Version 22.0 Available
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.
February 12th, 2008 at 6:59 pm
The Excel file has been updated as well; you can find it in the Downloads section. I didn’t have time to updated the Asian market ACU / PCU numbers; I’ll get back to those charts in a future release I hope.
I appreciate all questions, comments, donations, etc.
February 12th, 2008 at 7:04 pm
Thank you so much!
February 13th, 2008 at 5:47 am
[…] Paper, Shotgun: “Bruce Woodcock’s MMOGChart.com has updated with his latest tracking of MMO subscriptions. You may be able to guess what the bright green line disappearing into the sky […]
February 13th, 2008 at 10:57 am
Awesome! Check out my gaming forum.
February 13th, 2008 at 1:03 pm
A special Thanks from a french fan !!!
so Awesome, I’ve wait for you so much to continue my research !
GG Sir Bruce
February 14th, 2008 at 7:40 am
Well
Seems the LOTRO community got into an uproar over your stats for their beloved game…
To them, the game is a major success, and to me, it just does not seem that way..so, I do find it interesting to look at your numbers and see their scrips are close to EQ2 which has been out for 3 years…and has never really garnered the audience it should…
Of course the LOTRO fans do not see it that way…but, I think your deductions look sound..
Based on your criteria, you had really nothing to go on but overall numbers from various sources…is that correct? Any type of in game checking being done, or sources in turbine maybe…or strictly on box sales…etc..
thanks again for the hard work
February 14th, 2008 at 8:05 am
Opendegel,
As I talk about in the Analysis section, the LotRO number is preliminary and based on 1. Turbine’s statement of their popularity relative to other MMOG developed in North America, and 2. Box sales. In truth, LotRO could have 300,000 subscribers, but Turbine or a source inside Turbine would have to provide better guidance.
February 14th, 2008 at 7:08 pm
Yay a new MMOG chart! My life somehow seems a little more complete.
February 15th, 2008 at 6:51 am
Essential industry information.
I have added you to my blogroll.
February 15th, 2008 at 11:29 am
Good to see you back! Now, back to playing EVE…
February 21st, 2008 at 8:38 am
>Consider movies or television, where science fiction is featured
>far more often than high fantasy
> with a correspondingly higher financial success
It’s much cheaper for TV to make a SciFi serial then a fantasy RPG one. For SciFi one can just dress actors in something unusual, stick a few extra ears/horns, paint walls in studio in mad colors and order a few easy to render space ships shooting at each other.
For fantasy same won’t work as it will look very poor. One has to pay more for decoration, and renders. I think its one of major reasons why SciFi TV serials have bigger market share.
Computer games, from other side of view do not have such limitation. It’s completely same amount of money for 3D design of alien, orc, or average monster. Some monsters are even cheaper.
And here players, prefer fantasy by some reason. There are a lot of reasons, and I will not ever try to list them here. 1. I just mention a few, my own. I like magic, and sci-fi representation of it usually luck realism. 2. Good fantasy games use natural bright colors for terrain, while sci-fi designers like to create a lot of dark-grey-brown-black worlds, for post apocalyptic future.
3. Shooting from future technology weapons of destruction and doing 5% damage to opposite player or mob, does not look realistic, while slashing with a sword same opponent who can use parry, dodge, avoidance and just thick natural armor, fit in content perfectly.
Dixi
February 23rd, 2008 at 10:20 am
Great that you are back
I missed your statistics about the mmorpg market.
Great work!
March 4th, 2008 at 10:37 am
Great update from Wow.
But i am 56 … I go back to the game
Cia
March 14th, 2008 at 11:15 am
I love MMOGChart and I’m not even a developer
I think the statistics are very interesting, but I have a request for future charts, although I’m not sure how much extra work it would make for you. Can you break down the 200,000 chart into a 200,000-500,000 and 500,000 chart? Right now because of World of Warcraft the 200,000 chart is basically unreadable except for the top few games. Just an idea, and keep up the great work 
March 14th, 2008 at 12:10 pm
Hmm not sure if you will be interested in this piece of information.
A Chinese MMORPG (Zheng Tu) has released figures claiming to have 1.5 million users logged on at the same time on 03/02/08.
It claims to be the biggest MMORPG in China, which means it surpasses the number of subscribers WoW China has.
