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5 million registered beta users! 10 million users by end of year.
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The amount of subs after 1 year is impossible to determine with the amount of information available. This thread is silly. the amount of subs after 1 year will be heavily based on the amount and quality of content updates. In general mmos do not have very good retention with a paid sub.
Lets just play with some numbers real quick. If ESO sells as well as skyrim then we will have 20 million box sales. In order to achieve your 10 million subs 50% of those people would have to decide to sub. Do you really think that is a viable goal? A 50% retention is extremely high for an mmo. Selling 20 million boxes in the first year is unlikely to happen as well.
I think the game will do well, but the outrageous claims made in this thread are silly.
You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.
I'm looking at 2-3 million MMO players, and around 3-4 million Elder Scrolls single player fans to start with. With PC and Consoles. Over the course of the year, we'll see 5 million more Single players who love ES, and MMO players looking to play a new game, will join ESO on consoles and PC easily. Yes also it is important they keep up with the updates and features. Which they have already said they are commited to every 4-6 weeks after launch and that they defend the sub price because of the amount of content the expansions will contain.
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Betas are free. People are always anxious to get free stuff.
A game is probably extremely lucky if even 1/4th of the beta testers ends up buying the game. (along with the people who skipped the beta due to limited time or something)
My SWTOR referral link for those wanting to give the game a try. (Newbies get a welcome package while returning players get a few account upgrades to help with their preferred status.)
https://www.ashesofcreation.com/ref/Callaron/
Of course not everyone who signs up for beta ends up playing the game, but don't you think there is a majority of players who do not sign up to a game and buy without ever beta testing a game? This is kind of the point. the beta testers who sign up usually tend to be the minority of buyers and not the majority.
Lets say we take 1/4 of those like you said, that would be 1.25 million, then the buyers who did not sign up... what do you think that number is going to be added onto the testers who bought, to make it simple.
I think the reasoning state has begun!
Without going into detail of every point seperately i am going to sum it up in few sentences.
Your whole idea of 10 million subs in less than year is based on an assumption that 'because people loved Skyrim people would love ESO'.
However, i wish it was that simple. One of the biggest reasons Skyrim is so popular is because of the freedom it offers to the players something that ESO will never be able to mimic. Secondly ..the very dedicated modding community.
Take these two things away and ESO got nothing to offer to Skyrim fans to stick long term. Not saying Skyrim fans won't try ESO but if you think 10 million Skyrim fans are gonna stick for a year to give you that number than you are deluding yourself.
Selling boxes isn't a big deal these days especially with a name like Elder Scroll, however what is the big deal is to make sure that those people stick long terms and continue to pay their sub.
Given the normal retention rate in MMORPGs, ESO would have to sell substantially more copies than Skyrim in order to achieve 10 million subs.
We also have no reason to believe there are even a total of 10 million people left who are willing to pay a sub to *any* game long term, let alone this particular one.
Peace is a lie, there is only passion.
Through passion, I gain strength.
Through strength, I gain power.
Through power, I gain victory.
Through victory, my chains are broken.
The Force shall free me.
Not just skyrim, but all ES games, Oblivion sold 4.9 million copies, Skyrim 20 million.
ESO has unlocked starter zones to allow people to have that freedom once again, in fact the whole last year has been a huge shift into a Skyrim features and type of game, its as much ES as Skyrim was, not a clone of skyrim, but a pretty close to one while keeping ES features as the main focus. The modding community was no where near the main seller of Skyrim, it might shock you to know that computers only made up only 14%, while the consoles made up 86% and had no modding at all in them.
ESO has a lot to offer Skyrim fans, in fact since most of the copies sold did not have mods, and will be online instead of offline and have a constant flow of content into it will be like mods to a console users skyrim, you will see a lot of Skyrim players buying this on consoles a lot because of what you said, updates and content to the game. The fact that beta testers gave enough feedback to ESO to make first person view in game and over the whole last year make it more and more like Skyrim should tell you there is indeed a high amount of Skyrim players who are beta testers of that 5 million registerd users.
Everygame faces long term problems, the fact that they are commited to updating the game every 4-6 weeks and have even used this fact as a reason to justify the sub fee, is enough to know that is a core part of thier plans to keep players in game with constant updates and expansions.
OP do you understand that subscription mmos traditionally have a retention rate of around 30%? So you are saying that in year 1 ESO will sell in excess of 30 million copies?
When I responded to this thread on page 1 I was thinking delusional fanboy....
29 pages later I am thinking pr0 troll or paid poster...
Either way, well played OP and thanks for the hilarity, you have brightened an otherwise boring day at work
You can throw as many numbers as you want but i am going to stick to what i said.... 'selling boxes isn't same as retention'. I know that ESO will sell very well never said it won't.
I am sorry but ESO will always be limited because of its themepark MMO design and will never ever come close to the amount of freedom the Morrowind and Skyrim have to offer. Unless they change the whole fundamental design of the game it is never going to happen.
