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PC Games (Games) Role Playing (Games) Entertainment Games

MMOG Subscription Winners, Losers Analyzed 88

Posted by simoniker from the pie-chart-of-doom dept.
Thanks to CorpNews for its recent round-up analyzing and rating the biggest PC massively multiplayer games. Along with subscription estimates similar to the SirBruce analysis graph, there's sharp-tongued comments on performance for Ultima Online ("It's really all your fault. If you weren't a big hit, would others have followed?"), EverQuest ("Say what you will... it knew its target audience and hit it hard enough to make EQ part of popular culture"), and Asheron's Call ("Talk about the little engine that could.")
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MMOG Subscription Winners, Losers Analyzed More

MMOG Subscription Winners, Losers Analyzed

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  • Where is Final Fantasy XI?

  • Again... Puzzle Pirates (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Apreche ( 239272 ) on Friday April 23, 2004 @07:33AM (#8948148) Homepage Journal
    Why is puzzle pirates being neglected so much?

    So far, every MMO I've seen (and I've seen most of them) is just a glorified chat room. It's IRC plus fancy 3d graphics and sound. Sometimes there is also a progress quest [progressquest.com] included as well. No MMO that I've seen actually has skill based gameplay, which is what makes something no longer a chat room, but a GAME.

    Puzzle Pirates is the only MMOish thing I play. Why? Because success is almost entirely skill based. Theoretically someone who has a trial account and has never played before can defeat the person who has been playing the game since day 1 if their skill is great enough. Not only that, but the major factor in any victory is always skill. Not only that, but the people in puzzle pirates actually role play and aren't asshats. What started as random people on the net became my crew and now me hearties, arrr! You don't get that anywhere else.

    Give puzzle pirates the attention and respect it deserves. It's probably the most original and well designed game to come out in a long time.

    • Re:Again... Puzzle Pirates (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Bluesman ( 104513 ) on Friday April 23, 2004 @08:24AM (#8948356) Homepage
      Careful there. I learned long ago if you really enjoy something one of the worst things that can happen is that it gets very popular.
    • Sounds like you need to try second life
      In Second Life, only your RL skills matter. If you're a coder, you can become a scripter, if you're a photoshop wizard, you can build a clothing empire.
      In SL, instead of advancing the skills of a virtual character, it is YOUR skills that advance.
      Bear in mind that it's not exactly a game, so you may well end up deeming it a glorified chat room :P

    • Re:Again... Puzzle Pirates (Score:5, Informative)

      by RasputinAXP ( 12807 ) on Friday April 23, 2004 @10:01AM (#8949230) Homepage Journal
      A lot of us on Corpnews know of puzzle pirates, but it's worth noting that this was the first in a series of articles GBob is writing. You can only cover so much at a time before tasting the bile in the back of our collective throats.
    • Skill in solving simple puzzles like tetris? That are extremly open to cheating through a loop the vendor could never detect?

      I've seen demos at EoH at UIUC of a video camera rigged up to a computer to do image processing on a tetris game and play the game by inputting keystrokes. Do you really think a human could beat a lightning-fast computer who can punch "right" 5 times before you can identify the peice?
    • So far, every MMO I've seen (and I've seen most of them) is just a glorified chat room. It's IRC plus fancy 3d graphics and sound. Sometimes there is also a progress quest [progressquest.com] included as well. No MMO that I've seen actually has skill based gameplay, which is what makes something no longer a chat room, but a GAME

      I think the big explosion in MMORPG growth will be when we see FPS type combat properly combined with a RPG. Planetside and Neocron have tried but haven't gotten it right. Prob
      • I think the big explosion in MMORPG growth will be when we see FPS type combat properly combined with a RPG.

        Parent should be modded up. The two most popular on-line gaming genres are MMORGs and FPShooters. So what would EQ/FFXI + CS/BF1942 look like?

        Maybe the latest SWG expansion is an attempt at blending these two modes of gameplay? The only problem I see is that with FPS games you usually end up getting killed every 5 minutes...so how do you incorporate that into an MMORG that heavily penalizes deat
    • PP is an awesome game...however, you and I are the only ones playing it.

