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More Than 1.7 Million Active Subscribers 2/1/12 [EA Conf Call Discussion Thread]
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Why so hung up on the 1.7 million subscribers. I just noticed something from a updated on Darth Hater.
http://www.darthhater.com/articles/swtor-news/19915-electronic-arts-q3-fy12-earnings-call
Key Statistics:
2,000,000+ copies sold – 40% sold through Origin
1,700,000+ active subscribers – 1 million concurrent
Average session time was four hours during the first month and a half
99.5% Server Uptime
Did anyone see it? 1 million concurrent players. That number deserves a "holy shit" on its own. If someone has not worked in a F2P sector before or has not familiar with the Asian MMO market may not notice how impressive that number is.
That number is so much more impressive than the 1.7 millions subscribers. Much much more. As in not many MMO in the world can manage to pull that number.
Lineage, Lineage 2 and AION while very big did not manage to pull that number in ANY of their release market. There are a few that I could verify that manage to pull that number. Zengtu, Westward Journey, and World of Warcraft manage to pull that number in China market. World of Warcraft China did it when at peak and has not been able to do that ever since.
This is the first time ever I see a Western MMO in a Western market manage to pull that number. Everyone, this is a world first. Heheh.
1 million PCU in Western market.
Congratulations!!!
I'm going to use Xfire here, but this is just to make a point.
they're saying they're at 1.7mil subscribers now and on Xfire it shows up as 7200 users
the number used to be 11 000 a month ago, so they've lost about 65% of subscribers.
after 5 more months, assuming the same rate of loss, they'll be down to 200 000 subscribers.
This is a progression very similar to Rift, but very different from WoW.
SWTOR started with a higher number of subscribers, but if they keep losing subscriptions, they won't really get to WoW levels...ever
WoW was constantly getting new subscribers instead of losing them
Eve Online is the other game that was constantly going up as well
Also, SWTOR completely ignored the most important market: Asia.
Most of WoW subscribers are in Asia and as of now, it's kind of impossible to even buy the game
I review lots of indie games and MMORPGs
Most are gold sellers/farmers as well...
We don't need them.
eqnext.wikia.com
Where does the 1 million concurrent come from? It was announced that SW:TOR has 1 million unique logins PER DAY. That does NOT mean it is concurrent which would mean that all those 1 million would be logged on during the entire day which for sure is not the case.
My gaming blog
What are you talking about?
The gold farmers in WoW use NA/EU versions of the games that are purchased in their respective region and then shipped to China by those who organize the gold farming. Whether or not a game appeals to or is even released in the Asian market has zero impact on gold farmers and sellers coming from there.
I think those guys at Darth Hater miss understood the number. I have gone through the earning call carefully and I think they did miss-undertand it.
But yeah, heheh, that number shocked me a whole lot more than 1.7 millions subscribers.
WAR was released 2008 Septembre 18 and within 12 days it had sold 1.2 million copies and over 800k subscribers, now 3.5 years later it has an estimated of less than 50k subscribers and t w o servers left. source wikipedia
Initial sales does NOT mean it will be a success in the long therm. It just mean that the game was hyped to the skies.
My gaming blog
Why you guys care so much how many subscriber they have or not, like some would be a major shareholder here.
At the end we did discuss here for weeks and noticed that a part of the gamers like the game and many others not...some will cancel and some will stay. The game wont be better or worse with higher or lower player numbers, at the end its all about you and how you like the game, if you sub or not. The message about their financial quartal report wont change anything with my own decision about this game...so who cares.
Yes, that's exactly what it means. Someone that bought the box and then signed in to create an account has GENERATED an ACTIVE subscription.
As opposed to some-one that bought a copy but NEVER signed in to ACTIVATE thier account. That person would NOT be counted as GERATING an ACTIVE subscription.
The language that they use is a bit ambigious....that's not uncommon for corporations issuing report...and the ambigiousness is usualy intentional.
If they had stated EXPLICITLY that TOR had 1.7 million ACTIVE subsriptions as of 2/01/12 then they would be accountable for that figure. The language which was used can mean one of several things.
- TOR has 1.7 million Active subscription as of 2/01/12
- TOR had 1.7 million Active subscriptions as of 12/31/11 (the end date of the quarter they are reporting on)
- TOR sold more then 2 million units and 1.7 million users Activated thier subscriptions as of 2/01/12.
Some players are interested in how the games industry works, there's your answer.
And why do you care so much whether others care about sub numbers or not?
On topic: I'm surprised. I expected higher sales numbers, but also a much bigger drop in subs. A retention rate of more than 75% is really good. Well, I'm curious how TOR will do when competing with GW2, D3 et all.
Hype train -> Reality
Popular and profitable mediocrity means more mediocrity in the future.
A growing number of gamers are sick of mediocre MMOs.
Why would they be currently active? They just exist, that doesn't mean they're being used to play the game. It's been stated that they include people who have simply signed up to play the game, not those who have paid a subscription. You should maybe check that word up in the dictionary:
Lets say I'm a chef and need to cook for a party. I 'create' ten pies, but two of them were rubbish so I throw them away. I've still 'created' ten pies, just because I'm not using two doesn't alter the numbers. And that's what EA have done here, they've taken the maximum figure they could get, regardless of if those subscription periods are being paid for or even used any more.
Someone posted this earlier in the thread but it looks like it got overlooked. Reposting it because it seems especially relevant.
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/star-wars-mmo-explained
Q: Blizzard's recently been quoted as saying players who dropped WoW to play Warhammer are already coming back. Is that something you've observed?