And yes i know consoles made the major part of sales but that still doesn't mean that is a guarantee that all these people will stick to ESO long term. Why pay a monthly sub when you can have even a better open world experince in Skyrim? it does everything better than ESO.
And by the way in my experince it is naive to latch on to the words of devs when they say 'regular monthly content updates'. I will believe it when i see it because words are cheap.
Selling boxes isn't the same as retention but I think your really undervaluing the accomplishment that just getting people to buy your game really is.
As for the assessment that ESO will never have the popularity that Skyrim I will say you are probably right but I'll followup with a question. If Skyrim released a new DLC pack a month how many of their uses would buy them month in and month out to play the new content? I'm not saying ESO will release a DLC worth of content every month as I really don't know if anyone can keep up that kind of pace but you don't know either and if they somehow could wouldn't that change the dynamics of your assessment?
I guess what I'm saying is I'm holding judgement on ESO's long term success until I see how they treat us post launch. I would advise all the doomsayers and fan's who are making wild predictions of boom or bust to perhaps do the same because otherwise you really are just guessing at this point.
While 30 million could be sold as a very maximum, if every Skyrim buyer + 75% of the MMO market was to buy the game, I think that is unrealistic the way you frame it. Do I think the retention rate will be much Higher then 30%? Definitely so. Let me explain.
I see retention rate of 30% due to the cause of games not updating or giving new content to thier games, which causes a player to leave the game or just up and say this is boring. What ESO will do with its sub fee, is take that and update 4-6 weeks with expansions. I think they have shown enough that they are willing to fix anything in game that they get with feedback from customers, unlike a lot of the mmo's of the last 5 y ears.
I see the retention rate of MMO's players that join the game at a much higher rate of 60%+ and that's being generaous, and single player retention rate of ES fans at almost 80% for the first year considering they update and put in content. For alof of ES single player fans, this will be thier first MMO on a console, which they will be loyal to for the next decade given that past games like EQ1 player base, and WoW player base. The first time MMO is a big one for a lot of gamers and will result in that higher retention rate. Is another reason why MMO's FFXI is still around today.
I also see new gamers comeing from WoW, and EQ series, they are looking for that modern MMORPG and haven't seen a game like this come out in over 5 years. So I think you'll see ESO start to pick up those players until EQ or WOW makes an updated game... EQ Next would be the next game that would threaten ESO, because of how modern it is, but does it fit the base players of WoW and EQ is something to watch.
So with the higher retention rates of single players who come to the game will indeed be its base and followed by MMO players retention rates and then the refill rates of other MMO players migrating to ESO. Let me make it easy and give you the math here. 2-3 million MMO players at start with a retention rate of 60% over the first year (not month), 3-4 million ES fans to start with a 80% retention rate over the year... with 2 million from other games coming to ESO in the first year, and another 5-6 million more single player ES fans joining over the course of the year.
I went with minimum number of 10 million not a high number. We could see even more single players then that eventually with more advertising. ESO will have to market itself heavily to its skyrim base over the next year, which I think it will given the amount of feedback its already responded to over the last year.
Getting people to stick around is indeed crucial but selling the "boxes" is a still a big deal.
And Knotwood still hasn't said how he expects TESO to see 10M given that Skyrim only sold that many at full price - across all platforms.
And more than 50% were console but TESO isn't releasing on PS3 or XBox360 .... which constitute the vast majority of console out there ... a recent Titanfall article cited 80M 360s vs. a few million Xb1s (hence the conversion).
And as CazNeerg says given retention rates - a dev said they had assumed 20% in a recent Gamasutra article - and TESO would need c. 50M sales to get 10M subs. (GTA: 35M).
Yeah!
I never denied success of ESO (in terms of selling boxes' even i am holding on to 6 months before i buy the game because after my beta experince i would like to have lot more content to justify my 15 bucks a month sub.
But i never denied that game won't sell well. However claiming that it will get 10 million subs in less than a year because Skyrim sold 20 million copies is just ridiculous. And that is the only discussion i am having.
So..nope i am not underestimating ESO but i am not over estimating the numbers. Who here seriously believe that ESO will sell 50 million boxes? because that is the only possible way to get 10 million retention rate in less than a year.
Lets get real please.
ESO will "succeed" in the sense that it is a TES game and will sell a lot of boxes. But it will not hold players with the P2P model.
It will follow the same path as 99% every other P2P MMORPG over the past 10 years. There will be a honeymoon period where everyone plays the game like mad, but subs will wither away after a few months. The company will realize that the F2P model will bring in more players and more money and they'll switch to F2P or B2P model.
This is not an insult to the game. It's an insult to the P2P model. It just doesn't work any more. WoW and EvE are rare examples that were spawned while P2P was the standard and F2P was in it's infancy, so don't bother pointing to those as examples of why ESO can do P2P.
The P2P doesn't work any more. It's a volatile model that creates less exposure for the game, fails to hold on to players and creates less money for the company.
