Broken Toys

Well that could be 540 from some of the not so well to do game companies they’ve bought up. Can’t say which but there are a lot to choose from. If they predict that well of a turn out for Warhammer I don’t for see Mythic losing anyone and probably a small financial shift towards them as well.

So 1/3 of the people who purchased the box have stopped playing, less than 2 months after the game came out.

Is that a good, bad, or terrible retention rate?

@2 Comparing free-to-plays with subscription based ones isn’t a good thing to do. It’s 2 totally different models of business. Free-to-play is harder to track who is actually playing. You may have 5 million accounts registered but if 3 million haven’t played in a month then in all reality you only have 2 million. And even if you just go by subscribers I still see Warhammer beating out Runescape. With subscription based ones its very easy to tell because money is involved. And I’ll be damned if any company doesn’t pay attention to that!

However if we’re just throwing out MMOs to compare to then I see your Runescape and raise you a Maple Story.

Also, comparing free to sub is like comparing a Pinto to a Corvette. They’re both cars and they both run. But the Corvette is SO much sexier in all aspects. Plus if you want better quality you pay more for it(Runescape is $5.95/month for a subscription, Warhammer is $16.)

Matt

Dig into how Runescape gets their numbers. If 5 million players = 5 million registered users then it’s merely a matter of wording(This is an honest request.)

If you go by your argument that business model doesn’t matter then yes you can compare Runescape and Maple Story. And, that I’m aware of, most companies do a grand total of players world wide, not by regions.

No, the cost as an inherent reflection on quality is very valid. I bet I can find 11 million subscribers that think WoW is better than Runescape in many ways. Hence the more money spent the better quality you get. And I’ll admit, that is a general statement. There have been many that were pure crap but they either shaped up or shiped out. My argument is still valid I think.

BTW, where did you find that WoW is free to play in Asia? I can’t find anything on the regular game/geek sites and typing in Asia or Asian always brings up more “gold farmer” related articles than actual news.

Pandanapper

Whether Mythic feals the burn or not (I doubt the devs would be effected, mostly CS and QA anyway), I am kind of glad I got out of there.

“Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, an MMO from EA’s Mythic Entertainment
studio, sold 1.2 million copies in the quarter – with over 800 thousand current players.”

These numbers don’t make sense – particularly with the Sept. 30th end date.

WAR had previously announced 500k new registered players as of Sep 26th.

“FAIRFAX, Va., Sep 26, 2008 (BUSINESS WIRE) — The Armies have assembled and the Worldwide WAAAGH! is Underway! Mythic Entertainment, an Electronic Arts Inc. (ERTS:Electronic Arts Inc
News, chart, profile, more studio, today announced that in the first week since launch over 500,000 new players have registered for fantasy MMORPG, Warhammer(R) Online: Age of Reckoning(TM) (WAR), in North America, Europe and the Oceanic territories. EA’s most highly pre-ordered PC title, WAR has now become the fastest-selling new MMO of all time. “

I was forgetting.

Let’s also subtract from the 800k all those fake accounts that gold sellers made. 13k are just those that Mythic caught and banned. I expect the total number to be much, much higher.

If the CD-key system was cracked then they can create unlimited accounts, and so the number of active accounts is not in any way indicative of the success of the game.

1.2 million are the number of copies sold/shipped to the stores, I would hazard. It used to be 1.5 mil, but 300k are returns, is my guess.

I was in a Best Buy the other day that had a whole bunch of WAR collector’s editions on an endcap. Marked down, I think, though I didn’t take a close look. That isn’t usually part of the pattern of a hot-selling game.

Yes Kade, shock and horror.

EA is evil. News at 11.

The “1.2 mil sold” vs the “800k active” somewhat corresponds with the recently announced mergers transfers from low population servers. They’re allowing transfers off of 22 out of their 55(ish) servers, and that ratio isn’t too far off.

I blame SecureROM. It will only get worse.

EA will, of course, blame piracy. They’d give up the PC market entirely and go sctrictly consoles before ever admitting that they are shooting themselves in the foot with their customer-abusing DRM.

