40 million players?

According to this piece in the China Daily, dated 10th October, MU Online "has 32 million players in China, three times more than in other parts of the world".

Can that be right?!

If so, we in the West are still at the amoeba stage...

Comments

[Alexis Madrigal]

1.

That is a massively misleading statement. MU has nowhere near 32 million players or even a million players. Perhaps, 32 million accounts have been created, but that's pretty much irrelevant in the Chinese context. Unlike the US, you don't need to buy a $50 game, you just have to sign up, so there are far more accounts than players. For instance, according to a recent article at Pacific Epoch, Everquest 2's open beta has had half a million accounts created, but peak concurrent users of 12,000.

Back to MU: Raph once posted to TN that revenue is a good judge of a game's popularity. Well, MU made $1.1 million for the joint venture that operates the game (9Webzen) in the second quarter of 2005. Given a fairly average ARPUH of around 2.5 cents, you're looking at average concurrent users of around 20,000. In fact, MU lost about $700,000 in the second quarter. At one point (end of 2003), it had over 300,000 peak concurrent users, but it encountered very serious operational problems throughout 2004.

For as big as China is, we (and by we, I mean DFC Intelligence) forecast that there are less than 15 million Chinese MMOG players. Granted, that's a willfully conservative estimate, but the image of a hundred million people playing games is just not the reality of the situation. Like here, most game companies struggle to get to 20,000 people regularly playing their games. And that is why I have such immense respect for you game designers. Analysts have a much easier job.

[Taewon Yun]

2.

When you see an article/press release from Asia boasting X number of players, do not interprete it as the game boasts X number of active subscribers. What they are referring to is the number of registered accounts in MU's user database.

What is the difference between (active) subscribers and registered accounts? In Asian business model, there are not many restrictions to create accounts while you need to buy a box product in the West. That translates into gigantic number of registered accounts (most of them are not really utilized)in most games.

Thus, you will need to see these numbers with a grain of salt. However, it is also true that Asian online games (MMORPGs et al) are the main stream gaming in Asia while it is still a niche in the West.

[Junsok Huhh]

3.

I've just checked the number. It is right. Mu, developed by Webzen of Korea and serviced by 9Webzen Ltd.(Joint venture between Webzen and 9.com) has hit official 40M registered accounts. But, as above men said, it is somewhat misleading in itself.

Another number often mentioned is concurrent users. This is not frequently used concept in the west, but in Korea and China, most of experts prefer to check this number. This is a kind of cross-sectional measure that counts the number of logged players at a specific time of a day or week.
According to 9Webzen’s official announcement, the number of concurrent users is 320,000. There might be a big exaggeration, but as far as number, there is no place to compete with China. the number of Shanda’s “Legend of Mir 2(MIR2)” was even more surprising, that concurrent users of the game was 600,000 at its peak. See following link. http://china-netinvestor.blogspot.com/2005/06/chinese-mmorpg-market-legend-of-mir-ii.html

Of course, financial performances for these games in China are totally different story. I'm not going to jump into this here. Obviously, Mir2 has played central role in Shanda’s flourishing. Last year, the developer of Mir2, Actoz Soft of Korea was taken over by Shanda. It was really big news in Korean gaming communities.

[Mike]

4.

Only in a population as big as China's can a lousy Diablo ripoff like Mu Online get 32 million playes.

[Matt Mihaly]

5.

I'd love to see us stop getting all worked up about registrations as opposed to actual players. Counting registrations is largely just a marketing ploy and has no real value. It's bad enough when "games journalists" fall for this re-printing of corporate press releases, but can't we avoid it on Terranova? I'd like to think we're a sophisticated enough audience to just ignore that kind of thing.

--matt

[Lisa Galarneau]

6.

Matt said:

I'd love to see us stop getting all worked up about registrations as opposed to actual players.

Most of the game companies I talked to in Asia had stopped discussing numbers in terms of registered users (at least outside of press releases!) and have started to focus conversations on metrics like concurrent users, thus attempting to distinguish themselves from business models that aren't subscription-based. As Alexis alludes, this is also more meaningful in terms of describing a company's technical capabilities. So Lineage might have 4 million registered players, but a max of 110,000 concurrent players - still an impressive achievement. This would be a much more meaningful, although quite likely less impressive, metric for MU or even GuildWars, as there is no motivation for players (or companies, for that matter) to terminate accounts. The snapshot we are given in the 'registered accounts' metric is not real-time, but might characterise a brief up-tick in success last year, or even earlier. It's no indication whatsoever of stickiness or revenues.

[Lisa Galarneau]

7.

Junsok said:

"Another number often mentioned is concurrent users. This is not frequently used concept in the west, but in Korea and China, most of experts prefer to check this number. This is a kind of cross-sectional measure that counts the number of logged players at a specific time of a day or week."

Sorry, Junsok, just realised that I repeated what you said... I really must learn to read previous comments better before posting!

[Matt Mihaly]

8.

Completely agree with everything you opined, Lisa.

--matt

[Richard Bartle]

9.

Matt Mihaly>I'd love to see us stop getting all worked up about registrations as opposed to actual players.

Me too. If the report had said "accounts", I wouldn't have been quite so impressed. However, it said "players".

Looks like it should have said "accounts".

Richard

[Raph]

10.

Weekly uniques, not concurrent! The variation in game lengths means that peak concurrent isn't really a good metric. When one game has a 20% tie ratio and another has a 10%, we're talking about one game with doubnle the user base of another.

This is particularly telling right now when short-session games are high on the charts in Korea.

[magicback (Frank)]

11.

Weekly uniques is not much more useful considering the skew towards casual and low cost portal-type MMO games (say Neopets).

From a business metric perspective, I prefer the metric of revenues and the following formulation:

Average Revenue Per Player x Average Concurrent User = Revenue (for any given period).

This metrics looks at the number of players playing the game and the amount of money they are generating for the company. It’s like reducing combat metrics down to DPS :)

But ’40 million’ is a number that gets the headlines :)