World of Warcraft: 200,000 Concurrent Users

WoW has sold 600,000 units in the the US and ANZAC countries and broken the region's concurrent user number records, with more than 200K during the holidays.

More here.

Comments

[Cenn]

1.

Kudos to Blizzard.

Although the 200,000 simultaneous players is a bit iffy - considering they are divided over dozens upon dozens of shards.

But still, closing in on that elusive 1 million subs for a "western" MMOG.

I think Cory may have to eat his predictions for 2005 (no US MMO will reach 1 million subs)

[Bernard Moon]

2.

How many of those are from Korea? Majority of Blizzard's traffic on Starcraft and Warcraft are from Seoul. Anyway, I love both games. Blizzard definitely kicks ass.

[Bruce Woodcock]

3.

None of those are Korea... WoW Korea is still in beta test (and kicked ass so much in beta that they've reportedly got NCSoft worried over there).

I'd estimate that WoW has between 350K and 500K subs right now... in comparison, EQ2 just announced 310K. Still, I'd love to get some confirmation on those numbers.

Bruce

[Khefri]

4.

It seems that a high investment, a good design, a long beta test, deep ingame content and large amount of ingame mechanisms (so a mature product even if mature is always relative when speaking about MMOGs) can bring a higher reward.
What I am wondering is how many of the x00k WoW subscribers (400k to 450k ?) are new MMOGs customers and how many are just coming from other products. What could be the impact on the other main stream MMOGs?

[Cenn]

5.

Khefri, i'd be tempted to say at least 25%-50% are new to the MMORPG idea.

on reading the early forums, there were a LOT of complaints about new players who didn't understand how to group (a basic skill learnt in pretty much all mmorpgs). In additino to that, there is the already established name of blizzard and Warcraft which had/have a huge following.

The "name" brands are starting with a huge advantage compared to others. SWG, Lineage, EQ(2), WoW etc... all of these have an established name, some more than others.

I'm interested to see how the Matrix online will go. Once the NDA comes down i suspect we'll be hearing more from the beta's about it... and i suspect it will have a similar subs growth as SWG/WoW have, but on a more limited scale...

[Mike Sellers]

6.

What I am wondering is how many of the x00k WoW subscribers (400k to 450k ?) are new MMOGs customers and how many are just coming from other products. What could be the impact on the other main stream MMOGs?

That is a big question that has implications not only for other current games but for the size of the market overall. As Mark Jacobs recently pointed out in an interview, people have been speculating that the online game-subscriber market was limited for almost ten years now -- no one believed we could get subscribers for M59, nor that UO would do well, nor AC, EQ, etc. Before each game came out, otherwise knowledgeable and market-savvy people said they'd never fly. After each one, these same people say things like, "well sure, that one did well, but really it's the last one; the market is saturated now." Every time.

I heard this most recently from a venture capitalist ("we agree with all your market data, just not your conclusions") a few days after WoW's huge first day, and just after Mark's interview pointing out how faulty this idea was. Such a pattern does little to sway those who don't get this market, or who don't believe (as I do) that we're still in the shallow end of the pool. To my ears this sounds more similar to predictions like "TV is a fad that will never catch on."

So the question is: how many players do UO, EQ, DAoC, CoH, and others lose after the introduction of WoW and EQ2? The fewer they lose, the more resilient (and larger) the inferrable market. The more they lose... the more crowded the overall MMOG market really is (or at least for kill-monster-get-gold fantasy MMOGs).

[Dave Rickey]

7.

WoW/EQ2 combined for a bigger hit than has been seen before, but each one was within the historical bounds (10-20% hit to the subscriber base of existing games). This is the first time two major titles were released at once, I myself expected they'd have to split up the 15% or so of the market that is ready to jump games at any given time. Instead, they cannabilized about 25-30% of the existing market, and added another 500K or so to the market (Bruce Woodcock probably has more definite numbers on that, or will soon).

Obviously, I was wrong, either because new games don't compete with each other for subscribers from other games, or because the difference in production values was uniquely extreme.

