Black Desert, Blade and Soul: Koreanische Strohfeuer – So lief 2016 für die neuen MMORPGs

The year 2016 saw new MMORPGs, especially the Korea imports Black Desert and Blade and Soul. How did the year go for the two newcomers?

In 2014, the last major AAA MMORPGs from the West, The Elder Scrolls Online and WildStar, were released. Since then, fans of the genre who want to play new titles have been relying on smaller games or resorting to snacks from the East. In 2016, two imports from Korea came here with Blade and Soul and Black Desert.

We look at Google Trends to see how the year 2016 went for both titles. Google Trends measures user search interest, indicating how often a term was googled. These are not exact numbers, but in our experience, they align quite closely with the “interest” in a title. The trends show how hot a title is right now. Exact player numbers for MMORPGs are rare to nonexistent.

Blade and Soul – huge release hype – in January on par with WoW

Many had been waiting for Blade & Soul in Europe for years. The first trailers of the then fantastically looking game came when World of Warcraft was still at the peak of Wrath of the Lich King here in Europe. WoW looked graphically quite outdated compared to Blade and Soul at that time. The young beauty from South Korea was ready to conquer the MMORPG market. But then something got in the way. B&S was released in Korea in June 2012, but we in Europe had to wait until January 2016.

The release hype was indeed enormous. In January, nearly as many people in Germany were interested in Blade and Soul as in World of Warcraft. However, this big hype only lasted two weeks. Then it gradually faded. This is normal for a release.

Hardly anyone was interested in the updates thereafter

What is worrying about Blade and Soul, however, is that there were hardly any “highlights” where interest peaked. Only in mid-March was there a small “jump” upwards. That was when the first major update came, increasing the level cap again.

Especially at the beginning, a lot of new content was released for Blade and Soul. No wonder, the Korean version had a four-year head start, but interest in Germany remained quite low, and the announcements did not lead to an upswing. Interest significantly declined by April and May. From early June through the rest of the year, it remained only at four to seven percent compared to the huge release hype.

Blade and Soul compared to other Free2Play MMOs

This is a “typical” curve for new Free2Play games. Free titles have started extremely front-loaded in recent years, when everyone takes a look at the game. After a while, the core player base crystallizes, which is interested in the game long-term. Only a few Free2Play titles manage to be successful in the long run, as evidenced by this trend.

Runes of Magic (yellow) managed to hold on for a long time, then flattened out. TERA (green) experienced two boom phases. Only World of Tanks (purple) remained consistently relevant. The two newer titles ArcheAge (red) and Blade and Soul (blue) saw a gradual decline.

The assessment of Blade and Soul’s development also aligns with the official numbers from NCSoft. They celebrated the first quarter with champagne bottles popping: The Western release of Blade and Soul boosted global revenues above Guild Wars 2. However, NCSoft did not observe any significant swings in Blade and Soul’s earnings thereafter. On the contrary: In the second and third quarters of 2016, Blade and Soul’s global revenues declined significantly – yet remained ahead of Guild Wars 2, which also flattened out.

Black Desert – not so deep a valley

With Black Desert, the release hype was also significantly greater than anything achieved during the “ongoing program”. This is, however, nothing unusual; it is the norm.

The release hype, the peak, is therefore 100. The Buy2Play title was still able to maintain half of the interest over the first five weeks. By the end of May, they held a quarter of the release hype.

Black Desert did not fall much deeper throughout the year. Between summer and autumn, it remained between 12 and 18%.

At the beginning of the curve, many “important updates” were released for Black Desert; here again, the Korean version had a head start that they wanted to catch up with. In recent months, however, the flow of content has significantly slowed down. Even in Korea, schedules have shifted.

In direct comparison of both titles, clear parallels can be seen. Blade and Soul (red) had a significantly higher peak: Black Desert generated only 69% of the Google interest at its release compared to Blade and Soul at its launch. However, throughout the year, more people in the “core player base” became interested in Black Desert than its rival Blade and Soul.

The interest in Black Desert was roughly twice as high. This is likely also due to the fact that Black Desert is the more complicated and deeper game in gameplay mechanics.

Compared to established MMORPGs among us, Black Desert is about on par with Final Fantasy XIV and well below that of Guild Wars 2. Blade and Soul is approximately at the level of Tera in Germany.

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Here we compare the two MMO shooters Destiny and The Division in a similar way:

The Division does not benefit from DLCs as much as Destiny – this is how interest was after release