Murrie
03-15-2005, 06:44 PM
some notes from a conference or something with one of the SWG team who also worked on UO.
http://crystaltips.typepad.com/wonderland/2005/03/from_the_game_d.html
How can we get to over a million PAYING subscribers to a US MMO? How do we get a million freeplayers to convert to subscribers? EQ and UO have over 2 million who have ever played these games. The market size in the US is about 2.5 million players. The market place in October 2004, ranking OVER 100k (I’m only dealing with non-boutique games here, only those with over paying 100,000 subscribers):
1. EQ (Alice: Everquest. He was very entertaining and refers to all games as their spoken acronym, so "wow" and "eequeue" and "yuoh" for instance)
2. SWG (Star Wars Galaxies)
3. FF Online (Final Fantasy Online)
4. DAOC (Dark Age Of Camelot)
5. UO (Ultima Online)
Once WoW launched, WoW shot by everything. They have 600-800,000 paying subscribers in the US. EQ and co start at around 300K paying subs. What’s happened in the market shift from previous MMOs to today, is all existing MMOs went down in population when WoW came out. ALL of them. What does this mean?
...
...
What happens when you’re too successful?
* Flash crowds
* Lag
* Melt-down
* Huge lines.
...
...
If you have a lot of people using your system at once, your client can only receive so much data through the pipe before it chokes and dies.
Three years ago it would take 5 months to get 100K users.Today – 100K in FOUR HOURS or less. WoW got 250,000 in a day and a half. How do you handle that upfront flash?
Hard to completely fault Blizzard when they ended up with 2 to 3 times the number of players the most popular mmo had before launch... Id say they are probably doing extremely well sorting out the server issues given the amount that they are probably being overstressed...
http://crystaltips.typepad.com/wonderland/2005/03/from_the_game_d.html
How can we get to over a million PAYING subscribers to a US MMO? How do we get a million freeplayers to convert to subscribers? EQ and UO have over 2 million who have ever played these games. The market size in the US is about 2.5 million players. The market place in October 2004, ranking OVER 100k (I’m only dealing with non-boutique games here, only those with over paying 100,000 subscribers):
1. EQ (Alice: Everquest. He was very entertaining and refers to all games as their spoken acronym, so "wow" and "eequeue" and "yuoh" for instance)
2. SWG (Star Wars Galaxies)
3. FF Online (Final Fantasy Online)
4. DAOC (Dark Age Of Camelot)
5. UO (Ultima Online)
Once WoW launched, WoW shot by everything. They have 600-800,000 paying subscribers in the US. EQ and co start at around 300K paying subs. What’s happened in the market shift from previous MMOs to today, is all existing MMOs went down in population when WoW came out. ALL of them. What does this mean?
...
...
What happens when you’re too successful?
* Flash crowds
* Lag
* Melt-down
* Huge lines.
...
...
If you have a lot of people using your system at once, your client can only receive so much data through the pipe before it chokes and dies.
Three years ago it would take 5 months to get 100K users.Today – 100K in FOUR HOURS or less. WoW got 250,000 in a day and a half. How do you handle that upfront flash?
Hard to completely fault Blizzard when they ended up with 2 to 3 times the number of players the most popular mmo had before launch... Id say they are probably doing extremely well sorting out the server issues given the amount that they are probably being overstressed...