On Census Data: WoW and EQ2

[Venkman]

The phenomena that is World of Warcraft has resulted in a very broad array of people looking at the game, and at the genre. One of the more interesting groups is the folks at PARC who, for awhile now, have been gathering and reporting all sorts of interesting data at their PlayOn blog.

But even a less-played game like Everquest 2 can provide some interesting insights into players and their preferences. eq2census features search and filter functionality similar to the widely-referenced WarcraftRealms.

The data available provides some interesting insights into the similarities and differences between the two titles. There appears to be a similarity in how players choose "Good" vs "Evil" Races and Classes, while a difference is notable in the population across the Levels, particularly interesting at a time when servers are merging.

I normally would just migrate all the HTML stuff over to here, but it's sorta image heavy, and covers two different topics anyway. Plus I wasn't sure who'd care for something I slapped together because Bat Country EQ2's guild is in limbo pending our server merge :)

[schild]

Warcraft - 5 million
Warcraft 2/xpack - 3/? million
Warcraft 3/xpack - 3/1 million
World of Warcraft - 5.5 million
Diablo - 2.5 million
Diablo II/xpack - 4/? million
Starcraft/xpack - 6/3 million

I don't know how these numbers stack up with copies of a Battle Chest - which is how you buy pretty much every Blizzard game except for WoW now.

I uh, don't know what to say other than WoW isn't a phenomena in any sense of the word. The Sims was a phenomenon at 16 Million Copies Served in a completely untested genre.

While it's very nice that a lot of people are studying World of Warcraft, the number it has sold and the number of players playing it isn't shocking.For the MMORPG industry, WoW is an anomaly. For Blizzard it's standard fare with a much better opportunity for profit.

Edit: Also, I'm 99% sure that these numbers (from Wikipedia are for America only - except for WoW, maybe they can't get the American only numbers). The Wikipedia list shows AOEII selling more copies than Starcraft, which I know, for a fact is wrong. But anyway, every number there seems low, except WoW which is probably right on the money.

Edit Edit: Nevermind. This is from the same page, which backs up what I just guessed:

Please keep in mind:

Video game sales statistics change on a daily basis.
Video game sales statistics are difficult to come by.
Because of these reasons, please:

Think of sales numbers as the minimum amount of units sold, not the precise amount.
Help adjust these statistics as new information becomes available, and quote your sources.
Although this list strives to be sales world-wide, some data is currently based on US sales.

[Venkman]

Not really the point I wanted to discuss, but I think it's an important one anyway.

WoW is a phenomena in the U.S with having more than double the number of active accounts of any other MMORPG at their heights. It doesn't matter if WoW is 1mil or 1.5mil in the U.S (iirc I think it's 1.5). It's still craploads more than any other game has come close to achieving here. SOE's entire library only hit around 850k, making them certainly a dominant player, but highlighting differences in understanding of the genre and its potential.

Further, it's continued growth throughout 2005 garnered a great deal of press in non-standard/veteran-targeted publications, enough so average people (as in, an aunt I haven't talked to in 10 years) know the name. It achieved household name status faster and more broadly than any other MMORPG outside of the Shawn Woolley incident for EQ.

It's not a phenomenon in relation to other genre. PC Games are topped, by a large margin, by The Sims. Even Myst (the previous top-seller befoe the Sims won out with all of its combined expansions) far exceeded WoW in the U.S. Console games are even higher sellers, with the GTA titles selling somewhere around 2.5 times the number of Sims titles sold. And the console industry is the dominant part of the 10.5bil video game industry.

But within MMORPGs, within the U.S. (and in Europe), WoW has done more than any other title.

And it's fun. And it's built on an established concept with a lot of tweaks. And it's polished with tradiitonal Blizzard reknown. And it has a crapload of players carping about the same shit that melted Lum's servers. Derivation, innovation, little invention, success inspite of preferences and wishes. And I'm playing EQ2 because I don't feel like raiding in WoW and have nothing left to do there until the expansion.

Moving on...

[schild]

It's not a phenomenon compared to other PC games because it isn't other PC games. It's not a phenomenon compared to other MMORPGs because it isn't other MMORPGs. Anyone coming into the [MMORPG] market thinking - "Hey, I can compete with WoW" better have the words "Rockstar Games Presents..." before their title or Valve software on the box.