      It is a very small game, Apreche. Compared with the 400,000 people of EQ, are you surprised Puzzle Pirate didn't show up on the graph there? I would be surprised if PP had even 20,000 subscribers.

      PP would be huge if they had money for advertising in real magazines or on TV. But they don't. So instead we see web ads for them on Penny Arcade and the like, where everyone already plays...

      So it goes..
      • Ahoy mates. Thanks for the kind words.

        We are indeed way too small to show up in this graph; we have just over 5,000 subscribers (announcement to be made next week).

        I don't actually think that advertising in gaming magazines would do us that much good, though. TV perhaps, or maybe Woman's Own. But you're right that if we had a mountain of cash we could try it.

        For now we advertise/distribute where it makes sense, like shockwave, PA (where not everyone plays yet, I assure you) and, starting this week, popca
    • Puzzle Pirates (referred to as YPP!) is a great game. I played it extensively when it first came out. At that time it seemed like a sleeper hit that would eventually reach up to 50,000 subscribers. An impressive number for a puzzle MMO.

      Unfortunately, YPP! failed to live up to those high expectations. In my humble opinion the reason is because YPP! is too structured. The game is played by the rules and only by the rules. It is impossible to "think outside of the box" the way you can with a freeform 3D MMO.
      • And this is the reason to combine player-based advancement with character-based advancement. If players don't have anything holding them in the game (a built up character/ship/whatever) then what's keeping them there besides the social aspect?
    • Probably because the other MMO's you've looked at are MMP**RPGS** where the CHARACTER skill not the player skill is what should determine a win or a lost. That is not to say that playing a current generation requires no skill, it is to say that the fundamental burden is upon the character not the player. The difference between an MMRPG and Puzzle Pirates is the difference between D&D and Magic: The Gathering. Both are games, one is a Roleplaying game, the other is not.

  • Whoops? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Dark Nexus ( 172808 ) on Friday April 23, 2004 @07:46AM (#8948177)
    When a comedian makes a crack at people who live in their parents' bedroom and play on the computer all night, it's Everquest he's referring to.


    Parents' BEDROOM? Shouldn't that be parents' basement? Parents' bedroom would open up whole new areas of psychological issues.

  • FFXI (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    These will be much more interesting once they're updated to include FFXI. From what I've heard of player numbers, it pretty much blows away all of the other games listed there, including Lineage, particularly since the US PS2 release. It also shares one of Galaxies' key strengths, namely that it's been able to draw in a lot of the people who wouldn't normally play a MMORPG. Plus, of course, it's release in the US didn't blow goats, unlike Galaxies' release, which sucked pretty much everywhere.

    I'd bet that
    • I played FFXI from the first week it was out, and canceled my subscription this month. Here's why: 1. Level grind, level grind, level grind... there was almost nothing else to do in the game but fight monsters for xp. 2. The game's quest system sucks. Sure, there are a few quests that give you some really cool reward, but most just increase your "Fame" an invisible number somewhere in the computer that determines what other quests you can get. See a pattern? 3. As awful as this will sound, the Japanes

  • Meh (Score:2, Interesting)

    by genrader ( 563784 )
    I don't really care for this guy's article, while he seems to be telling what he thinks is wrong with MMORPGs, and it is true, his recommendations aren't what I would recommend for a few.

    Take my latest MMORPG that's a non-beta, Star Wars Galaxies. His recommendation is to provide the Space Expansion to be perfect. That's not the case, because if so then the original game where you're still going to spend a minimum of 40% of your time is STILL going to be screwed over. Too many people can become Jedi, the G
    • Take my latest MMORPG that's a non-beta, Star Wars Galaxies. His recommendation is to provide the Space Expansion to be perfect. That's not the case, because if so then the original game where you're still going to spend a minimum of 40% of your time is STILL going to be screwed over. Too many people can become Jedi

      Huh? It takes hours and hours and HOURS of tedious grinding now to become a Jedi. The problem that is keeping the people away from the game and turned the casual players off from SWG in the

  • margin of error: 3.5 million? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    the number of people subscribing to MMOGs has increased from 450,000 players in 2000 to over 2.5 to 6 million today Perhaps it's just a typo.

