f13.net

Funcom has released the quarterly financial report and that also gives us some proper numbers regarding subscriptions.

1.2 million copies were "sold" to stores, and 800K of those are sold to customers. And as of 14th of August there are 415K active subscribers.
The players are spread equally amongst Europe and the US, and the average player is 29 years old. And they claim that the high average age is a major factor in the fact that average playtime per session is lower than expected.

Yo can download the report in glorious pdf direct for the Oslo stock exchange (http://www.newsweb.no/newsweb/atmnt/Funcom_Q208_report.pdf?id=57795 (http://www.newsweb.no/newsweb/atmnt/Funcom_Q208_report.pdf?id=57795))

So, 385k didn't resub.

There's the answer.

Now we can blather on for 15 pages and pretend to be Bartle and Co. Yay internet!

It shows the market for mmo's is huge now, it also shows that if your product isn't good enough people won't continue to pay for it.

Edit: Meh never mind, I'm not sure.

Looks like a success by any standard.  And sets a bad example of for releasing incomplete games.  After the recent failures, I has hoping the market was maturing.

Sure seems like more than half the people quit, but what do I know.

I don't think I'd call %50 retention with little signs of growth success. Let's not get in another 10page article over whether AoC is profitable or not because it obviously will be, the market HAS grown. There's a difference between profitable endeavors and successful ones however and losing nearly %50 of your intial customer base is not success by any rational standard.

On the bright side though 400k is still a shitload of people so it should give aoc enough money to turn things around if funcom is smart.....


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 :roffle:

That's just silly.  Would AoC be more successful if it sold 100k box and retained 95k?

I'd say yes, since in that case it would show they planned for about the number of people they're keeping.  However, given that they shipped 1.2 million copies, didn't sell 1/3 of those, then lost 1/2 of the subscribers they did manage to sell to (or yet another 1/3 of the number of boxes they shipped) it would seem to indicate they're doing about 1/3 as well as they planned on.  It depends on how you measure success, but I'd measure it by how well you hit the goal you set.  Of course, if their actual plan and goal WAS to keep about 400k subscribers, then they did well.

It does, however, show an impressive number of people that both purchased and still play it.  The market has grown tremendously, considering they're hovering just under the level of subscribers EQ had during its best days.

Well it's still the Next Big Thing.  I want to see sub numbers after WAR and WoTLK.
Still 400k subs says 'success' to me.  Take WoW out of the picture and AoC stands up very nicely in the MMO market.

So older players that do not log in frequently... sounds more like a player-base that would forget to cancel a recurring subscription even after they stopped playing.

Retaining 95% of your initial subscribers speaks to a very positive reaction and you can expect favorable word of mouth to lead to future sales.  Losing half your initial subscribers means every potential new customer is probably going to hear from countless people what a flaming pile of dung it is.  (Which AoC is getting plenty of.) 

So yes, I would consider the 95% retention game to be more successful (in that particular period.)  They still have the chance to fuck it up though.  I absolutely loved AoC 1-20.  First month I thought it really would be a contender.  Then things started going downhill.

400K subs says "Fiddling the figures" to me. What's Funcom's definition of an active subscriber?

I'd like to know how many original WoW boxes sold vs subscriptions retained, just for the markets that overlap where AoC ships. I'm sure the percentage is higher. But I doubt it's much higher than 85%. Getting 95% of your box purchasers to pay into a second month is, afaik, unheard of in this industry.

400k subscribers is a success. This might actually put them in second place in NA and EU. Nobody else since WoW launched has achieved this without LoTRO-like fuzzy math. And few broke it prior in NA and EU (EQ1, FFXI, Toontown I think). Not that I think AoC would have hit anywhere near a million boxes if it launched five years ago (or at any point before WoW).

Yea, it's less than they wanted. And yea, they're a public company that paid gobs in development. We know this. But in a pure comparison of people-paying-money for a Western-world MMO, 400k is nothing to scoff at.

How are you going to count the 200k accounts banned in this number?  As an 'active sub' because it wasn't the user's choice to end it or as a 'lost sub' since the original box sale wasn't retained.

The report was published August 14. However, the report is for the 2nd quarter, which ended June 30th. If the figures are taken as of that date, they are going to have a pretty significant number of "first month" subscribers. Given what I saw of retention among my friends, I would not be surprised if the figures are end of quarter, not date of publication. 

What Numtini said. This is not a number current to August 15 or so. I'm guessing losses since June 30 have been substantial. Just on box sales, I'm sure they've made something, but if your benchmark is WoW, losing 50% of your potential subscriber base that quickly is not money-hat territory unless you think that's the sum total of your customer loss. Judging from what I'm seeing in AoC, the bleeding did not end on July 1.

