α⸦ �����Ѵٴ� ��鿡���� ���� �ʴ� �κ��� �ִ١���� ���.�ڽ��ʹ� �ڽ��� ���� ����ϴ� ��� �������ְ� ��� ���(average weekly unique)
[...] over 6 months old. Here is a page discussing Measuring MMOs - it links to that guys page as well. http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/06/01/measuring-mmos/ __________________ Bow down before the one you serve… VQ2 character : RokX VQ+ character : [...]
[...] registered etc.. For a WONDERFUL article on how many MMO’s fudge their numbers, read this: http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/06/01/measuring-mmos/ If you are reading mmogchart.com, note that he only measures NORTH AMERICAN subscriptions in his [...]
for Second Life? When the media announces that x virtual world has a high number of subscribers/residents/foobars, doesn’t that influence the numbers by causing a bunch of new sign-ups and virtual tourists? How do you calculate meaningful numbers? Raph’s Website - Measuring MMOs
[...] Raph has a great post about measuring player numbers in MMO games. [...]
[...] News: Sirius XM merger? Second Life population more around 200k Raph Koster on Measuring MMOS [...]
[...] and most of them are seriously flawed. The best discussion I’ve seen to date can be found here if you care. (We’ll talk more about Monsieur Koster in a future [...]
[...] wrote at length about how to measure MMOs, if you recall — I quite agree that registrations is not a useful [...]
[...] to an article on Raph Koster’s website, multi-account users in mmo’s are extremely prevalant. Assuming POTBS is [...]
[...] Raph Koster weighs in on how to measure MMOs. Great stuff. Bruce [...]
[...] stats; Uniques to userbase ratio; Puzzle Pirates; Puzzle Pirates ARPU from VG Summit 2007 [...]
[...] Uniques to userbase ratio [...]
[...] them, Raph Koster (main designer of both UO & SWG) wrote an excellent piece on his blog here:Click HereIts a good read, but to quote the part relevant to this debate on how bad using registered users [...]
[...] people, more than the population of all of North America). So far, so good — after all, I have complained about this [...]
[...] Club at Big Fish Games! Sponsored by: http://www.BigFishGames.com/ [Found on Ads by Google] 8. Raphs Website » Measuring MMOs Of course, subscriber metrics, despite these problems, are still a damn sight …. Raph has [...]
[...] guru Raph Koster has posted an excellent write-up on his blog on how to measure MMOs. I wanted to provide a link to here because it provides a very comprehensive overview of both the [...]
Celebrity Heights - How tall are Celebrities SoundManager 2: Javascript Sound for the Web How To Make Noise Blocking Headphones (Technology: Gadgets) Uncanny valley - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Raph’s Website >> Measuring MMOs Ballardian: the World of J.G. Ballard >> The Ballardian Primer: Surveillance Cameras
[...] no sensible way of answering the question literally. A couple of years ago, Raph Koster did an updated version of the explanation for this problem (it needs updating again by now to take account of how the industry has continued to evolve since [...]
[...] (this is rather the opposite end of interpretation to “Over 1 billion people play online games” - and make sure you read Raph Koster’s thoughts before trying to interpret these figures) [...]