Well I think this game is failing.  We are a few days into launch and it looks pretty flat and slow.  They aren't getting that surge you have seen in other games.

Yesterday it was 29th overall and still not in the top 10 MMOs.

So I'm gonna call it, this game is gonna die down to a very small niche and Cryptic is in major trouble.  They aren't going to make their 100K subs or at least not keep them past the first month.

Due to budget issues resulting from the fail of CO, Star Trek unfortunately is gonna be skimpy and probably fail badly if it even makes it out the door.  

I bought the game and wanted it to be good.  But I'm lvl 23 now and kinda discouraged with all the jerking around on powers and the inability to respec.  Not to mention I bought it through digital download from gamestop and so far they haven't been able to get me the final codes for the game.  They were able to charge my CC but I'm finding the whole experience upsetting.   It is all putting me in the frame to say to hell with it and have my CC company refuse the charges.

Well looks like Champions online has peaked at 10th spot for MMOs and 29th spot for overall.  Unfortunately it looks like CO is officially a flop.

With these numbers I'm kinda skeptical that STO will ever be released or if it is it will be a rush job and totally crap.  I'll frankly be surprised if cryptic is still in business a year from now.

Originally posted by ethion

Well looks like Champions online has peaked at 10th spot for MMOs and 29th spot for overall.  Unfortunately it looks like CO is officially a flop.

With these numbers I'm kinda skeptical that STO will ever be released or if it is it will be a rush job and totally crap.  I'll frankly be surprised if cryptic is still in business a year from now.

Luckily reality doesn't take its cues from ill informed doomsayers. Officially a flop? Your (key word is credible) credible evidence?

The only players who use xfire are the console gamers.  Real gamers don't use it.  So why pick numbers from a site that everyone knows is meaningless?

You don't have to find xfire credible.  Just ignore it. 

I find it the best tool that provides statistics on PC games that we have access too.

Based on what I'm seeing CO isn't doing very well out the gate.   Based on my experience with the game and the discussions on the forums I'm expecting major game play changes coming soon.  This is gonna likely drive people away and numbers are gonna drop substantially.  We will see by watching xfire if that happens.

I'm expecting that soon cryptic will begin hiding the numbers of people logged into the game and replacing the player count in each instance with generic terms like full, high, medium, low or maybe making it invisible altogether....  However right now it is possible to count how many people are actually playing and from that calculate likely sub numbers.

I'll guess they have around 75-150k subs right now.

I just did a rough  count to see how many people are playing.  I estimate around 8-9K not counting Monster Island or Lemura zones.  I wouldn't expect that either of those zones would be as populated as canada or desert but even assuming they are that brings the numbers to maybe 12-13k.  Subs are maybe 8-10 per player?  So right now it looks like CO probably has around 100k-130k subs? 

Originally posted by ethion

I just did a rough  count to see how many people are playing.  I estimate around 8-9K not counting Monster Island or Lemura zones.  I wouldn't expect that either of those zones would be as populated as canada or desert but even assuming they are that brings the numbers to maybe 12-13k.  Subs are maybe 8-10 per player?  So right now it looks like CO probably has around 100k-130k subs? 

 

As a general rule 10x concurrent users is good for subs.  But obviously that is super super rough estimate.

Originally posted by banthis

No offense or anything but Xfire is and never has been a varifable way to measure the size of the community.  Myself and all of my friends we've never once used it and I admit other than some epeeners that I've known I rarely meet anyone that uses it.  Thats not to say it doesn't give you some sort of estimated idea but it really seems to only apply semi accurately to non niche games.

Most gamers use X-fire....how is it not representative???

Who's "most?" Most everyone I know that games and my guildmates don't use Xfire.

Originally posted by grndzro

Most gamers use X-fire....how is it not representative???

Not even close to being 'most'. If you want a fairly accurate estimate of people playing Champions Online all you have to do is change channels for whatever zone you're in. You can see how many channel of that zone are available and how many people are currently playing in those channels. The Xfire figure of about 5,000 hours played in a week for CO doesn't even come close to any estimate you want to make about play time. It's probably closer to 30,000 man-hours a day right now. And I think that 30,000 man-hours a day is a very conservative estimate right now.