The link to the announcement http://bbs.ztgame.com.cn/viewthread.php?tid=1283039&extra=page=1 (It is in Chinese).
March 14th, 2008 at 12:25 pm
Shadus,
The 70K - 700K chart should give you most of what you want. True, there are some smaller games on there as well, but it’s not too hard to read yet. I’m toying with the idea of dynamic charts, but in the meantime you can always download the Excel file and track what games you want and which wants you don’t.
Seth,
Thanks for the link; I’ll look into it for my Asian research if it ever gets back on track.
March 18th, 2008 at 2:46 am
Seth - You saw the website for Giant Interactive, publisher of ZT Online. ZT is a “free to play” type mmorpg - but here’s the catch - if you choose to buy nothing, you will get nowhere in the game. Pretty much anything you want to do costs money. The players are like addicts, which is why one commentator called it “Digital Crack”, which sounds like a pretty apt description. Check out this must read article (in English) about the game. IMO, this is game journalism at its finest.
http://www.danwei.org/electronic_games/gambling_your_life_away_in_zt.php
March 18th, 2008 at 6:53 am
Congratulations on the new charts. We needed them. I’m guessing the next chart will include Age of Conan, Warhammer and Stargate, those three should all go over 200K pretty fast I think. But, I guess you’ll let us know.
Thanx again!
March 18th, 2008 at 10:04 am
Actually the next chart will (hopefully) contain PotBS.
Conan, Warhammer, etc. won’t have numbers out for a while!
March 26th, 2008 at 4:23 pm
Thank you for such a well presented and professional analysis.
Giant interactive launched their new free to play open beta testing on March 28.
http://english.17173.com/content/2008-03…
Mr. Shi is the most famous man in the China gaming industry
http://english.17173.com/content/2008-03…
Not only is he one of the richest people in China he is known to play all peoples games up to 14 hours everyday.
He also stole Shanda’s RD team when Shanda made millions and paid them peanuts.
http://pop.6park.com/chan2/messages/5119…
15th richest person in China
http://www.hurun.net/listen72.aspx
2nd richest in IT
http://www.hurun.net/detailen80,people2….
People are flying over from the US and Japan just to the launch party.
Yes Giant new game will probably not stay under the radar for very long.
Shi and Giant Interactive is most famous in China but back home this company is only known well for Mr. Shi attempt to stop gold farming.
Just my opinion but I think giant will be the biggest playing gaming in China this year!
Thank you again for all your hard work!
Wei
March 28th, 2008 at 2:32 pm
Can you seperate ptp from ftp mmorpgs? Would be awesome!
March 28th, 2008 at 2:52 pm
amu,
All the MMOGs I currently track are P2P. The ones that have F2P components like Second Life or RuneScape, I only track the P2P subscribers. If I track F2P MMOGs in the future via a different metric I will put them on their own charts.
March 30th, 2008 at 5:58 am
Would it be possible to have separate charts for the EU/US/Asian markets and/or an average population/server density? I know for example that WoW has roughly 2 million EU subscribers spread across around 240 EU servers for a rough average of 8.3k subs/server; which raises an interesting contrast to WoW’s reputation as the “biggest” MMO (on a personal level) since despite it’s volume of subscriptions you’re more likely to be playing with LESS people on a WoW server than (for example) EVE’s server, which currently has 30k concurrent players/server.
March 30th, 2008 at 4:25 pm
For most games I don’t have regional breakdowns so it’s not practical. Some of the games have comments in the Excel file on regional breakdowns when I have them. I might be able to do a regional breakdown chart for WoW, though.
As to your point about server populations, it’s partially valid, and EVE certainly has something to be proud of by having all of their players on one server. However, as far as the market is concerned, WoW is still #1 and it doesn’t matter that they are spread across multiple servers.
May 19th, 2008 at 3:47 am
well, there are lots of interesting things to look at, but it is not realistic for you to do it all (and some data is very hard to get)
would be funny with some list of how many people per server in MMOG’s? how many servers? regional markets… and so on..
you do a great work on this site, which i find very interesting.. i cannot wait for age of conan to pop up here..
April 15th, 2009 at 5:58 am
This is very up-to-date info. I’ll share it on Digg.