At any rate, there's no real indication of decreased market growth, far from it, growth continues at a rather ridiculous pace. And certainly not of a really overcrowded market, just of an increasing level of competition.

Good games will succeed, bad ones will fail.

--Dave

[Alan]

8.

I have to give Blizzard a lot of credit. They did it and they did it well. If you had asked me three years ago, when I got into MMORPGs, whether I'd see an easy-to-use, *good* first-time MMORPG I would have laughed at your suggestion. Today, in my opinion, WoW is that mythical entity.

That 200k concurrent users number may not be too off. From WoW Vault I count 88 servers/shards. (Fyi, the servers have a maximum population of 3k each.) 200k / 88 = 2273 (avg. pop. per server at the time). I also know that over the holidays, they were *extremely* packed. My server was almost unplayable at times due to population-lag. I can believe that 200k number without too much difficulty.

At this time, my only beef with WoW is server stability. I play on one of the more populated servers, Argent Dawn. The server is routinely lagged at EST nights and goes down about once a night or so, if not more. (Reset once on Monday night, down twice on Sunday night, 2-3 times on Saturday night...) If Blizzard can fix the stability/lag issues, I would have almost no complaints.

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

9.

Mike Sellers> So the question is: how many players do UO, EQ, DAoC, CoH, and others lose after the introduction of WoW and EQ2? The fewer they lose, the more resilient (and larger) the inferrable market. The more they lose...

Yes, although this is difficult to measure as the hardcore play multiple games, put some on hold for a while then return etc. I think there are many other questions that need to be asked in order to establish a long term growth pattern.

Right now a large portion of the hardcore gamers have already tasted MMOs. New players might then come from the more casual segment. Are these players as likely to play multiple games? Are they as likely to look for new games after burning out on their first or second game?

Maybe the hardcore treadmill market will double or so assuming no changes in the environment. Of course, there are changes in the environment, MMO gets more viable as even more people get broadband. Pay-by-the-hour and low bandwidth is the suck. But, there is a ceiling. These game mechanics aren't that attractive in the long run. People play MUDs when in college, but how many continue playing? And honestly, most people didn't play MUDs, not even in geeky comp sci departments.

[Damion Schubert]

10.

We really won't know the total impact of these games on the existing games for a while. Players don't cancel their accounts to a game as soon as they pick up a new one. They've got a lot invested in the old game, and they don't know if the new one will resonate as strongly. It takes some time for them to decide whether or not they want to cut the cord. As such, it may take 2 or 3 months for any of the older games to know how hard they were really hit.

Also, new entries into the market serves to bring awareness to that market. Everyone predicted the death of Ultima Online when Everquest came out - instead, it grew. A lot of that were UO fans who tried EQ, didn't like it, and brought a couple of disgruntled EQ newbies with them. Given how many new MMOers are in WoW right now, I'd expect games with strong ideas to get bumps a few months from now, when those players decide to dabble and see if they like more PvP (Shadowbane), more quests and content (Everquest) or prefer superheroes (City of Heroes). The size of that bump will be pretty dependant on how ready those games are when that experimentation phase comes.

[Iamblichos]

11.

What will be more interesting is to see how Blizzard handles the Adena-farming syndicates that have already started colonizing the various shards. Complaints abound on the boards about Chinese farmers who train aggro onto other players, spam duels and PvP attacks, etc. just as they did in Lineage II.

[Timothy Burke]

12.

Can I just say I flatly disbelieve that EQ2 has 300,000+ active subscribers?

I'm seeing a bit of what Iamblichos mentions, by the way. Some interesting tensions around that very issue definitely are popping up in various servers.

[Hellinar]

13.

Ola> Right now a large portion of the hardcore gamers have already tasted MMOs. New players might then come from the more casual segment. Are these players as likely to play multiple games? Are they as likely to look for new games after burning out on their first or second game?