Legends of Kesmai, UO, EQ, AO, DAoC, AC, SB, RO, SWG, EVE, EQ2, CoH, GW, VG:SOH, WAR, Aion, DF, CO, MO, DN, Tera, SWTOR, RO2, DP, GW2, PS2, BnS, NW, FF:XIV, ESO, EQ:NL
See my last post and actually Skyrim sold 20 M across all platoforms
I think there is a big difference between saying the P2P model hasn't work and it can't work. I am a firm believer it can work but it requires the developer creating a value statement of more than just server access. The fact that it hasn't worked just means no one has put all the pieces together since WoW and EVE to make it work not that no one ever will again.
I really don't think anyone knows if ESO has put all the pieces in place or not to make it work. Anyone who does think they know are just guessing. I do agree that the safe bet would be P2P not working long term in any game but sooner or later someone is going to come along and prove you wrong.
Why not say 100 Million?
I mean if you are going to go nuts with numbers might as well do it with style!
1 Billion is crazy, but if you are delusional enough to believe 10 Million you are probably going to think, "Yeah, 100 Million, not impossible!"
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Originally posted by Jerek_
I wonder if you honestly even believe what you type, or if you live in a made up world of facts.
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The biggest problem with the whole 10m sales thing is also the fact that even if you combine all the PS4's and XB1's together, the number isnt 10m, and i sincerely doubt every single console owner will buy a copy of the game. At the moment, unless the game sells massively on the PC, then even getting over 2m sales is going to be problematic. I don't think this game will sell massively on PC, there are too many choices that offer same or better gameplay than ESO does, and relying on the comparisons between it and skyrim/oblivion etc, is disingenuous, those games were made by Bethesda, in the case of ESO, while Bethesda is the publisher, it is actually Zenimax's first game using the IP, and ignoring all the issues with modding etc, TES games are mostly about the single player adventure/exploration thing, not PvP P2P, its a completely different gameplay choice right from the get-go, and reports are already in about how weak the single player experience is outside of PvP, thats going to be a huge factor in influencing peoples choices. The fact that its being touted as a successor to DAoC is also going to disincline TES fans or at least be a negative influence, DAoC was good in its time, but that time is long gone, and the playerbase involved was miniscule by current standards. And then there is the segregation, XB1's will be seperated from PS4 players and both will be seperated from PC players..i have no doubt this is at least in part due to the consoles in question server requirements/policies, particularly those of Microsofts, but seperation is bad, inclusion would have made for a stronger selling point even if it was just between consoles, particularly for friends who have one or the other but not the same as each other, which btw is most likely going to be the case. I don't know that the game is going to be a disaster, but it has enough ingredients to become one.
OP is either trying to win some 'fanboi of the year' award, or he's just new to this forum/genre.
TESO doesn't bring enough new shinies to the table to lure in millions of players. The game really isn't anything special.
Registered is nothing.
Playing is another.
Registered literally means "People looked at it", and has no correlation to whether or not it is popular or is a good game.
about 5 million starting isn't to high of a number, you got to keep in mind that millions of Xbox Ones and PS4's will be sold this year, its going to be its biggest selling year. I also have no doubt they have ESO as the main seller for both of those consoles, and why microsift wanted exclusivity to ESO. But that's another topic.
PS4 is also outselling XBOX one by a lot... because of ESO, we don't know yet, but xbox live is requiring a sub to live to play and ps4 is not. So when people buy consoles im sure they are looking at this before they buy the box they want.
2-3 million PC users to start, aprox 3-4 million consoles when its released. Then over the next year it will reach 10 million. Just to clarify.
6 million PS4's have sold since last nov. and Xbox just shipped 3.9 million consoles out in Janurary and selling 772k boxes a month right now. So theres your 10 million consoles, but I dint say 10 million starting, I said about 5 with only 3-4 on console.
so is it too hard to believe that out of 10 million conosles sold, so far that 3-4 million of them would buy ESO?
So far the only two games seling new consoles are ESO and Titanfall. Mainly because PS3 and Xbox 360 isn't that old yet. Just wait until closer to ESO launch for the record breaking sales you see on consoles. PS4 vastly outselling xbox means that people don't want double subs for ESO, they have that choice before they buy this time around.
[quote]Then where do you think all these 5 million beta accounts are coming from? Other MMO games? I don't think even half of those players are MMO gamers, and think most of them are ES fans, why do you think after one year, the game is looking more and more like Skyrim, why do you think they forced ESO to put in all the features of skyrim like first person view ect.[/b][/quote]
There are a lot of testers that are like me. Sign up to test anything and everything. I want to see whats coming and have my hand in it as early as possible. I sign up for alpha testing, even. It's people who are interested in the industry and like the idea of having (a little) influence on the games design and mechanics. There are others who have an earnest interest in game development. The more tests I get into, the greater the possibility of being listened to and developing connections in the industry, which increasing the chances of someone taking me seriously when I pitch my own game ideas. It's a very small chance, but one that is open to me and has little cost for the return I get. And, at the very least, I get to see what's new.