The report is basically there to tell you this. They made an increase of 11M revenue over last quarter in their PC division, minus a couple M from the first set of subscription payments this would be AoC box sales, and an after tax earnings of -7M.

Yeah, I'd like to see that too. I kinda thought 25-50% retention after the first month was The Way Of Things.

The sales were impressive and that retention rate is normal, which is why I think it is bogus. Virtually everyone I knew moved to AOC (my eq2 guild never did recover) and not a single person lasted their free month, much less further.

The real tragic story is really what would have happened if everyone had been pleased with the game. 800k was an incredible start.

I'd expect to see a good proportion of players leave at launch - this MMO isn't for them and they've found that out.

What matters is the following two quarters - if AoC doesn't see an increase in player numbers then (as people who waited to find out if the title was worth buying after launch, or those who weren't following it that closely go and get it) then it could be in real trouble. Crying doom over only having 400k players at launch is a little early.

Also: WAR.

When sales number 800k you and your friends are statistically insignificant, such quotes are reminiscent of people predicting WoW (or other MMO's) doom because everyone they knew left.

Having said that, it indeed feels (FYI I'm still playing) that retention rate is below average. However, the game is still in the shop shelves and Funcom can still add higher lvl content (which is IMHO the biggest problem that's hurting retention). I'm sure they will at some point, but I just wished they could be a bit faster ...

I expect that their Q3 report will show a big drop. Most of the people and guilds I know had mass defections in July-August, and there are a lot of servers that are virtual ghost towns. Maybe they'll slog along with 100-150k loyalists, but I don't think Funcom had any reason to call AOC "steak" and WoW "McDonalds".

To me this is a lesson on what happens when you launch a big name title with no end game systems that actually work, and without much end game content. Big sales, bad retention, bad word of mouth, and a dwindling subscriber base leaving at an accelerated rate until the lights go off.

Ok, I actually read Funcom's Q2 report and the reported "415,000 subscribers as of 14 August" is bullshit. The journalists can't read properly.

This is what Funcom actually reports, note the definition:


Thus:
- It doesn't say anything about "subscribers" or the retention rate as the number also includes people in their 30 first days. The resub/retention rate must be considerably lower then 50%.
- The timeframe is also vague ("currently"). However if out of 800k registered accounts only about half remain the numbers probably aren't for 30 June (that date was little over a month after release). "Currently" could indeed mean as of release of the report, ie 14 August.

Actually they already laid the groundwork, the report says they don't usually release numbers, but are doing so at that time as an exception.

It's still an okay analogy.  Steak might taste great, but after you have it day-after-day it loses its appeal.  It also costs a lot more.  And McDonald's has the best fries, which some days is why you want to go there.

My "steak" was undercooked and mindnumbingly boring after level 20.  :grin:

AOC's steak was so under cooked that hundreds of thousands of players contracted virtual Ecoli and their subscriptions died.

Industry standard for conversion (paying after the free period) is about 75-80 percent, with monthly churn (already paying subscribers dropping out) running half or less of that (can be as low as 7% or as high as 25%, in my experience).  If they sold 800K boxes and only have 415K customers, including people still on their free month in mid-August, they did considerably less than that.  For comparison, WoW seems to have had a conversion rate in its first few months in excess of 90%, Camelot and EQ1 both came in at the high 70's.

--Dave

EDIT: That being said, if they manage to maintain a subscriber base of 250K, and they spent $25M making the game, a winner is them from a business POV.

And the verdict is:  AoC bombed almost as badly as LotRO.

Define "bombed".

:awesome_for_real:

(The smiley means this is a fake troll.  Don't take the bait.  PLEASE.)

It doesn't work when Cevik's comment was a real troll.

No, it's a shitty analogy. AoC *is* WoW, only executed at a lower level of competence and with less content. Yes, boo-hoo, it's a new game, everyone's got bugs, less content, etc.  But we're not comparing what AoC might be in three years (probably not much more than it is now) with WoW, but the two as they are. If you think WoW is McDonald's, then AoC is Arby's or Wendy's or something. There are perverse reasons for liking one of those over the other--maybe you like Burger King onion rings or shit like that--but it's not steak vs. fast food.

The real tragic story is really what would have happened if everyone had been pleased with the game. 800k was an incredible start.
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Industry standard for conversion (paying after the free period) is about 75-80 percent, with monthly churn (already paying subscribers dropping out) running half or less of that (can be as low as 7% or as high as 25%, in my experience). 
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Dave, truthfully, not casting any doubts on your assertions here, but there is no other cultural industry that more aggressively denies outsiders any meaningful way to evaluate what the "industry standard" is. It's actually kind of weird. Hollywood accounting is deeply bizarre (and full of lies) but at least there's some public data on the performance of individual films. There's meaningful things to be said about the market performance of television programming. MMOGs? Who the fuck knows? All we have is Sir Bruce's batshit guesswork and a handful of insiders telling us things about the industry standard. And some of that information I find they contradict when it's a private conversation, or they confess they're just as in the dark as any other outsider when it comes to a company they don't work for at present.