  • Cattassing - Genuine Question (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 23, 2004 @09:31AM (#8948864)
    Reading MMORPG boards I've worked out most of the slang - MOB, DOT, NUKE, phat lewt Kill stealing, PK etc etc etc.

    But I've never seen a definition for "catassing" - what exactly is a catasser or catassing?

    Skip the troll replies please, I really want to know.
    • Catassing? Damn. Now thats some weird language.

      I play NWN online and we hear a lot of "killsteal" and such. When I get accused of it, I warn the idiot. Then I fire off every spell I have. Usually PK's after the 4'th hit.

    • Re:Cattassing - Genuine Question (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 23, 2004 @10:49AM (#8949865)
      catassing is a slang term that has evolved over the past 5 years, it's from the early days of UO. There was a newspaper article regarding this guy who played UO excessively, over 100 hours a week and his friends had not seen him in months. When they went to his apartment looking for him the guy looked like shit,had trash everywhere and an overflowing litterbox. His apartment smelled like shit. It was a huge article for us MMORPG junkies to point and laugh at people who put their real life obligations behind their game time..we would say these people smelled like cat's ass. This later became known as "becoming a catass"..someone who spends too much time playing games. More recently the term catass is used to describe a playstyle. For instance "I don't want to catass for 400 hours to get this Über sword".

      This is roughly translated to "I don't want spend 400 hours of tedius boredom for a stupid sword".
  • I found his synopsis of Shadowbane to be interesting. I just recently killed my account on that game. I played since it was release (Mar. 03, I think).

    If you ever wanted to see what it was like to be in a Mad Max movie then this is it. Except there's no cars. :)
    A total gank fest. Not that this is a bad thing, but it is definately a game designed for a specific segment of the MMO market. New players are best advised to stay away from this title. It can sour their view of MMO's almost irreparably. Someone wh
    • I played almost a year of Shadowbane in both beta and release.

      Let me just say, that it was the most powerfully involving games I'll ever touch. On the face of it, yes it can be a blood bath to the new player. BUT the simple fact that you can build and seige towns in epic 100 vs 100 or more player battles really taught me the power of leadership, teamwork and communication.
    • I was surprised, too. And I overall agree with it.

      I've played Shadowbane since beta, and I love it. And hate it. But my guild is great, so I'm staying with it for a while longer.

      One thing that wasn't mentioned was the opportunity they missed with the Mac market. They could have *owned* the Mac MMORPG market if they had decently supported it, because they were the only MMORPG (outside of Lineage) which let Mac & PC users play together. But the Mac client has been slowly deteriorating (it used to be mor

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Dead On (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Zonk ( 12082 ) on Friday April 23, 2004 @10:49AM (#8949863) Homepage Journal
    That's a really great synopsis of the current MMOG market. Here are a few predictions for you, based on those numbers, for the coming year:

    - World of Warcraft, simply put, is going to change everything. Subscription numbers for UO, FFXI, DAoC, AC, AC2, and EQ are going to fluctuate wildly when WoW comes out as people cancel their subscriptions to give Blizzard's game a shot. I don't know how many will stay, but I expect World of Warcraft, by the middle of next year, to be comfortably within the 250,000 - 300,000 area.

    - Star Wars Galaxies will continue to hemmoraghe players until this fall, when the space expansion comes out. Regardless of how good it is, their subs are going to skyrocket as people flock to the game that has X-Wings and TIE Fighters. This influx of players will sustain them at least another 2 to 3 years as they continue to patch in new content and....(shhh) fix the game. SWG has passed the point where they could have failed. It isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

    - Anarchy Online is going to be a sleeper comeback kid late this year or early next year. Their upcoming expansion sounds good, Funcom has finally managed to start to move beyond their disaster of a launch, and people are getting tired of Fantasy MMOGs.

    - Lineage 2 is not going to do very well at all in the states. US gamers just don't like being ganked.