One of my roommates said something interesting the other day, that Blizzard games are a save point for whatever genre they invade. As in, Blizzard decides when to release their game and that's where the genre is saved. Like in a regular game. You can come back to that save point to play the pinnacle of that generation/type of game, and it's nostalgic and perfect and just how you remember it. But you can't just walk forward fro that save point. Paths diverge. Adapt. Change. But that save point is what Blizzard does. They are the mile markers before exits on a highway. Trying to compete with a Blizzard game is fruitless. They're the only ones who can make save points. In other words:

                                                    ,-------------o-------->
                                                   /
---------o------------o-----------o---------O<----Blizzard
                                                   \
                                                    `------------o-------->

Calling a Blizzard game a phenomena is missing the point entirely. Whenever I say this, I'm not trying to knock WoW. I'm trying to knock the pundits that clump WoW in with the rest of the genre.

[Venkman]

I'm sorta confused, but I think we agree. Maybe phenomena is the wrong word. But then if I didn't use it, we wouldn't have "save point" either :)

The thing that we can't forget is that what WoW did for MMORPGs for the general public is not really comparable to the save points in RPGs and RTSes of the time. Sure, some of people talking about WoW the way they are is based on much more available public collaberation than has existed years past. But this is still about hundreds of thousands of people playing a new game alongside hundreds of thousands that have played analagous ones, collectively drawing even greater awareness to a genre that otherwise would not have gotten so much of it anytime soon.

The phemomenon, to me, is that awareness (and, on a minor side, how it proved so many people, including myself, wrong).

And yes, it raised the bar. Like EQ1 did, and UO before it. Other games have come since and created their own comfortable niche. The important thing for any new company to realize is the true scope of the undertaking. But you don't need 40mil (or 80mil) to make an MMORPG. You need "enough" to capture "enough" people to make "enough" profit to continue expanding a game. Given the realtime and persistent nature of this genre, and the rather linear/focused nature of the WoW experience, there's now as there always has been room for more developers and publishers to come along with new ideas.

Because of this, a point I keep making is that WoW has helped the genre (as any success would) simply by bringing more people in. Someone will eventually migrate from WoW through other titles to land in Second Life. WoW (as any success would be) is an ambassador of sorts to these games. Not everyone who buys it will like it forever, and some of them will leave for the genre at large. Like we all did from earlier big successes (relative to the competition of the day).

[schild]

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.

[Venkman]

Hehe, and not to derail a derail, but I can't see Tabula Rasa having anywhere near the "instant get" easy messaging that helped WoW. Garriot's known to be sure, and NC Soft is not me using my checkbook, but the game itself is not something I've linked with "big" yet. And I say that as a fan of both forms of it. I could be way misinformed or just not seeing it the right way, but I'm going to be particularly interested in seeing what they show, if anything, this E3. Thus far, it's relied mostly on its unique gameplay components, chunks of which were redesigned from the ground up last year anyway.

The next "big" MMO has to, like WoW, come with much more than just a cool game idea. It needs a huge marketing push (like a budget equal to what most spend to develop and publish), the sort of name that makes that messaging easy, ideally a many-market near-concurrent launch, or one that builds upon itself, and even more ideally, an existing fanbase. Movie tie-ins maybe. Co-branding maybe. Licensing, I wish not, but it works. But a game sold only on its innovative gameplay components? Not sure it could be that big.

What could be big? Not sure really. So many titles now, there'll probably remain a few big front runners with a huge number of niche titles. And again, that's not a bad thing if those niche companies scaled their business appropriately. It's easier for Vivendi to get listing at GameSpot, but Andrew Tepper can still pay his bills.

[schild]

What's needed? Consoles.

The PC realm is owned by Blizzard for the next 3-5 years minimum.

[Venkman]

Man I hope not. I am too old to get used to those controllers  I have a 360 at the office though. Keep thinking of trying some gaming on it with my wireless keyboard mouse.

Blizzard's a dominant player to be sure, but there's still more people playing games on a PC that aren't Blizzard than those that are. In the near term, I see a movement more to aggregation rather than single-title or platform-exclusivity though. Pogo, Miniclip, license-based sites, stuff for cellphones and mobile platforms, that sorta thing. The amount of online gamers in the U.S. is actually pretty huge, many orders of magnitudes larger than WoW. They're just not playing MMOGs, for fairly common-sense reasons (dedicated time and theme alienation mostly I'd think).