I still don’t see how they sold 1.2 million copies and there’s no official Mythic / M.Jacobs post bragging about it. Selling over 1 million copies is a huge benchmark and good press, surely they would have not passed over such a good opportunity? It makes more sense to me that the 1.2 number is copies “sold” to the stores instead.

beta accounts maybe

When there are 800K paying subscribers, the press release will explicitly say “subscribers.”

Bought the game and never subscribed, my server an open RVR server had high destruction and low to medium order – the scenairos never popped and Tier 3 was an absolutely mob grindfest devoid of quests after level 25. I have watched the boards and there have been no transfers on or off my server and the server boards continues to die. If I had wanted to play EQ flavored PVP water I could have stuck to WoW and in fact I just re-activated my WoW account. Mythic and EA got a box sell from me from older game trade ins but while the game in its current state is fun, it requires a population, and they have not been proactive or aggressive enough in establishing that for all the servers.

Which was retracted here
http://forums.ea.com/mboards/thread.jspa?threadID=457006

And it’s just as well too – because the feedback to the original statement found here http://forums.ea.com/mboards/thread.jspa?threadID=449687&tstart=0&start=0
gave a pretty clear indication of the sort of customer reaction they could expect.

I found it interesting because the idea of linking forum and game accounts was mentioned by a poster on Raph Koster’s site about 6 months ago and it was suggested by that poster that this was a way to ease the pressure on forum moderation.

In a way it’s kind of disappointing that EA does not intend to make this policy… the resulting test cases would help to resolve a few outstanding issues with regard to EULAs and ToS I think?

yeah, the 1.2 million number is undoubtedly what they shipped into the channel. The number of boxes that EA “sold” to retailers. Now those aren’t permanent sales as EA will have to refund what doesn’t sell by a certain date. 800,000 is probably the number of accounts created from boxes sold to the public (plus maybe beta accounts, comped accounts etc etc, as Scott noted their phrasing is strange and suspect). the 500,000 number is most likely the number that of those accounts that actually had a cc# or game card associated with them, or were actually paid for beyond the first month. It’s the only number I see that actually says “subscriptions”.

And if that is true then it really is ugly. 40% os shipped product converting to a recurring subscription for just the forst billing cycle.

And is it just me, or is EA really opening themselves up to consumer fraud lawsuits with that forums policy. It may be one thing to ban a player from a recurring subscription service game such as a MMO, based on forum behavior. But to ban them from a web enabled single player game, that really only requires the internet access because of the DRM? Such as Spore or C&C 3? Ummm? And to have the power to basically disable the paid for product with no refund vested in their comunity reps and message board mods. Does anyone see that they may have finally crossed the line in gaming customer abuse that a State AG could finally understand, and would probably be willing to act on?

back @TPRJones: I certainly hope so. I just can’t see a smaller company obtaining the NFL rights to publish for the PC while EA puts out a quality sports title for all the consoles. Which leads to the typical ‘argument’ that the niche will be filled by smaller companies, with less marquee titles and little casual games for us PC gamers. Which are fun – granted – but not NFL Madden fun. I doubt EA has as much as a dwindling customer base as the bloggers and ‘in the know’ people surmise – perhaps on the PC, because EA feels they can’t ‘protect’ their developments, which makes sense why they are moving away from the PC. Last time I checked their top end sales are doing quite fine but just have too many employees to make a profit! (That was a sick-twist joke, about the employee part, related to his article)

part of the problem with the questing is there are a bunch of places to go… i.e. in T3 there are 6 separate zones with a bunch of quests. If you do a lot of quests, expect to go to at least 5 of those to level past that tier. I’m just about into T4 and starting the 6th one.

There are a ton of quests, you just have to do a lot of running around looking, and flight paths are limited to 1 per zone so…

i’m starting to turn into a fanboi here about WAR but many people just seem to have the wrong perception. Yeah the grind is here, but the pvp is tops if you roll with friends and not PUG, the content is decent, they seem to actually be TRYING to get stuff done like gold spammers and bugs, just had a server move for low pops… they are trying.