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The drop is already visible
XFire shows a 20% drop of played hours compared to the peak one month ago. So as predicted this latest "great" game is starting to lose ground.
How much you wanna bet that by next month it will be at 50% of peak?
Comments
The weeding process has begun. Every MMO drops off after the included 30 days.
거북이는 목을 내밀 때 안 움직입니다
Me, my brother and 2 other player i personnally knew all quit before the end of our first month. So it comes at no suprise for me.
3267 posts? I'll take you a little more seriously when you have over 10,000.
Is it really that much of a drop, I guess the forums are going to explode AGAIN.
This is after 1 month mind you and also quite similar to the drops AoC and WAR experienced. After three months they were down to less than 50% of peak and where are they now?
Rift is going the same route, trust me on this.
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I can tell you my hours played have dropped by 80% but not by choice, life happens. Also sometimes on the weekend if I do get chance to log on I haven't because the que on my server was an hour long. Yep its totally finished, I'm just gunna rage quit.
So what, this happens with almost every mmo. I'm sure this game will stay were it is now.
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waiting for ... nothing..
I can't help but wonder how many subs dropped after the first month of WoW. Thankfully we were not all so obsessed by sub numbers back then.
Vault-Tec analysts have concluded that the odds of worldwide nuclear armaggeddon this decade are 17,143,762... to 1.
I'm not sure if wow ever had a drop in sub numbers
And indeed, this obsession for sub numbers makes no sense at all!
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waiting for ... nothing..
Exactly. That's not going to stop the Chicken Little's from freaking out and prophecizing doom, though.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
I'm on a rp server and our Defiant side has around 40 to 50% less players at peak hours. I logged on Sunday and hardly saw any people in he main town. Their situation looks quite sad indeed.
On the other hand, Guardians are flourishing. If anything, there are many more people playing lately, in my opinion. The rifts and invasions always have players rushing at them and yesteday there were around 40-50 players at one of the world mobs in two minutes after he spawned...
I do believe that there has been a drop in subs, but it's quite normal for pretty much every mmo to see a drop after he first month. I do see lots and lots of new players joining the game and loving it... For some reason, I do believe that Rift won't go Aion's and Warhammer's / AoC's way. While it doesn't have many new elements about it, it's still a very polished themepark. Second best after WoW, I'd say.
"Only in quiet waters do things mirror themselves undistorted.
Only in a quiet mind is adequate perception of the world."
Hans Margolius
This doesn't surprise me. The test will come from whether or not the people leaving, leave in numbers like DCUO.
The game was good for what it was. I do not understand Trion not releasing sales numbers. My paranoid little mind ALWAYS looks at that and thinks "What are they hiding". I didn't make it to my 30 day mark. I found other stuff to keep myself occupied with.
It's got something to do with the fantastic world event: River of Lag.
Sounds to me like you want Rift to fail a little too much with a little too high a level of enthusiasm and gloating anticipation, eh OP?
Anyway, I wonder about Rift's longterm retention as well, whether it has enough endgame content to keep players entertained. Rift seems to be a hell of a lot more polished right out of the door with finished features than WAR or AoC had, the Rift dev teams are a lot faster and more efficient with updates, with as a result a far lower level of QQing and whine rant explosions than those other games had and an overall more content player (and ex-player) population than those other 2 MMO's had.
No, a better example would be Aion: also an MMORPG that had a high level of polish right at launch, but it couldn't prevent large dropoffs from players in the months afterwards. I'd say that the grind from midlevel onwards was the biggest turnoff to many in Aion's case, not the disappointment and embitterment of broken expectations and unfinished or bugged features and content as was the case with WAR and AoC.
As for Rift, I think a decrease in players is to be expected, however, following the statistics of XFire, Raptr and Steam now for a while, I find that the dropoff after the free month so far has been a lot less than I'd expected.
We'll see how things progress in the months ahead.
The ACTUAL size of MMORPG worlds: a comparison list between MMO's
The ease with which predictions are made on these forums:
Fratman: "I'm saying Spring 2012 at the earliest [for TOR release]. Anyone still clinging to 2011 is deluding themself at this point."