*COUCH* Champions Online 5871 "#33" Cryptic Studios Atari *COUGH* thats was 5mins go. Well the only thing i liked about the game was customazation. Other than that the games a flop, good luck with all the people that are gunna sub for this game ;0

This is hillarious....no where did I say most gamers have x-fire on all the time. But almost everyone has made a X-fire account at some time, and used it.

Most people use it occationally.

When did it become popular to hate x-fire? I'v never had a problem with it. it just works.

Originally posted by grndzro

This is hillarious....no where did I say most gamers have x-fire on all the time. But almost everyone has made a X-fire account at some time, and used it.

Most people use it occationally.

When did it become popular to hate x-fire? I'v never had a problem with it. it just works.

I have never used X-fire. I will never use X-fire. I personally do not know anyone in real life that uses X-fire. I don't hate it. I see no functional use for it.

Originally posted by grunty

Originally posted by grndzro

This is hillarious....no where did I say most gamers have x-fire on all the time. But almost everyone has made a X-fire account at some time, and used it.

Most people use it occationally.

When did it become popular to hate x-fire? I'v never had a problem with it. it just works.

 

I have never used X-fire. I will never use X-fire. I personally do not know anyone in real life that uses X-fire. I don't hate it. I see no functional use for it.

I'm sure most gamers aren't 54 years old either.

Originally posted by grndzro

Originally posted by grunty

Originally posted by grndzro

This is hillarious....no where did I say most gamers have x-fire on all the time. But almost everyone has made a X-fire account at some time, and used it.

Most people use it occationally.

When did it become popular to hate x-fire? I'v never had a problem with it. it just works.

 

I have never used X-fire. I will never use X-fire. I personally do not know anyone in real life that uses X-fire. I don't hate it. I see no functional use for it.

 

I'm sure most gamers aren't 54 years old either.

Who do you think started programing games?

yaya, thanks for programming Snafu, I liked it a bunch.

Point was you are not in the target audience for xfire. I use it rarely.

It dosen't change that it is a good demographic for a game's popularity.

I'd go as far as saying that only mbe 20% of people that have xfire let it run in the tray all the time. but that 20% is probably spread pretty closely to a game's popularity barring X-fire incompatibility or in game functionality.

Ha most gamers don't use xfire :P  But some gamers do use xfire.  In the population of MMO gamers maybe 1 in 1000 use it or maybe less.  So xfire numbers aren't anywhere near definitive.  The smaller the sample the more erroneous the results are.  That said it is a relatively good sampling system that does publically report statistics.  It is likely pretty good for english speaking populations and probably less good for foreign language populations, simply due to it being english oriented site.  Not that people in other countries won't use it just that in the US it might be 1 in 1000 where in asia it might be 1 in 5000...

So comparing a game that is predominently asian to a game that is predominantly american will likely give a much larger relative ratio.  So if you compared those two games the asian game might appear to have less activity then the american game where that would be untrue and the numbers skewed by demegraphics.  But that aside the relative numbers for a game with a good population will be pretty good for tracking when a game peaks and when it starts to loose subs and if you know how many subs it had at peak the xfire ratio likely predicts pretty accurately the game population at any point.

Xfire is around 200.000 players on line 24/7 these days. That means in MMO terms a random changing sample of around 1M to 1.2 M players 24/24 hours.

Pure western players (as some games which do well in eastern markets don't show up at all in significant numbers).

As it is a constant sampling 24/24 7/7 it is extremely good to view trends - not only within a game but also between games. It can be compared with the TV broadcast sampling methods. As it only measure PC gamers ... gaming (it's not a social study).

2 constraints: games under 1000 Xfire players have less accuracy and watch out for xfire promoted games with prices on their websites.

But overall - certainly with the extreme 24/7 timing - it shows almost all you need to know how a game is doing.

One last remark: do only look at players (not at timed played) of a game.

--------

As a reference a safe bet to calculate the actual players of a game it is good to set out a reference. I use a 3 way point reference (and they all check out independant within a 2% bracket): WOW = 5.5 M, EVE = 0.3M, Lotro = 0.18M

With this you can see that CO for the moment has around 125K players at launch.