I can’t think of any big MMOG that has put up what I would consider a casual server. I think the biggest barrier to a casual MMOG market is that the current servers are designed and built by hardcore players. They assume that everyone wants to play 24/7, but some unfortunate “casual” people aren’t able to. Any time some one suggests a server with playtime or leveling limits, its met with "no one would pay to play less". I, on the other hand, believe that some casual players, with a regular job and a regular schedule, might be quite happy to pay say $3 or $4 a month to play just one particular night a week. If the server is only up one day a week, it avoids all the problems of guildmates out leveling you etc. And it would surely be an easier sell to the spouse.

I recall when ATITD was in beta rather than live, the server was only up occasionally for scheduled times. I found that rather easier to fit into my life than a full time server. I have several friends that like the look of WoW, but would never take on the time commitment that current MMOGs require. A regular one night a week get together might suit them a lot better.

[Abalieno]

14.

One of the good parts of WoW is that it doesn't require time commitment. I mean, you can play it at your own pace and enjoy it. At least for these first months there are enough players to group with even if you are low level. Everyone can access 99% of the content without fulfilling requirements. Even if you need well-built groups to go in an instance you can easily gather who you need without waiting LFG for hours or forever.

This compared to most of the mmorpgs in the market where you need strong ties with guilds and similar groups to even dream to glance at 50% of the content/gameplay.

[Bruce Woodcock]

15.

>Instead, they cannabilized about 25-30% of the
>existing market, and added another 500K or so to
>the market (Bruce Woodcock probably has more
>definite numbers on that, or will soon).

While they did grow the market, I think the cannibalized even more than that, perhaps 50%. Unfortunately, people like SOE and Mythic, who've admitted to declining numbers for EQ1 and DAoC, have not quantified that yet. NCSoft data probably won't be available until next month. I can tell you anectdotally that even the smaller non-fantasy MMOGs have seen an impact.

The market was pretty flat in 2004, so it's good that WoW came along to grow the market some more, but the fantasy space in particular is just so crowded you can't avoid cannibalization.

Bruce

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

16.

Hellinar> If the server is only up one day a week, it avoids all the problems of guildmates out leveling you etc. And it would surely be an easier sell to the spouse.

Yes, I suppose you could get a healthy game by running a saturday/sunday only game with time-caps on achievement. At least if you allow the players to do planning activities during the week.

A better alternative is to have two independent progression paths, two types of content. One for everyday play and one that you can participate in once a week.

[Lee Sheldon]

17.

Mike Sellers:

"people have been speculating that the online game-subscriber market was limited for almost ten years now"

Is that just MMOs? If so I'd still agree. I see "Wish" just bit the dust -- something I predicted two years ago. If the market is growing by the leaps and bounds some claim, what do all the casualties mean? And if it isn't growing that fast, why not?

Until I lose my bet with Mark Jacobs, I'll continue to believe that cannibalism will drive the new games and early adopters will inflate the numbers. I have 3 months (I wish I had the 6 months I originally wanted!) to see if WoW and EQII actually create and -hold- the 30% larger market Mark predicted at dinner during the Austin conference.

Bruce Woodcock:

Hopefully you'll have some reasonable numbers by GDC. That's approximately when one of us will have to pay up.

Lee

[Mike Sellers]

18.

Until I lose my bet with Mark Jacobs, I'll continue to believe that cannibalism will drive the new games and early adopters will inflate the numbers.

Lee, given the rise in overall players since the early days of UO (much less M59 or The Realm), you can't reasonably say that product growth has been due to cannibalism. the market growth in terms of totals subscribers has been tremendous every single year since 1995 -- without exception -- and without a single indication of saturation despite many many predictions to the contrary. Unless you want to say that EQ's 400,000 players spawned from every UO and AC player dividing by fission? Or that every single DAoC, CoH, SWG, EQ, UO, and AC player also play Lineage, Lineage II, Ragnarok, and WoW.

You asked, If the market is growing by the leaps and bounds some claim, what do all the casualties mean?

These two are unrelated. Very few games have been killed due to poor player numbers (and most of these are ill-conceived, ill-supported EA games like Majestic, MCO, E&B, and soon I imagine TSO). Most of the "casualties" have been killed before they ever saw daylight because the developers ran out of money, the publishers ran out of courage, executives were purged from a publisher, etc.

