f13.net

I think what we're seeing here is a building obsession on the part of the Chinese over WoW that's quite similar to how the Germans feel about David Hasslehoff.

On a worldwide note, it seems that no matter how much Blizzard drops the ball on the PVP or technical side of things, people are continuing to buy and subscribe to this game. I made a chart to help explain things.

(http://www.f13.net/staff/shockeye/chart.gif)

You know, I think we all expected WoW to do well, because Blizzard's games always do, but this is just obscene.  They broke EQ's old record of most subscribers by what, a factor of 4 now?

Lets just hope they put some of that money into adding new development teams for other projects instead of lumping them all together into just two.  I want a Diablo 3 Damn it!

It looks like a grim future indeed for non-EQ clones.

If I were rich I would buy 3 million subs to some random MMORPG just to fuck with everybody.

Hellgate London not doing it for you?


And holy shit, that's alot of money landing in someones lap every month.

I'm sure the money goes out for lap dances just as quickly.

*TOSS A FEW MORE MILLION AT MAKING MORE CONTENT, MOTHERFUCKERS*

Long as you're tossing around dolla bills, y0, how 'bout fixing dupe bugs, quicker patching, and more instances for battlegrounds to remove queues. Those could use some luv, too.

I am continually told that the shortage of Horde players is the reason for the queue.

What you're told is correct.  On some servers it's still pretty much 3:1, 2.5:1 or god-forbid, even worse.  Very few servers are balanced population wise.  There's no helping the queues when the battlegrounds are working correctly, unless they can design/modify it so elves can fight elves. 

To the average WoW player those gripes are irrelevant. Downtime only makes people want to play the game more. The gold goes to whoever can build the best slot machine.

I guarantee they won't be spending cash money on new programmers and artists. That would be too easy.

If not for that graph I wouldn't of been able to grasp exactly what was going on. Shockeye 4 teh win.

If I were a paid analyst I would remark that the slope of the graph is increasing, and therefore predict that in the year 2010 every human on earth will be subscribed to WoW.

This is just fuzzy math:

(http://www.f13.net/schild/graph2.jpg)

The red line is innovation. Now I just need phat analysis funding to prove it. I promise I won't spend it on (cheap) hookers.

At least its not SimsOL that did it, we have yet hope of disent mmorpgs coming out in a distant future.

Wow.

That's a lot of gold farmers.

Heh, I was going to make this same comment myself.  Three data points over four months is kind of stretching the analytical stuff, but it certainly looks like it's increasing at an increasing rate.

Hey, just wait until India reports in.  I hear the Tauren are really going over well there.

those are scarry and impressive numbers.  Still haven't subbed, or played since Beta.  No complaints, just not my cuppa 'o tea.  Prolly will try at some point since it's still the cat's ass. ;)

In other news, I resubbed to EQ2 (quit in Dec.).  I've played for 2 nights with the same poke-around-look-at-the-artwork kind of casual play you might have working in your garden at home.  I like it.  Low levels are fun.  Few players, low stress :D  However, in resubbing I noticed The Smed made an announcement I missed while I was screaming in SWG (since abandoned). Here's his take on WoW.  Sorry for the repeat if already posted:

Sony Online Entertainment President, John Smedley, discusses EverQuest II and the future of MMOs (http://eqlive.station.sony.com/news_section/newsview.jsp?story=49987)

To me SOE is shaking in their boots, huddled in the corner rocking gently, rolling their eyes.... because
1) they have been totally pwnt by Blizzard over direct revenue (abandoners) and lost opportunity revenue (new subs);
2) they see some hope, however marginal, that the new peeps WoW is bringing in might make some coin fall their way; but
3) they really have no ideas of how to catch up other than building another pyramid (essentially, another gigantic MMO to compete since the world at large is sick of EQ#). 

All in all, they are falling away fast since the new metric for success will be not units sold (as Raph recently mentioned) but active billing regs.  The whole business is about recurring revenue and He-Who-Has-the-Biggest-Subscription-Base-Wins.  Wins now and will continue to win.  Units sold is a console model, where EA etc. have to sell over their limited "weekend" period like movies (cf. Haemish article).  But MMO's with their long-term operating costs (datacenters, Indian CSRs, etc.) have to have a continuing stream.  Blizzard seems to be not only finding new springs of players but seems to be the only person at the pump.  Smed's mention on online poker and wireless are interesting, and maybe with The Exchange SOE will do something devious with online gambling.  But so far as the MMO market goes, I really wonder how big their nestegg is and how they are going to try to catch up.

ZING!

I have a pretty strong feeling that almost all this money is being thrown down the abyss that is Vivendi's massive debt.

Damn that was funny.

Blizzard is certainly fucking SOE into the ground without lube or protection.

We all know the reson for this - Horde needs better boobies.

Seriously.

Blood Elf Bikini-zon 4tw.

Given that the loot bug remains UN-FUCKING-FIXED this many patches in, and that the last patch introduced a client/server synch bug (that monster you are running from keeps hitting you because the server doesn't know you are moving), they really ought to spend that money and give the current devs some good severance packages and hire someone with abilities.

I cringe thinking of the bugs and exploits that their first XP will introduce, when it comes out in ... 2012

I was going to wait and resub when the xp came out.

But I am a weak weak man.

And I do love the hot gnomer action.

Obligatory WoW General Forums refutation, complete with fuzzy logic and numbers fresh from the ass. (http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?fn=wow-general&t=4129421&p=1&tmp=1#post4129421)

Best response in that thread:

Even better:

I think this guy, and the article he sited, got the real point.  1.5 mil subscribers in one month.  America and Japan are now niche markets.

Those numbers might be a bit of an estimate too.


The thought of a lovechild makes me shudder.

And if they are double the actual numbers then they only have 15X the commonly agreed minimum break-even point for an MMO.  If any of us were working on an MMO that was pulling 750K subs, we'd be shopping for upgrades for our Porsche.

Mind you, China is a complex market.  I can recall translating English between Chinese students when I was in grad school because they couldn't understand each other's native speech.

So that's what killed me.  It was a pain in the fucking ass.

Nice one.  I think I need to go home and have a lie down.

I think every single other MMOG would kill - I mean contract murder for hire - to get the 'niche' numbers that WoW is getting.  But yeah, sucks for the US :(

Seriously, this thing is reverberating in my head like that Lews Black skit about the IHOP conversation.

I really can not grasp what could cause this guy to make that sort of correlation.  "If not for my horse I wouldn't of spent that year in college."  "1.5 million people in China are only like 5000 people in the US."

You better get a handle on that before you have an aneurysm.

And yes, America is a niche market, it's just taken this long for American companies to realize it. There's a reason NCSoft is doing so well that it can afford to fund so many developments. SOE? Pfffffft, they are pikers compared to the motherfuckers coming out of Asia or able to penetrate Asia. Korea and the Pacific Rim scoffed at EQ1.