[Righ]

Doubt it. Gamers are fickle, even frothing Blizzard fanbois. Between Warcraft II and III they played all sorts of crap, the bulk of them didn't sit on B.Net playing old games. A lot of folks did, but not the bulk of the WCII players. Blizzard have brought a bunch more people into MMORPG gaming, and those folks are going to try other MMORPGs if they enjoyed WoW- there's already evidence that some established titles are getting a second wind from bored WoW players. Just as most Warcraft players didn't aspire to get to the top of the B.Net ladders, so most WoW players won't aspire to raid every night through all Tigoles content. For these people, the game ends earlier. They'll return for expansions and new release, but between times, they're easy pickings.

However, the thing that's going to have to change post-WoW to capture some of the new MMORPG gamers are the graphics. It doesn't matter that the models in about every other game are technically better than in WoW. The WoW graphics are bright, vibrant, attractive and work on crappy computers. More MMORPGS need to simultaneously reduce the polygon count and tart up the palettes if they want to make a good first impression. Because shiny first impressions count when you're trying to attract fickle gamers.

[Trippy]

The phenomena that is World of Warcraft has resulted in a very broad array of people looking at the game, and at the genre. One of the more interesting groups is the folks at PARC who, for awhile now, have been gathering and reporting all sorts of interesting data at their PlayOn blog.

But even a less-played game like Everquest 2 can provide some interesting insights into players and their preferences. eq2census features search and filter functionality similar to the widely-referenced WarcraftRealms.

The data available provides some interesting insights into the similarities and differences between the two titles. There appears to be a similarity in how players choose "Good" vs "Evil" Races and Classes, while a difference is notable in the population across the Levels, particularly interesting at a time when servers are merging.

I normally would just migrate all the HTML stuff over to here, but it's sorta image heavy, and covers two different topics anyway. Plus I wasn't sure who'd care for something I slapped together because Bat Country EQ2's guild is in limbo pending our server merge :)

You need to fix the links on your site. This one, for example doesn't work. Neither does this one (from this page). In your EQ2 and WoW: Race and Class article you don't really talk about WoW so the title seems a bit misleading (where's the evidence of similarity?).

[Sauced]

My online life tends to circle around more sites and boards that serve my primary interests, film snobbery mostly.  And I have a lot of people I consider dear friends who think video games are for mouth-breathing palm-draggers.

They know about Leroy Jenkins, they've played WoW.  They would never admit it in public.

[Venkman]

You need to fix the links on your site.

You know, I had some problems with that yesterday. Not sure how it went so fubar, so thanks! Fixin' processin'.

[Fargull]

However, the thing that's going to have to change post-WoW to capture some of the new MMORPG gamers are the graphics. It doesn't matter that the models in about every other game are technically better than in WoW. The WoW graphics are bright, vibrant, attractive and work on crappy computers. More MMORPGS need to simultaneously reduce the polygon count and tart up the palettes if they want to make a good first impression. Because shiny first impressions count when you're trying to attract fickle gamers.

Righ,

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...

[Toast]

An amazing thing about World of Warcraft's numbers is that every 3 months or so, each account generates a full box sale's worth of revenue.

So, 5 million active accounts in a year's time is worth roughly 25 million box sales of a conventional title.

Now, I wonder about the operating margins of this revenuecompared to the margins for releasing a  standard big budget hit game. With the gigantic economies of scale that Blizzard is leveraging, profits must be bananas.

Back to the original point:  I wish the game manufacturers would release more census type information. Unfortunately, it's pretty juicy proprietary marketing type data that any smart game company would hoard.

[Righ]

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

You mean Horde. The smart games companies play shamans.

[Murgos]

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've disagreed with you on this before and I disagree with you now.  If you go read the EVE newb boards there is a sizable chunk of those posts that start off with, "I just came over from WoW and..."

[HaemishM]

Ok, I'll clear it up. It isn't a phenomenon because Blizzard consistantly goes this.

It doesn't fucking matter what Blizzard has done before. FOR THE MEDIUM OF MMOG'S, WOW IS A PHENOMENON. Shit, even Korean MMOG's haven't sold this well when you look at overall numbers. It is an aberration, certainly and since it was Blizzard and yadda yadda yadda, there are reasons it happened above and beyond it being an MMOG. But for the medium of MMOG's, it is a phenomen, just like Diablo was and just like Warcraft 2 was. It's big and it needs to be paid attention to.

No, companies should not try to compete with it, and that's a good thing. Its numbers may be the one thing that make investors sit up and realize they don't have to be the biggest thing on the block to make profits with MMOG's.

