On Census Data: WoW and EQ2

[Venkman]

That being said, Blizzard clearly had pressure applied to them to release the game before Christmas given the dire financial performance of VUGames at that time

I personally think they planned to hit Christmas time all along, at least as early as March 2004. The speed to go from Gold to Shelf is not that important. The infrastructured needed to move a half-million boxes from a replicator house to those thousands of places it needs is where the complexity is. It's not like Blizzard had a bunch of tractor trailers idling in the parking lot waiting to go. Whichever company they worked with had to schedule replication and distribution into their overall workflow many many months in advance, after working out planogramming and shelf stocking with so many different retailers (and stocking in late November requires a lot of pull, since most Christmas stock really wants to begin appearing on shelf around September/October). There's only so much "just in time" that is possible in distributed-hard goods.

My big problem with census data in MMORPGs is that it often:

If we were all forced to talk in pure fact, there'd be no forums. Of course it's speculative bullshit. But it's fun speculative bullshit. And you know as we all do how much decisions made in this genre are made more on faith and educated guesswork than unassailable fact. There's some real qualitative research that drives quantitative research, but it's still much more "art" than "science".

I only mentioned the PARC stuff so I could draw reference to looking at EQ2 and make my own bullshit speculations :)

[Akkori]

well, I will sit at the big-boy table for just a moment.. long enough to say that IMHO, any game that is so combat-focused as WoW will never have the long term appeal as a game with several strong elements. This is why people get bored of WoW and go do something else for a while. Its combat=its boring. 4 different game devoted to content might keep one hard-core gamer happy, but not one. After powering through the game (aka "beating it"), they move on till another expansion or the other games they play release an expansion. But sicne they like to sell boxes, this doesnt seem to be a problem to them. I dotn understand it, myself. It seems to me that they would want players to pay that monthly fee for a looooong time. Especially now with digital downloads becoming more prevalent. WHy bother a big retail box push when you just use some bandwidth and let the player burn their own cd?

[Venkman]

But why is leaving a game a bad thing? If they worked their business model around a certain duration of retention, then it's all good.

Further, the games with the longest-term appeal have also been traditionally those with narrower appeal. Part of this is based on the quality of execution of course. Another part is the inability for any one company to actually hit that panacea of deep crafting, awesome combat, repeat-play acquisition-based encounters (raiding), dynamic zones, relevant PvP with holdings and loss, and resource collection system. Too many systems requiring too much work and too much time for any one company to give a shot at.

And that's only after a company thinks it's worth doing in the first place, which apparently the bottomless-wallet like Blizzard did not, probably because they thought it'd be too narrow of appeal.

[Shannow]

Blizzard makes populist games. They work towards the lowest common denominator and thats what ultimately makes them so successful. Lots of ppl like that, some of us don't.

[jpark]

Unfortunately, it's pretty juicy proprietary marketing type data that any smart game company would hoard.

Agreed.  Has SOE posted their data yet?

[Venkman]

Those boilerplate "About SOE" parts of press releases contain the total number of subscriptions across all of their titles (was about 850k). As of now, I believe the only title they post online players now is Planetside (though I can't recall MxO and never knew about ToonTown). They never did for SWG nor EQ2. And they haven't done so for EQ1 since DAoC beta, saying at the time, quite rightly, that there is no real benefit to posting numbers.

There really isn't. Most other games don't either. Basically, there's no benefit to the company for posting numbers to players. They'd rather players make decisions on their experiences rather than some arbitrary and uninformed impression of total player count. Player count does not communicate per-level density, and it's density that is more important than whether there's 1,000 or 10,000 other people you'll never see in zones you'll never get to.

The density is a combination of count and world design. AC2 for example always felt empty. I don't think having 500 or 5,000 people concurrently logged in per server would make much of a different either. The world is simply too large. It's also the reason I couldn't care less about the DnL world size. Unless they are confident they can fill key areas in the world, the larger it is, the more spread players are, the more likely they'll quit because they think the game is "dead".

The impression of deadness is more important than the fact of deadness. Not reporting players online removes the ability to draw a pre-game immediate impression, leaving the quality of the game design to stand on its own. At the very least it requires players make more informed impressions from direct experience. And I'm a firm believer that people should go out and exercise their curiosity themselves rather than wait for others to do so for them.

[Trippy]

Those boilerplate "About SOE" parts of press releases contain the total number of subscriptions across all of their titles (was about 850k). As of now, I believe the only title they post online players now is Planetside (though I can't recall MxO and never knew about ToonTown). They never did for SWG nor EQ2. And they haven't done so for EQ1 since DAoC beta, saying at the time, quite rightly, that there is no real benefit to posting numbers.