    - AC and AC2, despite losses to WoW, are going to continue on quietly and happily. Jessica Mulligan is no slouch, and despite aging graphics and a tiny playerbase those games just keep getting better.

    - City of Heroes is going to be a success...for a while. CoH is going to draw a whole bunch of newbie MMOGers into the fold who have never picked up a MMOG before. 6 months down the line if they don't have villains patched in they're going to start losing people as the fact that there is nothing to do besides combat starts to wear on the playerbase.

    - Middle Earth Online is going to be a middling success. Their design concept is only so-so, but they'll attract enough attention via newbie MMOG players lusting after Legolas to stay afloat.

    - Warhammer Online .... ?? I don't know where it's going to pull it's playerbase from. Have to wait and see on this one.

    - EQ, one year from now, will no longer have such a commanding lead over all other US MMOGs.

    - EQ2 is going to do "okay". It's a very different game but the branding alone will be enough to keep it going. Despite what SOE says, EQ is going to lose players to EQ2, futhering the WoW effect on the original Everquest.

    - The Sims Online should be put out to pasture. That creepy melting pot of social darwinism was doomed from the get-go. EA should let it die.

    - Shadowbane will continue to slowly exist as a team of dedicated and talented developers rescue a game that had almost as bad a launch as AO. People will always want to "Play to CRUSH!" so SB will always have players.

    My 2 cents. I spoke a little more about this here: Quality over Quantity [mmorpgdot.com].

    • Re:Dead On (Score:3, Interesting)

      by chrismcdirty ( 677039 )
      Any predictions for Guild Wars?
    • Regrettably, I haven't paid enough attention to it.

      Guild Wars is a free MMOG, developed commercially. I don't know enough about their business plan to figure out where they're going to make money.

      I imagine there will be interest in it if only for the free part of the equation. I don't see it overtaking any of the big guys, though.

      Guild Wars Site [guildwars.com]

      • Guild Wars is actually looking like it has a lot of potential. Screenshots aren't much to go on, but it looks better than WoW. I'm really interested in seeing what some ex-Blizzard developers can do.

        But it is not going to be coming out for a while. At least we all can test it during E3. They are planning a public alpha during the conference so that everyone, not just gaming press can test it out for themselves.

    • Re:Dead On (Score:3, Insightful)

      by *weasel ( 174362 )
      At least your WOW subscription guesses are reasonable. Most people keep throwing around 500k - 1m ... and everytime someone suggests numbers that large it turns into a joke.

      My only point of contention with your prognostication is: expansions don't bring in new gamers, never have.

      They can bring back gamers who cancelled recently - but rarely do they retain anyone they bring back. They bring a quick surge from former players who give it a shot - and they retain players they haven't yet lost. Their larges

      • Re:Dead On (Score:2, Interesting)

        by SoVeryWrong ( 576783 )
        I agree with your assessment of expansions, but I think the SWG addition may behave a bit differently based on the giant fanbase for the XWing/Tie Fighter games.

        It could possibly pull those people into MMOGs, if they make the cost of entry low enough that it doesn't require 6 months of play to get a fighter.

        • Re:Dead On (Score:3, Interesting)

          by *weasel ( 174362 )
          With the current advertised rate of inflation in SWG, I doubt it'd take much time at all to buy a starship.

          The problem I see, is the divergence between MMO -RPG and MMO -Space Combat Sim.

          Frankly, I don't see twitch combat on the MMO scene working out to well, even on broadband connections. (and most gamers don't have those).
          Witness WWIIonline's 64 unit visibility limit, and the all-too-exploitable client-side hitscan of Planetside.

          And any 'slowing down' of combat to appease technical reality is going to

    • Lineage 2 (Score:2, Informative)

      by Negative9 ( 512823 )
      Just a note concerning Lineage 2:

      I've been playing the beta and it's not a gank fest. If you pk someone who doesn't fight back you turn red and pretty much ruin your character (it's possible to work the karma off but if you've committed multiple pks you usually won't live long enough to do so). All my encounters with red named players so far have involved watching them run for their lives while being chased by a mob of other players. Reds tend to be pretty rare.