For clarification, this is the definition of phenomenon I'm using:

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

No one thought it would reach 5 million subscribers, not even Blizzard itself. Hell, I thought it'd settle at 300k. I was wrong. That it would succeed is not unusual or surprising. That it would succeed so much is.

[Arthur_Parker]

Does it become a phenomenon at 7 million subscribers?  Should we wait a few weeks and see? 

I'm fully expecting Earth's first extraterrestrial encounter to occur in a local computer game store when someone walks up to the counter with 8 boxes of WoW, one in each hand.

[Righ]

Does it become a phenomenon at 7 million subscribers?  Should we wait a few weeks and see? 

Not for schild. It will never be a phenomenon to him, because he contends that this is just another wildly popular Blizzard game like the rest and even a moron would have known a Blizzard game would be this popular. It isn't an MMORPG, it's a Blizzard game. You people calling it an MMORPG or MMOG are pissing him off.

[shiznitz]

Everyone is ascribing the wrong meaning to "phenomenon." The word simply means an occurrence. Starting my car every morning is a phenomenon.

[Dren]

Just because I was curious the other day and wanted a chance to say "I told you so," I give you:

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=1577.msg40800#msg40800

It is always fun to look at everyone's predictions for WoW sub numbers.  I seriously thought the maximum would be 1-2 million, but I didn't count on the Asian countries jumping on it like they did.

Edit:  Haemish said 200k!  Lollerskates!  :-D

Edit-Edit:  Whoa, my estimate remembrance was way off. 1-2 million more likely.

[Nebu]

At the very best, WoW will hit 400k within the first 3 months and decline slowly after that.  yadda yadda yadda

I was wrong as well.  I was deluded into thinking that people would see through WoW as being yet another dikuclone with new shiny. 

Time for me to revive the pet rock!

[HaemishM]

I'll be damned, I thought I said 300k. Oh well. I also thought EQ2 would settle in at about 150k (I think) and I'm not sure I wasn't overestimating there.

Either way, I was WILDLY wrong about WoW's numbers, just as much as everyone else was.

[schild]

If EQ2, Guild Wars, Tabula Rasa, and a few other games weren't on the horizon - I'd say double or triple that number. 400k sounds about right though given the number of Blizzard fans who will probably sign up.

I gave EQ2, Tabula Rasa, and Guild Wars WAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY TOO MUCH CREDIT.

[schild]

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 Nebu said above, he thought a lot of people would just see it as a dikuclone. Well, it is a dikuclone and 5,000,000 people are retarded. Maybe I just don't want these people fucking up the genre with their lowest common denominator herdery. Yea, I just made up a word.

[Toast]

Blizzard was willing to do this game at lower box sales than earlier games because of subscription revenue stream.

They were coming from an environment where their online play was free. They were entering an industry where the big dogs were measured in thousands of subs.

WoW's results had to surprise them as much as us.

[Murgos]

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.

If you think big company investment and accounting is as simple as ($Box = $Box else NO) then it's probably a good thing you run a free internet msg board.

[schild]

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.

If you think big company investment and accounting is as simple as ($Box = $Box else NO) then it's probably a good thing you run a free internet msg board.

For most companies I'd say no. But for a company like Blizzard that has a much longer than normal production time and ridiculous costs (if that $80M number holds any water), yea, there has to be a cerain guarantee on how many they think they'll sell at the very least. Though they may have been conservative and said 2-3Million. I highly doubt they could have gotten all that money had they said 500,000 and actually thought that.

[Murgos]

Income from WoW (a subscription based service) did not need to equal the sales of ANY of their previous games to be shown as a worthwhile investment of their income.

Your too fixated on the box numbers; over a 5 - 7 year time frame sales of 1/10 the number of boxes as sold for Diablo II would equal a greater net profit than Diablo II ever did.  I guarantee you that was taken into account when the greenlight was given for the game.

They compared investment strategies and saw a benefit in making WoW, some of that benefit was probably also counted even though it was intangible and in the frame of experience and methodologies and has no 'real' dollar value at all (though it was undoubtedly given one by an actuary.)

*Note the spell checker changed Diablo II to Doable II - a game I think I would much rather play...

[Toast]

From a finance perspective, there's such a huge benefit of securing future revenue streams from customer. It smooths out your business cycle, locks in a level of run rate revenue, and allows you to just milk an initial capital investment. Even better, it funds the hell out of future hits.

