Or so says the Houston Chronicle. The story is actually an AP feed, by Matt Slagle, elsewhere running under the much less exciting headline "Tale of two video game worlds: Online consoles soar, PCs stumble."
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Mar 26, 2004
In the not-too-distant future, online play will rule universe
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"Korean-based "Ragnarok Online," for example, boasts 17 million users worldwide in a game where players can battle, chat or obtain pets."
Holy Decimal Point, Batman! Does Ragnarok really have 17 million? Or is it 1.7 million?
Posted by: Edward Castronova | Mar 26, 2004 at 11:19
If all those Starcraft players started playing Ragnarok instead, it might be 17 million :)
But then I figured, oh why not look it up...
"Ragnarok Online Reaches 17 million users -- User base nearly reaches a million in the U.S."
http://www.vgln.com/pc/10795000574443.shtml
Posted by: Euphrosyne | Mar 26, 2004 at 12:03
I’ve been in a Google frenzy too. The origin of the figure appears to be a 16th March press release from Gravity Interactive. However if you look back, the previous figure doing the rounds was 1.6 million, so it looks like a typo in the PR department that no one thought question.
So either we have missed 15.3 million subscribers out there (who all turned up in about 5 months) or there are a lot of sites that really need to look at numbers, even in press releases, before they print them.
Posted by: Ren | Mar 26, 2004 at 12:13
700K US players for Ragnarok Online? Where are they hiding? Where *were* they hiding?...
Seems more like a case of counting trial accounts and website hits than paying subscribers.
Posted by: DivineShadow | Mar 26, 2004 at 12:34
17 million seems high, but 1.7 could still be low, judging by other materials--unless *everyone* is using inflated data. From TN's own November posting: 700,000 Thais Play Ragnarok Online, Despite Curfew. (Of course, that number can be debated as well)
But if Thailand--not known for its high tech culture--can muster up such significant numbers, surely S. Korea and Japan can do serveral times that, plus spare change from the US and Europe. As for why it doesn't seem like anyone in the States plays RO, remember that the culture is offshore, the press releases are in another language--but go to a game store and you'll see the RO displays, and I've seen tons of web ads recently. FFXI claims some hefty non-asian subscriber numbers, but gets almost no discussion here...
Posted by: Euphrosyne | Mar 26, 2004 at 15:04
E> you'll see the RO displays, and I've seen tons of web ads recently
And print ads too. RO buys regular two-pagers in all the popular games magazines, and I actually think I saw an RO ad in Wired recently, if I'm not mistaken... (If I were them, I'd get a US ad agency to redo the text of those ads.)
Posted by: greglas | Mar 26, 2004 at 15:49
17 million is probably the number of individual impressions. In many countries the distribution are via game cards, so if you buy the card and create a new account then you are added to the count. Many could be mule and farm accounts too.
Legend of Mir have hit about a million concurrent users, so that is a better number to go by.
As for FFXI, a few have pointed out before that based on press releases that it should be listed under the US 100K group on TN too. Perhaps, as the press focus is little on this big game, there is a whole new player base that is getting very little press time. Perhaps many are playing on consoles and are not on the net blogging away...
Lastly, there are about 2 or 3 Asian online game developers listed on stock exchanges (Korea and NASDAQ) so it would be interesting to see the numbers in their filings.
Frank
Posted by: Magicback | Mar 26, 2004 at 21:17
"(If I were them, I'd get a US ad agency to redo the text of those ads.)"
I did editing and rewriting for the RO English site in the early days, and it was like pulling teeth trying to communicate. There was a tangible reluctance to let someone outside the company have any influence. They've since expanded the site and removed almost all my text, and replaced it (again) with a no doubt highly educated but obviously not fully fluent in-house translator. I can appreciate the differing business ethic, but I still chuckle when I read something from them.
Posted by: Euphrosyne | Mar 28, 2004 at 04:47
I've noticed that most Asian game sites have poorly translated english equivelants... while one would think they'd want to correct it to better appeal to english speaking audiances I have my doubts...
If you've spoken to any supposedly english speaking gamers recently they actually seem to speak the way these sites are written.
Is overseas gaming the true source of "l33t d00dspaek"?
Posted by: Sourtone | Mar 28, 2004 at 17:48
While I don't think overseas gaming is the true source of gamespeak, I do think it has a heavy influence. I am guessing it is a form of net Esperanto.
An example of the "esperanto" effect is Singlish (Singapore English). There are many terms that are taken from Hokkien, Malay, Cantonese, Mandarin, and Hindi among other languages.
It becomes a form of easy identification. Thus, perhaps RO is projecting this unique language form as a cultural identification marker: "see everyone in RO speak like this..."
Frank
Posted by: Magicback | Mar 28, 2004 at 22:33
Euph> I did editing and rewriting for the RO English site in the early days, and it was like pulling teeth trying to communicate.
Wow! And all this time I thought you were just a Finnish rock star: http://www.euphrosyne.net/.
Posted by: greglas | Mar 29, 2004 at 10:36
Curses! My anonymous cover has been blown!
Posted by: Euphrosyne | Mar 29, 2004 at 11:50
There is certainly a lot of lingo left over from the early days of UO. Before they had servers in Japan/Korea, a lot of Asian people played on the US West coast servers, and they had their own, um, interesting dialects of English.
You still periodically see someone in the various communities reference "pk la ^^".
Posted by: Jayce | Mar 30, 2004 at 13:12