SOE stopped listing their total sub numbers in their press releases other than a vague mention of "hundreds of thousands" last year:

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=5634.msg138952

[Venkman]

Thanks for the update. Been apparently a very long while since I read that :)

[Margalis]

A game like WoW which is "easy" and more combat-centric is likely to lose more people, but also to attract more people.

Then you have games like FFXI. There are people that have been playing that game for years and years and show no signs of slowing. The most recent expansion was so damn long and hard that most people estimate that only 1/10 US owners have actually finished it!

Of course, a game like that loses plenty of people along the way as well as it becomes too frustrating. I'm not sure that the average retention rate of a game like FFXI or EQ is longer than WoW, although the high end of the scale is probably larger. By that I mean I don't think many people will still be playing WoW 5 years after release, while that isn't true for a FFXI or EQ. But average retention probably isn't that far off. And even if WoW is a bit behind in that area, their huge volume much more than makes up for it.

If I want a game that is purely about combat I'll just play Phantasy Star Online or the new one (Phantasy Star Universe). It has a more video-game feel and WoW feels pretty video-gamey to begin with.

[jpark]

By that I mean I don't think many people will still be playing WoW 5 years after release, while that isn't true for a FFXI or EQ. But average retention probably isn't that far off.

I realize my point here is not widely shared - nonetheless * Steps on to wooden crate*

Because the graphical appeal of the game is based on style rather than the latest polygon count possible in a game - the visual appeal of WoW may last a longer than any other game.

The only thing that could mitigate against this is if other games adapt its style over polgon philosophy.  For now, it is not only differentiating, it is insenstive to technology cycles for the foresseeable future.

[Numtini]

Then you have games like FFXI. There are people that have been playing that game for years and years and show no signs of slowing. The most recent expansion was so damn long and hard that most people estimate that only 1/10 US owners have actually finished it!

I think FFXI and Lineage / L2 are tastes for us in America of how the rest of the world has felt. It cost them virtually nothing to bother to sell them to us, but really, they could care less whether we buy or not. We're just those odd foreigners who can bring in some extra money for them. And if not, there's no real cost anyway.

[Trippy]

I think FFXI and Lineage / L2 are tastes for us in America of how the rest of the world has felt. It cost them virtually nothing to bother to sell them to us, but really, they could care less whether we buy or not. We're just those odd foreigners who can bring in some extra money for them. And if not, there's no real cost anyway.

There are translations costs.

[schild]

FFXI had good reason to be localized. It was costly and seems to have been worth it. At least on the PC Side. Probably not on the PS2 side, but if one is translated it's probably just a conversion job. It was also a way to pimp the PS2 hard drive that HAPPENED to fail. Shocking, I know.

As for Lineage 2 - simply a bad call by NCSoft. But they seem to be on a run of bad calls lately. Webzen, save us, you're our only hope. Or sommat.

[Margalis]

Because the graphical appeal of the game is based on style rather than the latest polygon count possible in a game - the visual appeal of WoW may last a longer than any other game.

That would be a great point if not for the fact that FFXI has a higher polygone count and a better style.

And even if that weren't true, nobody is going to play WoW (or any other game) for 5 years because the graphics still look ok. Bad graphics might get you to stop playing but good graphics aren't going to keep you going for a half decade.

Maybe I wasn't clear. I meant the same people won't be playing WoW 5 years after release. That's what I meant by max retention.

[Azazel]

Ok, I'll clear it up. It isn't a phenomenon because Blizzard consistantly goes this. But they don't consistantly bring people to a genre, not anywhere near the numbers they rack up at least. All they do is soundly thrash a genre whenever they enter the arena. I mean, I guess you could argue - though we won't know until Tabula Rasa comes out (or some other equally big MMOG - not DDO or Auto Assault) that WoW has brought people to the genre. But it's certainly not 5.5 Million people. It's probably more around 5-10% of that genre. But as long as Blizzard releases the Burning Crusade and starts work on the release of their next game (diablo 3, starcraft 2, whatever) fast enough, I would say the number that will retain in the general MMORPG market will hover between 5% and 15% of their total sales. In other words, the MMORPG market grows like it does every year and everything except WoW has been forcibly niched.

I don't know about that. It's a big mix, and it also depends on how you're defining the "genre". I'm an ex-eq'er and so are my closest friends who play WoW, but I've also met a lot of people who are, as you say, the Blizzard fanbois, of living on Diablo 2 for years. Then there's a lot of others I've run into who'd never played one of these games, or may have played WC/SC/Diablo but didn't live them. There's a lot of people who are playing WoW who never would have touched the genre before, simply because WoW is so accessable compared to others in the genre. Well, at least the 1-60 part of the game. At 60 it's just Everquest 1 on easy mode but with fewer interesting raids and even worse faction grinding..