Try this exercise: If the average WoW purchaser subscribes for a total of 6 months, you could conceivably view each box sale as this:

Box Revenue:  $50
Deferred Subscription rev:  (6x$15) = $90
Total Rev per box:  $140

Not a bad business to get into, eh?

[Venkman]

Blizzard probably worked the numbers for a two year plan: X dollars from launch, Y dollars from fees, Z profit from a cumulative total of both, knowing when their expansion was going to hit.  Nobody in this genre calculates on a month-by-month basis. They need to have a solid estimate well before launch. This is why I laugh whenever I hear "they love gamers and only release stuff when it's ready". Nope. Not when box distribution is required. You don't just turn on distribution to thousands of retail locations overnight.

If you go read the EVE newb boards there is a sizable chunk of those posts that start off with, "I just came over from WoW and..."

For the game jumping I've been since November, this actually has appeared with some degree of frequency in all of them. There's too many MMORPGs (and for some, just too many games) for everyone to stick exclusively to one. The average length of an account in months has been reducing for years. No idea where it is now, but if it's above 5 months across the genre, I'd be surprised.

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.

That's relevant for initial launch. 14 months later they still have a metric fuckton of players far beyond even the most aggressive predictions of 2004 and prior. You can grab a ton of people with creative advertising. You can't keep them interested in a game in that quantity for that amount of time without something solid to experience.

(and like so many admitting they miscalculated: in January 2005 I had a bet with someone that WoW wouldn't be 1mil by Christmas 2005, for reasons of content consumption and boredom. Then they announced plans for launch in China. Then they hit 1mil in just the U.S. alone. And shit, at E3 2003 I wrote the game off as derivative schlock with limited and unsustainable interest).

Somewhere in here used to be a discussion about census data. Guess it wasn't as interesting...

[Trippy]

Blizzard probably worked the numbers for a two year plan: X dollars from launch, Y dollars from fees, Z profit from a cumulative total of both, knowing when their expansion was going to hit.  Nobody in this genre calculates on a month-by-month basis. They need to have a solid estimate well before launch. This is why I laugh whenever I hear "they love gamers and only release stuff when it's ready". Nope. Not when box distribution is required. You don't just turn on distribution to thousands of retail locations overnight.

It only takes about a month or so after a game has "gone gold" for it to appear on retail shelfs. This applies even to A+++ titles like Half-Life 2 (gold October 18, 2004, released November 15, 2004). MMOs are a bit different in that you can make the retail discs before the game has actually "gone gold" since everybody playing has to have an Internet connection so you can keep making changes all the way up (and through) release day. 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. E.g. Hunters were added near the very end of the beta testing as were the talent trees for a number of classes.

[schild]

Darniaq, I read a lot of that census data a couple days ago.

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

A) Is profound bullshit.
B) COMPLETELY speculative bullshit.
C) Complete misinformation.
D) Not based in a land we like to call reality. If you're asking players directly, they'll often lie about sex, age, etc. If you're looking at character sex male and female means NOTHING. More males probably play females than females do. Male and female shouldn't even be considered seperate races in MMOGs anymore. It should just be boobies or no boobies. Also, no MMOG is going to release that much information on a game. Well, maybe some niche ones would, but that'd be more important to their business (we have 5,000 females out of 7,000 players!) rather than actually interesting or representative of the genre. Also, discussing census data is more often than not a circlejerk guessing game. I leave it up to the blowhards over at Terranova and Nick Yee's House O' Random Graphs to do that. :)

Edit: Exhibit A:

After the previous analysis, we ran an additional one that included the character gender variable. Here, our results were puzzling. Across all of our metrics, male characters were better connected than female characters. And this was true for all classes, with the only exception of Priests. In other words, male characters of all classes are better connected than female characters of all classes, except for female Priests, who are better connected than male Priests. This gender difference was clear and consistent across our three measures of centrality.*

Shocking. A world full of dorks, males are better connected, except for priests because dorks think priests are a pussy class. Do I a degree to do this shit?

I'm not knocking you Darniaq, on the surface it's interesting, but really, Blizzard would need to give away a LOT of information they're just not willing to give.

[Righ]

Shocking. A world full of dorks, males are better connected, except for priests because dorks think priests are a pussy class. Do I a degree to do this shit?

You may not need a degree to do something, but you can get a degree in just about anything. The study of MMORPGs is fairly mundane and sane. Some American woman who went to Glasgow University bequeathed an endowment on the University on the condition that it created a course in parapsychology.