So the next 4 weeks will decide how much players will play this game in the long run as around 30% is the normal retention rate for a game past 2 months launch.

So CO will probably level out at around 60K-80K subs past its launch period.

Originally posted by Zorndorf

Xfire is around 200.000 players on line 24/7 these days. That means in MMO terms a random changing sample of around 1M to 1.2 M players 24/24 hours.

Pure western players (as some games which do well in eastern markets don't show up at all in significant numbers).

As it is a constant sampling 24/24 7/7 it is extremely good to view trends - not only within a game but also between games. It can be compared with the TV broadcast sampling methods. As it only measure PC gamers ... gaming (it's not a social study).

2 constraints: games under 1000 Xfire players have less accuracy and watch out for xfire promoted games with prices on their websites.

But overall - certainly with the extreme 24/7 timing - it shows almost all you need to know how a game is doing.

One last remark: do only look at players (not at timed played) of a game.

--------

As a reference a safe bet to calculate the actual players of a game it is good to set out a reference. I use a 3 way point reference (and they all check out independant within a 2% bracket): WOW = 5.5 M, EVE = 0.3M, Lotro = 0.18M

With this you can see that CO for the moment has around 125K players at launch.

So the next 4 weeks will decide how much players will play this game in the long run as around 30% is the normal retention rate for a game past 2 months launch.

So CO will probably level out at around 60K-80K subs past its launch period.

 

Well said and I agree with what you say.   I put the game at around 100-125k based on the number of players I counted online and figuring 8-10x subs vs people online.   Nice to see how well xfire is matching up.

There is one point though I'll add.  Eve and AoC numbers couple both be somewhat artificially high.  Both of those games around 6-12 months ago ran programs to encourage people to run xfire.  I guess they wanted to boost up their xfire numbers.  Probably doesn't matter now but for awhile their xfire numbers jumped way up.

Looks like the Aion open beta blew past CO and even LoTR dropping in at #21 overall or 7th on the MMO list.  Also yesterdays numbers will be somewhat off because xfire was down for several hours.

Originally posted by ethion

Looks like the Aion open beta blew past CO and even LoTR dropping in at #21 overall or 7th on the MMO list.  Also yesterdays numbers will be somewhat off because xfire was down for several hours.

 

Which means what?  WAR still had better numbers when it came out and is a better game then Aion.

The Xfire numbers for CO are pathetic, they aren't even close to reaching WoW's numbers.  The game is a failure.

Originally posted by Manchine

Originally posted by ethion

Looks like the Aion open beta blew past CO and even LoTR dropping in at #21 overall or 7th on the MMO list.  Also yesterdays numbers will be somewhat off because xfire was down for several hours.

 

 

Which means what?  WAR still had better numbers when it came out and is a better game then Aion.

No, technically AION is a better product, maybe you prefer Warhammer, but AION is superior in every technicall aspect.

AION has more content, is more polished, more sophisticated (better animations, textures etc) more balanced, better audio quality, a functional end game and has better performance.

I am under the impression CO will face some hard moments especially after the release of DCU.

Originally posted by Dreizack

The Xfire numbers for CO are pathetic, they aren't even close to reaching WoW's numbers.  The game is a failure.

Most of people who play CO don't have xfire, i am the only in SG of 30 people who has it trying to get them to use. Where as in WoW it is different story. Look at city of heroes it is down at 137 even though it has active subs base of 100k+.

As for Aion it is going to come down to the community and how NCsoft manages the game, their track record is mixed in NA/Europe for their products (Lineage, TR etc btw CoH till 2008 and GW were only published by NCSoft). Hopefully they learned from their mistakes.

Originally posted by Ozmodan

The only players who use xfire are the console gamers.  Real gamers don't use it.  So why pick numbers from a site that everyone knows is meaningless?

Sorry ace, Im a "real" gamer and I have used it for 5 years.

Xfire cant be used to give a total population, but it is a nice population of people to gauge trends. In statistics, you ask a group of people questions, and then use that group of people to get an idea about what the whole is doing.

Xfire is kind of like the Gallop of MMO's. It wont give you the entire picture perfectly but it is fairly accurate in showing games that are increasing vs games that are on decline.