These games are still very high-risk to produce because few people have even the slightest clue how to make them (and no one has this down to paint-by-numbers), but that doesn't mean the market isn't there and growing fast. The complexities and risks in the product/service and the size and growth of the market have little to do with each other. You might as well ask why so many movie scripts don't get bought (that is, the script 'fails' as a project) if there's really such a big market for movies.

[Dave Rickey]

19.

We're a *minimum* of three years away from cannibilism being the major source of players for new games. I'll make a prediction: The roughly 1,000,000 subscriptions for WoW and EQ2 will turn out to have been less than 50% cannabilized from other games after the dust clears. Probably more like 30%, just like every game since UO (probably UO too, but the 40K or so that would have represented was divided a lot of different ways, and no-one was trying to keep track of the market as a whole). And no single game will have lost more than 30% of their subscriber base (still more than ever before, but we've never had two major titles come out so close to each other).

Like Mike Sellers said, games that are killed before launch because of severe technical problems or lack of funds don't count as succumbing to competition.

Why this rush to declare a crisis after every single game launch? If it dies, it was because "the market is saturated." If it succeeds and pulls some players from existing games, it was because "the market was saturated."

Show me annual growth rates under 10%, and I'll grant you a saturated market (right now we're around 60%). Until then, can we give it a rest?

--Dave

[Michael Hartman]

20.

> Cenn wrote:
> The "name" brands are starting with a huge advantage compared to others.

SWG drastically underperformed expectations, so I don't think the names have a big advantage.

I just think all that has come out recently have been games with a "name."

CoH certainly didn't have a name and it has done well.

If you make a good game, people will play it.

That might sound overly simplistic, but really that is the ultimate truth.

Considering how absolutely horrific the launch has been of WoW, and considering their borderline unethical and definitely unforgiveable "patch" system, the fact that WoW has hit 600k in sales this fast is testament to a very good game at its core.

[Damion Schubert]

21.

Considering how absolutely horrific the launch has been of WoW, and considering their borderline unethical and definitely unforgiveable "patch" system, the fact that WoW has hit 600k in sales this fast is testament to a very good game at its core.

I've experienced two nights of minor login issues since I started playing. No one I know has experienced severe data loss or rollbacks or horribly misguided customer service. WoW is having a launch that is fairly smooth in the grand scheme of things -- remember, ALL launches have issues, the question is how you respond to them.

Having a good name certainly does help you. Is World of Warcraft really so much better than the games before it that it could top EQ's peak in less than a month? No. Blizzard's reputation and the Warcraft brand added a lot.

[Mark Asher]

22.

The one thing I don't ever see much comment on when discussing market growth is users with multiple accounts. How many players have accounts in more than one game? How many players have more than one account in a single game?

You can measure the market by active accounts, but I think a more accurate reading would be if we could see numbers for active players. I think players with multiple accounts represent a weakness rather than a strength when trying to ascertain the robustness of the market. They are more likely to shed accounts than a player with just one account is likely to leave the market entirely.

I think WoW may be the game that really causes a lot of player migration from older games. Players have confidence in Blizzard and WoW. It's an inviting new home for their friends and guilds, one that they know is going to be well-maintained by Blizzard and be around for a long time. They may finally wave goodbye to games like EQ, UO, AC, and DAoC.

[Bruce Woodcock]

23.

>Hopefully you'll have some reasonable numbers by
>GDC. That's approximately when one of us will
>have to pay up.

Well Lee, the problem with this idea is that Mark is one of those people who will have to admit just how many subscribers DAoC has lost in order for us to know. :)

Bruce

[Lee Sheldon]

24.

Mike Sellers:

"Very few games have been killed due to poor player numbers (and most of these are ill-conceived, ill-supported EA games like Majestic, MCO, E&B, and soon I imagine TSO)."

URU was killed due to lack of players. Horizons is barely limping along due to lack of players. CoH I'm told is hemorraging players. We see elsewhere that DAoC is losing players. How many players has SWG lost?