[Azazel]

I would say the graphics are going to be 40% or so.. honestly, one thing Blizzard nailed to the post with WOW was the interface.  No game has one has an interface nearly as neat as WOW's.  DDO looks like it was birthed from the mid 90's compared to WOW's...

I logged onto EQ1 for a few minutes about 6-8 weeks ago, for the first time in months. the familiar hotkey interface of:

1 2
3 4
5 6
7 8
9 10

had been replaced, by - you guessed it - 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 along the bottom of the screen. There were more changes, but I didn't stay online long enough to really check them out or remember them now. By the same token, I can say that as someone who'd played EQ for 5 years, it'd royally suck to have to completely remap and relearn your controls simply because the devs decided to try to mirror WoW's interface all of a sudden one day 5 years into the game..

[Merusk]

It's not the first overhaul of the Interface EQ has done, though. EQ players are on the 4th interface design at this point. (Original, Velious, Luclin, and now the one you mention.)

Plus, with as many skins as people were running when last I played, what the devs make the default interface look like is a minor technicality anyway.

[Azazel]

It's not the first overhaul of the Interface EQ has done, though. EQ players are on the 4th interface design at this point. (Original, Velious, Luclin, and now the one you mention.)

True, but the previous upgrades to the interface kept the sme feel as the original as they went along, despite adding more functionality and user-customisation. With this one they've changed the default "look" of EQ from what it had been for 5 years in order to make it more WoW-like. I never liked screwing with the custom UIs anyway, they were a headache to me, and always seemed to break with each patch. It was more stable and familiar to just resize/shape the default one to my liking..

[Venkman]

Because the graphical appeal of the game is based on style rather than the latest polygon count possible in a game - the visual appeal of WoW may last a longer than any other game.

I heavily endorse this product and/or service. It also can't be discounted the sound and music work they did on the game. Topshelf stuff there. Very self-consistent with the graphics.

People spend a lot of time on these games, and they don't want to be depressed about it. There may be some universal rule about graphics and ambience and breadth of appeal or something, but I don't know it. I feel though that more peope want stylized pretty graphics than grungy unhappy ones.

Now, people do like differences. Eastern Plaguelands and Stratholme are not carnival atmospheres. But it's a place people visit, a highlight of the talent in world design. Some people are affected by too much time there. Others couldn't care any less. But ask a thousand people where they'd build a house or spend their day crafting, and I'd bet very few would say EP, and even fewer would actually live and craft there permanently.

Conversely, EQ2 is generally not a world of universal appeal. It has some highlights that I've seen, but in general, as we've all discussed, it's a gray only-semi-stylized world trying too hard to be realistic. The real world doesn't have floating wisps and light tinkling bells in the middle of a forest. This is fantasy! Act like it!.

[jpark]

I very much agree.

As an aside, I love Gothic, which some might find depressing - but EQ2 is a bit depressing visually and it is not remotely Gothic to me.

In WoW - I love the atmosphere of Trisfall glades and the undead zone.  Great execution, and if you don't like it as a player - you can always be an Elf :)

Music is certainly important - but I guess it will be awhile before we have smell 

[Signe]

Most of the games I play already stink.

[HaemishM]

An unusual, significant, or unaccountable fact or occurrence; a marvel.

No one thought it would reach 5 million subscribers, not even Blizzard itself.

Do you think Blizzard would have made the game if they couldn't at the very least sell as many copies as their past games? I'm just taking a piss in the wind here, I mean who would ever want to repeat history.

As has been said, yes. I'm pretty sure the investment meeting went something along these lines.

We've been running Battle.net for no charge to customers for years. How much money did we lose on that, Johnny? A shitton? Ok, and people like Johnny over here are paying $15 a month to play EQ? Johnny, stop playing EQ, we're in a fucking meeting, you retard. I mean, look at this. This isn't even as fun as Diablo. Johnny here could program this in two days. People are paying fucking subscription fees for this shit? HOW MUCH? They are raking in millions of dollars a month for a less interesting Diablo/Battle.net. Are you fucking kidding me? Johhny, put down the fucking mouse before I brain you, you simpering twat. If we only get 1/4 of the people who play Diablo on Battle.net to subscribe for 3 months, we'll have a fucking mint on our hands. We'll print money with my picture on it. I will be KING!

Yeah, let's fucking do it.

I mean, shit, if you had millions playing Diablo II on Battle.net for free, and you got 25% of that to pay a subscription, you'd still have been as successful if not more than EQ1. And that's with not selling as many boxes. Recurring revenue is a beautiful thing, especially when you have the following these guys do.