      Other than that though the game is a comp
    • AC is coming out with an expanion pack to up the graphic and to add PK based castle type acitivies.

      EQ players are not going to move over in huge numbers to EQ2. If they wanted a better game they already exist, they stick because friends are there, they have powerful characters who thye don't want to loose, and EQ2 will not be EQ with new graphics and a new expantion pack.

      WoW will do about the same as SWG in the US; however in other markets it will be huge.

  • slim pickings (Score:3, Insightful)

    by rhettoric ( 772376 ) on Friday April 23, 2004 @11:27AM (#8950344) Homepage


    I think this article was pretty spot-on.

    This is still an immature market no matter what anyone says. I'm the perfect user for this sort of thing (make my own hours, disposable income, and a geek), but none of these established MMOGs have kicked my can. I did consider Everquest, but it just seemed like the same monster-killing over and over again, with no compelling plot. And you can have all the pretty graphics and explosions in the world, but that doesn't make a good experience (Jonny Mnemonic anyone?)

    I think WoW is going to be compelling and profitable and thus, the new standard by which all the others are going to be judged. I know I'm going to try it out.

    Still looking forward to part 2
  • I can't help but wonder if he'll be doing an anaylsis of games that did particularly poorly--- like Earth and Beyond (another EA failure), which had a barely survivable player base... that is, until SWG came out.
  • I'm an EQ, DAOC gamer and have been enjoying MUDs since the early Gemstone days. I tried E&B becuase it was different and I was VERY impressed with the game. The story was original, the characters were interesting and the dialog/plot/quests were so funny I fell out of my chair laughing on several occasions.

    Really a shame their endgame content and PvP aspects fell short. The space combat was actually very well done also. Just a shame they couldnt hold everyone's interest.

  • FFXI (Score:2)

    by medeii ( 472309 )

    FFXI (Final Fantasy 11): It's missing. Why? All of the million-plus [playonline.com] players can't be in Japan. I know more people in my area that play FFXI than play the rest of these games combined, and no, they're not even on my server.

    • Two things

      1) Thats probably not 1 million players because people can have multiple chars.

      2) Even so, that still means more $$$ for square because each additional char costs another buck even if you don't use it all month.

      • There are other factors, too:

        1. There are, at any given hour of the day, between 4-5k people on my server -- I've seen 7k before at peak hours after a patch, when everyone logged on to try out the new content. Multiplying 5k people by 31 servers, and you've got about 150k people online at any given time. That's easily enough to put it in the running for that chart, even if it's not in first place.
        2. I'm aware that it's characters, rather than people, but in my experience most of the players don't have a mule
  • Pirates of the burning sea ( www.burningsea.com )will be the LAST MMO I will try. I've been a UO addict for more than 2 years, and I was then extremely disappointed by AC2, and then SWG (the're both nothing compared to UO. well, SWG it much closer than AC2 though ). I loved Master & commander movie, and I think that PoBS could be very fun. If it's not, well, I swear it will have been my last MMO.
  • This article just seems to say which ones have the most subscribers. Does anyone want to take a stab at organizing them by how fun they are?
    • Simply based upon the fact that the author or potentail author might like stamping on kittens and considers that fun. Where as I doubt that is what you would like in a game. Not to mention that its hard to have played all MMO games and get a fair representation of them for a comparison. Esp since you have to play for at least a few weeks to understand everything and know where to go for the action. So your comparison will be biased based upon what game you played last.

      Based upon the number of subscribe
  • www.eve-online.com

    This is a space MMO that has really started to gain a following after a year of its launch. The cool thing about EVE is that everyone plays on the same server. It is a different type of MMO compared to all the EQ clones. Not to mention it's visually gorgeous.
    • The reason the graphics are good is because they are still background pictures that you can never get to; go grab the touched up NASA photos for the same effect. Once you get close to stuff the graphics are not that good.

      The biggest problem I had with Eve-online is that it does not know what type of game it wants to be. The best way to explain would be if you were playing the game of Monopoly and ever time you wanted to put up a house or hotel you had to go design a building, locate the materials and th

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