I have authored an article in this month’s Beckett Massive Online Gamer magazine (#13, July - August) entitled “The Top 20 Influential People in Massively Multiplayer Video Games - 2007″. Although the byline is mine, I researched the feature with the help of many folks, including Doug Kale @ Beckett and other industry insiders. Here’s the list: more…
A copy of the PowerPoint presentation I gave at ION is now available under Downloads.
MMORPG.com has published an interview with me conducted at IMGDC last month. My charts get discussed frequently on their forums so it was a good way to provide their readers with a little more background on whom I am and what the site is all about.
Version 23.0 is now available! I’ve updated a few games through March and April, as well as filled in some historical data points for other MMOGs. Also new to this version is Pirates of the Burning Sea. In addition, check out the new World of Warcraft chart with breakdown by territory.
I am currently seeking a vendor invite to attend this year’s E3 Media & Business Summit as a media/analyst. I did not attend last year and a lot of people missed my annual E3 MMOG reports, so if I am to do one this year one of you PR people out there need to get me an invite ASAP.
Today and tomorrow I will be attending the 2008 Indie MMO Game Developers Conference 2.0 in Minneapolis, MN. If you’re here as well feel free to chat me up during the conference or at the party.
Just a quick note: I’ve updated the links to my AGC 2006 presentation in the Downloads section. Previously the PowerPoint file had been made in MS Office Beta, so there were some errors in the presentation when viewing it. I’ve cleaned it up a little and fixed a couple of bugs, and re-uploaded the revised PPTX file for Office 2007. I’ve also added a converted PPT file that is compatible for those of you with Office 95 - 03 who couldn’t view the file before.
I’m going to be giving a presentation at the 2008 ION Game Conference in Seattle, WA, May 13-15. The hour-long lecture, An Analysis of MMOG Subscription Growth, will essentially be a historical overview of my subscription tracking to date, updated with the latest data, as well as some projections for the future. If you’re going to attend, please feel free to say hello to me afterwards! more…
At long last, the new version of my charts and analysis is now online! I don’t have numbers for every game, but there are quite a few updates, most notably to World of Warcraft, RuneScape, Dofus, Tibia, and NCSoft’s various titles. Also included are preliminary numbers for Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, Lord of the Rings Online, and Tabula Rasa.
The NPD Group has announced today that they’re going to start selling quarterly reports tracking “market size and title shares for paid online subscriptions to video games and MMO/PC games, gaming Web sites, and video game console services.”
Well it’s about time. NPD is currently the industry go-to source for monthly retail sales figures, but they are notorious for also under-reporting said numbers; they don’t include sales from major retailers like Wal-Mart, nor do they track digital downloads. It’ll be interesting to see how their MMOG numbers compare with mine (or if they’ll just copy my numbers for their own report).
The long-awaited update of my charts and analysis is almost complete, but I’ve been holding off pending NCSoft’s latest quarterly results. They should be coming out this week, or next week at the latest, but there’s nothing on their corporate website and I’ve received no response yet to my inquiries, so I don’t know when it will actually occur.
In any event, the 2008 Game Developers Conference starts on the 18th, so I am committed to putting out an update before then regardless of what NCSoft does. I’m also still trying to get some official numbers from EA, SOE, and Turbine, so if any of you out there read this and want to email me some data, please do!
Update: Based on my reading of NCSoft’s Korean website, the upcoming quarterly results and conference call will be on February 13th. So expect an update then!
By now you’ve probably seen the announcement last week by Blizzard that World of Warcraft had passed 10 million active subscribers worldwide: 2.5+ million in North America, 2+ million in Europe, and approximately 5.5 million in Asia. WoW’s growth has been remarkable, but a look inside the data shows why this announcement was a bit of a surprise. more…
We’re back! As you can see, the website has gotten a complete makeover and a new WordPress blogging engine. Feel free to look around and let me know if anything is broken. I’m currently working on a new update to my MMOG subscription research that I hope will be online within the next week or two.
So, a lot of you have emailed me over the past year wondering what’s up with the site and if it will ever be updated again. I haven’t responded to your many queries, mainly because I didn’t know the answer. I’ve spent much of the past several months doing consulting for various MMOG startups, and I’ve also spent time working on my own non-MMOG projects. The combination of the two, plus the fact that MMOG subscription numbers are harder to get than they used to be, has made continuing my research cost-prohibitive. more…
Once again, Final Fantasy XI has released a census of its online population.