The largest gaming company in the world, Tencent, launched an MMORPG in 2024 to fill the gap that WoW had left. Tarisland started in July 2024 as a free MMORPG and caused quite a stir. However, it completely flopped on Steam.
This was the idea behind Tarisland: Because Activision Blizzard fell out with NetEase, there was suddenly no WoW in China. The servers went offline and many Chinese players were mourning.
Then Tencent announced that they would release an MMORPG for mobile and PC. It was obvious that they wanted to step into the gap that WoW had left in China.
The MMORPG was released globally on June 21, 2024, and was quite well received. However, a release on Steam was a flop.
Tarisland could only maintain the interest of MMORPG players for 2 weeks
How much success did Tarisland have in Germany? An analysis of the interest in Tarisland in Germany shows that the MMORPG had quite a small hype at release in June.
For two weeks, it was more relevant in interest, as measured by Google Trends, than major MMORPGs in Germany such as The Elder Scrolls Online, Black Desert, or Guild Wars 2.
However, Tarisland was only able to spark a flash in the pan. The game was only truly relevant for two weeks, after which interest declined significantly and it dropped well below the interest in established competitors.
Late release on Steam turns into a debacle
What happened with Steam? Tencent apparently completely miscalculated, as they apparently planned for Tarisland to gain traction with the release on Steam in October 2024, but that failed completely:
- Tarisland never exceeded 582 players at peak on Steam.
- The ratings are disastrous, with only 24% positive reviews.
- There is no significant spike in interest on Google Trends at the time of the Steam release.
In reviews, it is stated that players start at level 41, which nobody can understand, and is an absolute no-go for many players. Additionally, the game has many Pay2Win options and too few opportunities to customize characters.
Was there a new MMORPG in 2024 that performed better? Significantly more successful than Tarisland was the new MMORPG Throne and Liberty from NCSoft, which managed to hold players’ interest in Germany for about 8 weeks and remained above the interest in the strong established competition. However, in December, interest also waned here: Throne and Liberty loses more than 70 percent of players on Steam in 2 months, community cites reasons