Frank Gibeau: No, actually our player numbers are increasing, so I don't know where they're getting that data. Our numbers are doing great. It's booming, both in Europe and North America. We haven't launched in Asia yet so that's going to be a big opportunity but it's one of the fastest-growing MMOs in the history of the industry and we didn't see our numbers cap out or slow down - they're continuing to crank.
......................................
We have a lot of WoW players in Warhammer right now but we also have a lot of people that don't play Warcraft and are coming in from Ultima and Dark Age of Camelot and frankly are new to the category, because they like the Warhammer licence. It's obviously got a very big following in Europe and we're doing extremely well there. In North America, we're doing great.
As far as I can tell, this quote is from November 2008, so he's probably telling the truth and the numbers were still going way up. But then all of a sudden they plummeted. I'm not in any way suggesting that SWTOR has the kind of issues that WAR had or that it will suffer the same fate. But right now people are looking at the 1.7 million subscribers and trying to say it's a success or failure. It's too early to tell, not only because the game hasn't been out very long, but also because there isn't a lot of competition either (WoW and Rift and not much else really). People need to wait a few months before declaring anything.
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it." -Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007
1 million doesn't sound right, especially with 4.5 hours avg session time; avg. session time would have to be 13-14 hours to match concurrent. Not sure what that number is about.
If you read the rest of the article, they state that at this point, most of those 1.7 million subs are "paying subs". That is, they're past their free month and have paid their first sub fee.
Either way, the haters are choking on their sour grapes, right now. The WAR-esque predictions haven't come true, and likely won't. That doesn't guarantee success indefinitely(nothing does), but any talk of "titanic" failure is even more absurd now than it was closer to launch.
whatever happen the swtor will trive because they got their money back so everything after is profit do you honestly believe they wont release in asia!lol !400 million gamer in china more then the whole population of canada and usa together
Not bad going for what is essentially a mediocre game. If it brings more people in to the MMO market it's not a bad thing, it may well wet their appetite for something different. Not convinced Bioware will bother turning the actual gameplay in to anything any better now they think they can rest on their laurels, I gave up before the end of the first free month as did most of my friends. It's not an MMO made for people like me but it's good news for those enjoying it.
highly doubtfull they wont sleep on their laurel till they have had 2 game card sold to same customer!selling the first one is easy,selling the second is harder and the third game card is what tell you how you ll do in the futur for said country!
If people don't care to post, forums like this won't exist. So you asked why do people care so much? Well it's something to talk about, some drama to read during morning coffee breaks, and something to argue over. Need there be any other reasons?
EQ1-AC1-DAOC-FFXI-L2-EQ2-WoW-DDO-GW-LoTR-VG-WAR-GW2-ESO
Hah.. sounds familiar, right? People are so gullible.
Maybe he should have checked XFire
When I want a single-player story, I'll play a single-player game. When I play an MMO, I want a massively multiplayer world.
Really? War sold 1.2 million copies and had 800.000 subs after the first month so in that regard SW:TOR is so far similar to WAR.
My gaming blog
Ok. First of all. Your math is way wrong.
They didn't lose 65% of XFire players. They lost 35%. 7200 / 11,000 = .65 Meaning 7200 is 65% of 11,000.
Second of all. XFire doesn't show that they lost those people as subscribers. It simply shows that there are less people playing every day.
You can't assume the same rate of loss over the next five months either. It will at some point level out and a core player base will stick around.
As far as it being impossible to purchase the game in Asia...incorrect as well. I have a guildmate who lives in the Phiiipines and she plays just fine every day. Also, they are working on releasing the game in Asia right and other markets right now.
They weren't ignored. They just didn't get the same release date.
Shadow's Hand Guild
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Thought I would toss in my 2 cents. I know right, you've probably been wondering were I was at. Anyway, I look at it like this. They sold just under 2.1 million copies(based on box sales and the fact that they said that 40% was digital) we know how many boxes were sold and if we do the math we can see they have sold 2,078,456 units of the game - roughly(based on box sales recorded by 3rd party sources such as NPD and Origins DL's- on EA's own report that 40% of total sales were degital downloads from Origin).
They report that they have retained 1.7 million subscribers of those units sold(they could have rounded that number up or down so lets give them a shadow of a doubt and say they rounded down). Most of those were sold in December prior to launch - in fact if we go by what EA's has told us about digital sales we can see that SWTOR sold 80% of the current total of units prior to the Dec 20th release date - 80%.
Then if we correlate the recently released info, we can guess that since the first month SWTOR has retained just over 60% of their player base. That means a 40% drop in subscribers since release.
Now I do not know about you, but a game that lost almost 400k players in its first month of release - is not doing very good.
Just my take on this whole quarterly report story.
Yep. Amusing to see people declaring success only after 1 month. They did it for AoC, WAR, Aion (in that case it turned out to be true). It is like people dont learn from the past.
My gaming blog
Except for one difference, SWTOR has more subs right now than WAR ever did.
Shadow's Hand Guild
Open recruitment for
The Secret World - Dragons
Planetside 2 - Terran Republic
Tera - Dragonfall Server
http://www.shadowshand.com
Oh man I can't wait till March.
I might get banned for this. - Rizel Star.
I'm not afraid to tell trolls what they [need] to hear, even if that means for me to have an forced absence afterwards.
P2P LOGIC = If it's P2P it means longevity, overall better game, and THE BEST SUPPORT EVER!!!!!(Which has been rinsed and repeated about a thousand times)
Common Sense Logic = P2P logic is no better than F2P Logic.