Cancelled in Beta in the past couple of years we have Mythica, Dragon Empires, URU:Ages Beyond Myst, True Fantasy Online, Ultima X, Warhammer Online, Wish, and I'm sure I'm missing some.

You obviously have more information than I do. Help me out here. I know it's not as simple as Dave suggests that "Good games will succeed, bad ones will fail."

Can you tell me specifically what was responsible for these particular cancellations? (I only know for sure on one: URU.)

"Most of the "casualties" have been killed before they ever saw daylight because the developers ran out of money, the publishers ran out of courage, executives were purged from a publisher, etc."

Isn't another possible reason a realistic assessment of the market? Or is that what you're calling "the publishers ran out of courage?" I've been attached to several MMO projects in the last few years that failed to get financial backing. Why can't the VCs see that 60% growth that Dave quotes?

I'm not saying -all- the players in WoW and EQ2 deserted live games, but they aren't all new players either. I realize the fact that I rarely find new players when I'm playing new online games is only ancedotal, but 60% new growth??? Where are the numbers that support this?

"These games are still very high-risk to produce because few people have even the slightest clue how to make them (and no one has this down to paint-by-numbers), but that doesn't mean the market isn't there and growing fast. The complexities and risks in the product/service and the size and growth of the market have little to do with each other."

I agree the two are unrelated. I'm just not seeing the same numbers that get quoted so often. I see people picking up on press releases. I know the credibility gap between PR and reality. I know you do too.

"You might as well ask why so many movie scripts don't get bought (that is, the script 'fails' as a project) if there's really such a big market for movies."

You are arguing a correlation I never made. And the analogy is faulty. Unproduced scripts (and un-picked up pitches) are analogous to games that were designed on paper or prototyped or pitches that weren't bought. The movies that have not been released after reaching "beta" are so rare they're lengendary like "The Private Life of Henry the 8th" or "Something's Gotta Give" (The Marilyn Monroe film, not the more recent one). Some films sit on the shelf for a few years, but for better or for worse they all eventually see the light of day. Hollywood releases everything it spends millions of dollars on.

Everybody knows to the last dollar how much any given movie or studio makes even though box office doesn't track repeat viewings anymore than our subscriptions track true numbers of players. We can watch the numbers for a film fall off after each opening weekend. We know how many people watch "The Apprentice" and we know when they move on thanks to Nielsen. We can tell almost to the day when the market is saturated with one kind of product in movies and TV. We can even tell when single-player game types wear out their welcome. The games disappear from the shelves.

What we need in MMOs is more than just PR and wishful thinking and self-justification. Some sort of Nielsen rating system is needed to track both market and market share. We need boxes attached to our computers and consoles. We aren't going to get them anytime soon though because our market doesn't justify the expense. Advertisers are not unaware of MMOs. The market simply doesn't justify their interest (yes, a good thing in my book).

Anyway, I really -would- like to know about the reasons behind the beta cancellations.

Lee

[Mike Sellers]

25.

Very long response; apologies.

Lee, what you're asking about why MMOGs are canceled is, in terms of our industry, sort of like asking, "why are so many people in our family alcoholic?" This is something we just don't talk about publicly. Those who know typically don't say. Even in saying this much I feel like I'm betraying some family secret, going out on thin ice career-wise (even though I currently run my own shop).

It'd be nice and rational if MMOGs were cancelled because they had poor gameplay or weren't able to attract enough players, but I'll stay on this thin ice and say that that is rarely the majority cause, and rarely if ever this simple. Poor design early on, poor management throughout, the inscrutable vagaries of publisher interest and milestone payments, rock-star egos clashing, and this lurking belief that there's a zero-sum equation just around the corner -- that if your game does well mine will not -- all drive what is hardly rational, no matter that it is papered over that way for public consumption.