I think all we can say for sure about AoC is that it started pretty well, enough for Blizzard's designers to take notice publically. I think that says a lot about the market opportunties (people are tired of WoW, no matter how 'clean' its design). I think you can say even from this data that they lost a significant amount of subscribers (whether it is in relative terms worse or better is up for argument in this data-poor context). What they need to make notable or significant profit, who knows? They're not about to tell us.

Khaldun, I'd agree that the secrecy over hard numbers is silly.  One, inside our incestuous little clan there are few secrets, I can get the real numbers on virtually anything.  Two, it's counter-productive, it means that in business terms to the extent the numbers are kept under wraps, we're all flying blind, which is as much of a detriment to the companies keeping the secrets as it is to the competitors they're trying to keep in the dark.  It also means that potential investors have to make their own guesses, and since they lack the inside sources those guesses are often so wrong they cause them to make serious mistakes or have totally unrealistic expectations (which again, is bad for the entire industry).

I'd be much happier if we had a organized industry group that tracked such things.  But it's just not mature enough for that.  Maybe we were getting close, but WoW messed that up by becoming such a big part of the market, there's no advantage for them in helping "the industry" when in dollar terms they are most of it.  So we're back to the educated guesses of people with inside sources.

--Dave

My guess is that the 50% that did drop were the "hardcore."  They got through the content and said, "Where's the steak?"

The remaining are that "older" customer base that seems to play less.  Thus, they get through the content slower.  Thus, they haven't hit their wall yet.

I'm one of those "older" guys that plays enough to be considered "hardcore", but at a slow and steady rate.  Normally, when I start an MMO, I go at least 1 month into subscription.  I think my shortest stay was AO (funny that.)  I tried it on their free trial download (EVERYONE should do this.)  I really did it just to experience a game that was important in the timeline of MMO's and stuck around for an extra month.

Most of the time I go about 3 months before I figure out an MMO is not for me (CoH, SWG, EQ, FFXI, SB, etc.)  UO and WoW are the only ones I can measure in years so far.  I did last shorter times, but that's because I never made it out of Beta (DDO, LotR, etc.)

So we're back to Sir Bruce and his MMO chart guestimates?

Actually, I call bullshit on that. The money is there, WoW's numbers are quite public - it's just that everybody in the medium is still on the mentality that there can only one big boy and everyone else is an abject failure. And that hasn't been true since DAoC released. Now if by "not mature enough" you mean the people in charge are still immature twats who like to measure e-peen only if they are winning, you might be right.  :why_so_serious:


But they don't ever obfuscate their numbers, while most others do. SOE won't give a straight answer to the "how many subscribers" question to save their lives. Same goes for Turbine. Releasing subscriber numbers doesn't hurt them, because the stat is so meaningless - 100k subscribers for Eve is a fucking fantastic success while for AOC it's an abject failure and for Habbo Hotel it's a slow day.

What would be interesting to see is the number of "first time" mmo players who bought in and also who still subscribe. That in itself would be a better indication of market growth outside of the WoW factor.

I doubt they have good data on numbers of that kind, but I'm guessing they're very very low. There's not that many rabid fans of the IP who were dying to play it in a MMOG (unlike SWG, say) and I can't see anything that would draw a first-timer to AoC otherwise--it requires top-end machines, it's got a Diku design that really does nothing to encourage newcomers, etc.

Now that's interesting. Do you think all dikus are discouraging to newcomers? Or just AoC's particular design? Because it seems to me that initially, diku is the best kind of rpg to get players involved. Kill a monster, take its stuff.

I think the core design of a diku is relatively easily grasped, but you could underestimate how difficult even some of its basic conventions are for players who've never tried one. Stats, levelling up, classes (which aren't unique to diku, but are pretty basic to it) aren't intuitive. Add to that some complexity about the loot (what's good? what's not? what do I do with it?) and the monsters (what can I fight? how?) and things get more confusing. Then layer in all the stuff that's become part of the basic vanilla WoW/EQ design and it's not at all intuitive. I can't imagine someone who'd never played a MMOG before sitting down and deciding that Age of Conan was the easiest to understand and engage. Now, if someone who'd never played one before just happened to give AoC a whirl for whatever reason and liked the basic core gameplay of a MMOG, then they might well fall in love with AoC as their first engagement with the entire genre. I just don't see any reason why AoC should get *more* of that kind of person at the present and lots of reasons why it shouldn't.