No other thing in the MMOs is surrounded by such a mystery as the number of players. However, these numbers are highly sought after by fans.
Players are crazy about numbers for these 5 reasons
Players want to know numbers in MMORPGs. There are several reasons for this:
- For many gamers, numbers are an indicator of the success and quality of a game. How “good” it really is. What many like must be good.
- Numbers are great for discussions with fans of other MMOs. What? You play this niche game X? Mine has 5 times more players!
- No one wants to play a game where they feel alone. MMORPGs need lively worlds to provide the full experience.
- Numbers beautifully indicate how a game has evolved over the years.
- Player numbers reveal whether the game will continue to be developed and supported in the future, or if it will soon go offline.
Unfortunately: No MMO, or at least hardly any, reveals its player numbers.
Player numbers are a state secret. This is due to the nature of MMOs, which always have losses after an initial hype. The numbers often drop, and continuously. With official numbers, publishers and development studios fear that they would give players the feeling that the game is in a downward spiral.
But it is exactly these numbers that players desperately want to know. What they search for on Google, what they pay attention to in articles about MMOs, what they ask about. So the gaming press must provide them with numbers. What happens then?
Numbers are circulating everywhere, but most of them lack meaningfulness.
We have the player numbers for you… approximately
Recently, when PC-Games took a bird’s eye view of the MMORPG world at the end of the year, the magical word “number of players” was neatly listed for each game. However, it was difficult to properly fill it with content. Lord of the Rings Online? No player numbers. Rift? No comment. Age of Conan? No statement.
Well, the skeptical reader might say: But those are also older MMOs that started as subscription models and have long since become Free2Play. They are likely struggling. What about new games? What about paid games? Yes, let’s have a look at that.
Player numbers in TESO and WildStar
The Elder Scrolls Online remains silent
The Elder Scrolls Online is consistently silent about subscription numbers. In the summer, in July, a figure of 770,000 subscribers was mentioned. A market research institute wanted to ascertain that number. That figure probably came from the studio, they said they got all the numbers from there. But no one at Zenimax wanted to confirm or deny it.
The number circulated globally, and if Zenimax had been dissatisfied, they would probably have contradicted it. However, they say absolutely nothing about it. The number now circulates, looks quite decent. At least it is not damaging to their image, and since they have never commented on it, they cannot be held responsible for it either. Quite a tactic.
Assuming that this figure of 770,000 players (if it ever was correct) is still current six months later and still relevant today is rather naive.
Yet it is repeated time and again: it’s the only number we’ve ever had.
WildStar remains silent
What about WildStar? Nothing at all. One of the current heads once blurted out in an interview that they had “several hundred thousand players”, for which he promptly received a reprimand from the publisher NCSoft. And that “several hundred thousand players” has never been confirmed again.
As much as the developers of WildStar would like to talk about their initial successes, apparently contracts prevent them from doing so. In such a puzzling situation, whether he is allowed to disclose numbers or not, Carbine’s president Jeremy Gaffney found himself shortly after the release. He was apparently only allowed to speak of server load, not player numbers directly.
Officially, neither TESO nor WildStar has published any numbers, aside from “uncontradicted market research figures” and “I let that slip out once.”.
“Yes, well,” the reader will now say. Elder Scrolls Online and WildStar have both somehow underperformed. What about the success stories this year? What about Final Fantasy XIV and especially WoW?
Final Fantasy – sugar-coated
At Final Fantasy XIV, there were new record numbers throughout the year. The game came to the PlayStation 4, it launched in China. The numbers kept growing, looking increasingly impressive at the end of videos.
However: The talk was always of “registered” accounts. 2.5 million was the last count. This came right after the announcement that they were now offering free trial days (for which you also had to register, so the trials probably counted towards the 2.5 million in some way or another – there simply wasn’t space for the fine print under large numbers).
Then came the news: Final Fantasy XIV, the predecessor MMO Final Fantasy XI, and Dragon Quest 10, the three MMOs from Square Enix, together had almost 1 million players. Even though the lion’s share is likely to fall on FF XIV, this is still far from the registered accounts and doesn’t look so impressive anymore.
What was once shortly before “on par with WoW” has now become “probably globally about as big as TESO alone in the West” (if the TESO number were correct, which we also don’t know).
In FF XIV, another effect comes into play. TESO relies on mega servers, while FF XIV uses traditional single servers. It’s a bit like having the same audience in a giant Olympic stadium or in a small provincial arena. 5000 people get lost in a Bundesliga stadium but look like a huge crowd in a third-tier arena.
World of Warcraft – complicated
But World of Warcraft, some will say. That’s the big exception. Everyone knows they have 10 million subscribers, right? Well… not quite.
How do the 10 million subscribers fit in with the fact that, for example, a recent statistic on the AVs at mmo-champion recorded only 2.7 million accounts in NA/EU?
This is because that lighthouse figure “10 million players” is only partially composed of the WoW we know. The Pay2Play game, the subscription game, the one where you have to buy a box and a digital expansion to be up-to-date. In Asia, where WoW is also distributed, they have a different business model. There, players pay by the hour for a trip to Azeroth in internet cafes, the so-called PC bangs.
So does the person who logged in for one hour in China for 9 cents count the same as the player with a monthly subscription here in these 10 million, in this statistic? That would be absurd to equate, right? About that, the press releases that give out the peak numbers remain silent.
Only when you lose a few hundred thousand players in a quarter do they say: That was mainly due to Asia. Don’t worry about us; things are going great.
When you research what the fine print says, you read that the “10 million” WoW players are not all players with a subscription but that the 10 million actually also includes those players who logged in in an Asian internet cafe in the last month.
No wonder that pure subscription games prefer to keep the numbers secret without this “support from Asia,” as they are immediately measured against the 10 million WoW players and look quite shabby in comparison.
ArcheAge 3 million, Hearthstone 20 million, World of Tanks 100 million! Records!
Things get a bit stranger with free-to-play games. They report things like “This has been downloaded so often” or “This many registered accounts exist.” This leads to crazy numbers that say nothing about the current enthusiasm of players for the game. They also count inactive accounts.
Live with it: There are no official numbers, only approximations
As a fan and also as a gaming journalist, you have to live with the fact that we do not receive any official, comparable, up-to-date numbers. As much as we would like to have them.
However: There are certainly ways to measure the success or trend of a game.
We at Mein-MMO, for example, use Raptr figures or certain trends on Google as a basis to see how active players were in a month in an MMO or how interest fluctuated in search engines. We look at quarterly reports and try to deduce conclusions from the revenues that some companies have to list for their investors. We see what traffic the game homepages approximately record and use that to determine a trend.
These numbers are vulnerable, relative, influenced, and not set in stone. Especially players who don’t like them often doubt them thoroughly.
However: these numbers are still the best we have. If you want insight into these numbers, then check out this post:
Maybe players should come to terms with the idea that it is not so important how many people play a game. As long as there are enough around to have fun.
What does it ultimately matter whether 120,000 or 1.2 million people are playing the game outside your own circle, and what the future may look like due to the financial situation? Much more important is that at the moment, you enjoy it. And you don’t need hundreds of thousands for that; often a dozen good teammates is enough, and sometimes just one.