Continuing on this thin ice I'll speak to some of your questions as best I can as a sort of long-distance (and perilous, as I don't mean to disparage anyone's work in this difficult area) example: I don't believe that URU was cancelled because it had too few players. That may well have been the proximate cause, but it goes much deeper. I'm going from nth-hand info, so bear with me, but my combined understanding/intuition/inference is that URU had severe technological problems with the servers not supporting anything like sufficient numbers of players; that there were deep divides between design and what was feasible to implement; and that there were management issues such as having only soft support from the publisher. There are, I believe (with greater or lesser degrees of knowledge vs. inference) similar constellations of issues -- not the same ones, but similar -- in the cases of Mythica, UXO, and Horizons. Certainly in the cases of these last games (all typical fantasy games) the purse-string-holders had to be looking forward to a year in which both EQII and WoW were going to be released, and wondering if they could weather that storm (the presumptive zero-sum market again). There are other overlaid issues too such as changes in executive management or their priorities that are tectonic in nature: so deeply submerged as to be invisible, but with sudden and unexpected consequences in the public eye.

I wish things were as simple as Dave said, that good games will succeed and bad ones will fail. That's never been the case in the games industry and it certainly isn't in a highly mutable, dynamic market like MMOG development. Good games have a greater chance to succeed, but can also be hobbled by any number of technical, managerial, or marketing issues, while a poorer game might happen to shine in those areas and consequently do better in the market.

I think that VCs do see strong growth in this area, though I don't know that they see 60%. That number (or any number) is dependent on taking what you think the overall year-over-year subscriber numbers are per game, adding them up, and applying some factor for error and marketing hype. People often say "you have to account for players with multiple accounts on different games" but this is specious. If I'm tracking car sales and every car-owner buys three cars, what do I care? The market expands and is likely to sustain that expansion so long as that behavior continues. People have assumed -- contrary to any evidence -- that players playing multiple games was a sign of saturation since at least 1997 or so, but it hasn't been true yet. I see lots of reasons this will continue to not be true, and no reasons to believe it will result in saturation soon. That said, knowledgeable VCs have their own gut check, and many don't see -- or don't attach significance to -- this market growth.

Now I can hardly speak for VCs in general, but I can tell you some of what I've seen. First, many VCs view games in general as a fad not worth investing in rather than a bona fide market. Some do see the growth in games and MMOGs specifically though. They also see the ballooning cost figures (TSO did us all wrong on that score, I have to say: it's arguably the most visible to non-MMOG players like VCs, and it's also the one they hear dark tales of concerning how much it cost and how it spun out of control). And they see huge risk. Some honestly seem not to believe the "money hat" multiplication that comes from subscription revenue -- this is a case of educating the capitalists, not educating the market -- and focus instead on public failures (here too we do ourselves a disservice: if MMOGs were not so bent on creating pre-beta hype, their sinking beneath the waves later would be far less notable).

So, is there market risk here? Yes, definitely. Huge risk. But does it come from a current or foreseeable lack of customers? Emphatically not. It comes from the risk inherent in creating a product that is sufficiently novel -- but not too novel -- in a fast-changing technological environment, one that melds both product and service in ways we still don't fully understand, and which requires significant management focus and financial support for 2-5 years to bring to fruition. That's the risk. The rewards of course are also potentially enormous -- most MMOGs should, I believe, be cash-positive within three months of launch, be profitable within the first year, and show healthy gross margins thereafter. This has been demonstrated over and over, even with some games that we don't typically consider successes (consider that based on usage figures in the 50,000 to 80,000 range, even TSO generates annual revenues that would require significant sales -- 400,000 to 500,000 boxes -- from an offline game, and will likely do this for as long as EA keeps it plugged in).

For a novel, well-designed, well-managed MMOG, the future is very bright, despite the risks inherent in technology and marketing. Frankly, I believe we'll see more MMOGs with market success in the range of EQ2 and WoW, not fewer. The market is there and it's definitely growing.

[Michael Hartman]

26.

> Damion Schubert wrote
>
> Is World of Warcraft really so much better than the games
> before it that it could top EQ's peak in less than a month? No.

I think it could easily be argued that the answer is yes. The EQ model of forced grinding and grouping is not a good model. It succeeded in spite of this, not because of it.

> I've experienced two nights of minor login issues since
> I started playing. No one I know has experienced severe data
> loss or rollbacks or horribly misguided customer service. WoW
> is having a launch that is fairly smooth in the grand scheme of things
> -- remember, ALL launches have issues, the question is how you respond
>to them.