IT'S DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMED XFIRE'S NUMBERS EQUAL THE EXACT NUMBERS OF THE PLAYERS IN THE GAME!!!!!!!!
For petes sake I wish people stop using stuff like Xfire or randomly going into game and '/who'ing to count 'how many people are playing'
NOT EVERYONE uses Xfire
NOT EVERYONE plays a game at 'peak' and/or is in the same timezone as you
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If the above was always true then all MMOs would have stopped service the 2 months after release... oh wait most are still going
Bring on the WARRRRGGHH!
Yeah I'm not sure what you would compare it to, but I would agree with AION, man, it was rediculously tedious.
This I think is a factor but I don't know if it's major. Trion has already shown they have a deft hand for releasing content that can pull players in (esp. at end game).
The problem I see is the replayability of the game. I'm gunna say it.. WoW... gasp ... had 3-4 different places you could level through. Each starter and then atleast 2-3 zones throughout the world that were level for whomever wanted to do it. You could complete a continent if you wanted, or boat back and forth for XP.
Rift doesn't have that. And with the use of public questing/Rifts you NEED people in zones otherwise new players, or alts, are just going to get disgusted with the game. I found during my playtimes, many zones were empty of players but had so many Rifts that questing was impossible.
No suprises here to be honest! It was going to drop and we'll see it free fall to DCUO numbers. Looming on the brink of extinction, all while Blizzard is reeping it in from WoW chanting 'Still number one baby!'.
I think trion will do a great job if they ever fix the performance issues and the optimization of the game.
The thing is what gw2 and other mmos that come out soon will do to rift.How it's going to survive only god knows.hehe
And no word about wow.It's going to be long forgoten.
I just had the same problem. I was in Stonefield and one of those mass invasions events happened and I encountered one player who died then logged out, and one other asking for help in chat. That's 3 people, and it wasn't NEARLY enough to stop the invasions. I had to wait until we lost the event, and then slowly clear the footholds at the quest hubs so I could turn in everything.
0118 999 881 999 119 725... 3
In all honesty a game that was as a generic as this was always going to flop. Another sub-standard game, copying other IP's, adding on a little piece of unoriginal content and expecting to be successful. The industry needs to come up with something more creative than this. And GW2 will not be it either. All hype these games. All hype.
So what makes folks think that Rift would have been different than the other pve-heavy themepark single-player-esque rpg lobby-system games released over the past several years; selling million(s) of boxes, but the studio and publishers hope for subscribership retention dashed with the lawn-dart effect, beginning 1-month out.
Im sure the title wont live up to the studios expectations, but it will live up to the markets expectations of success being 200k-300k sustained subscribers 3-6months post-launch. Not a bad thing, but nothing to be all boastful about. Rift game me alot of enjoyment over the 6-weeks I played it. I've got a level 50 toon, had fun on the journey, but refuse to pay $15/month to play their end-game content without features by sitting around reapeating the same BattleGrounds/Warfronts over and over or spending a couple hours doing the same dungeons over and over just for the sake of a purple item. But that's me.
Really that hard to figure out?
Less subs --> Less money for devs --> fewer devs --> less development
Also, a significant drop in sub numbers shows that the game has no longetivity. And if it gets bad enough then you will get Vanguard where SOE recently announced that continued development has ceased with the game.
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Actually, in interviews a number of months back Trion people themselves said that they'd be happy with a few hundred k of subs, anything more would be a bonus.
The ACTUAL size of MMORPG worlds: a comparison list between MMO's
The ease with which predictions are made on these forums:
Fratman: "I'm saying Spring 2012 at the earliest [for TOR release]. Anyone still clinging to 2011 is deluding themself at this point."
Back in the EQ/DOAC days, the devs said that a 70% retention rate was normal for a game. A 20% drop seems like things are going pretty well for Rift considering that.
I personally think that most games will see a drop in hours played after launch as people get into more reasonable playing times. People tend to consume new games very heavily in the first few weeks and then gradually scale back playtimes.
The curious thing is if this means the huge growth of the game has stopped or the xfire numbers mainly represent early adoptors to the game.
On the flip side, DCU saw alomst 70% decline after its first month and is somewhere above 90% decline currently. Rift doesn't seem to have to much to worry about yet.