No, not all launches have issues. But there are a lot of MMORPG developers out there who want people to think this, so they can get away with releasing sloppy, unfinished code.

WoW has has DAYS of downtime for numerous servers (for a handful of servers, they were completely down for almost a week shortly after launch). Right now about 15-20 servers are in the midst of a 16 hour "maintenance downtime", with the rest of them down for 4 hours. This is a weekly occurrence.

Then there is patch day, with their absolutely abysmal bit torrent path system that forces customers to share their own bandwidth if they want better than 2 kb/second.

WoW's launch has been terrible, and frankly I'm sick of games getting a pass on this because supposedly "everyone" has a bad launch.

DAoC did not have a bad launch.

Threshold didn't have a bad launch.

None of Iron Realms games had a bad launch.

Gemstone (nor any other Simultronics game I know of) did not have a bad launch.

Honestly, the whole "everyone has a bad launch" excuse is as tired and repugnant as the trend in single player games to need a patch or two before they are fully functional.

[Mark Asher]

27.

The quality of the launch only matters to the initial batch of players, and then only if it is bad enough to make them unsubscribe. Otherwise, who cares?

Three months after an MMO is out, the MMO should be judged on how it currently plays, not on problems it had at launch.

The whole good launch/bad launch thing exists because MMO fans like to argue about it. DAoC had a good launch three years ago? Too bad I sold my Wayback Machine on eBay or else I'd go back in time and enjoy it.

[Iamblichos]

28.

Michael said:
> WoW's launch has been terrible, and frankly I'm
> sick of games getting a pass on this because
> supposedly "everyone" has a bad launch.

I agree with this in theory, but in practice it seems to be the case. Every MMO I've played (AC1, AC2, Horizons) has had a bad launch - many worse than WoW. AC2 & Horizons were both MUCH worse, both in terms of server stability and in terms of lag. This type of launch-related problem is not a deal-maker or breaker for me.

What makes me as a player stay is that Blizzard obviously thought long and hard about their content - this is the most complete, populated (in a content sense, not a player sense) game I've played since AC1. The world has depth, both in terms of game lore and in terms of environment.

The two concerns that will drive me out of the game are 1) farmers and the problems they bring, and 2) persistent lag and hardware issues. We are now moving into the 3rd month the game has been out, and stability seems to be growing worse instead of improving. I think everyone gets a pass on their first month, but that should be enough to identify where the bottlenecks are and what can be done to alleviate them. Blizzard claims to be addressing the farming issue; so far so good. What I have not seen is any attempt to correct the world design flaws (like the totally sporked login server arrangement). If I go, that's what will run me out.

[XP]

29.

I'm rather unconvinced by taking EQ1 and DAoC as references for market saturation.
These games ARE experiencing cannibalization, but a large part, IMHO, is due to specific factors.

Launching a game called EQ2 was bound to cannibalize EQ1.. It might very well have been a strategic decision, too.
At least it's an attractive lure to the EQ1 players, and might be viewed as auguring badly for EQ1's future. Though it's anecdotal, I've met a lot of EQ1 players that migrated en masse to EQ2.

As for DAoC, it went through several severe changes with its last 2 expansions (ToA and NF). ToA introduced extreme mudflation and enormous timesinks. NF changed the endgame completely and compounded some effects of the mudflation.
The way the game has evolved has heightened the entry barrier to newcomers while inflating the power gap.
It's rather obvious that Mythic is aware of the fact. How they will relly adress it is another story.

The point there is that Mythic has both disgruntled a lot of old players while making its game unfriendly to newbies and casuals.
Sure, WoW is a factor, but Mythic has a large responsibility.

It might be more interesting to look at how other games like CoH are affected, IMHO, than taking EQ1 and DAoC as reference points.

[Samantha LeCraft]

30.

http://blizzard.com/press/chinapatch.shtml

WoW launched in China today. During the open beta in China, the game reached a peak concurrency of over 500,000 players.