Jason: There are alot of bad posts from both sides of the fence in this thread. However, what Ilgauskas is refering to is the following. Blizzard reports number of accounts - that is the number that is floating around. What they do not report is:

1) How many 15 EUR/USD per month (recurring) accounts do they actually have (since we know for a fact that the majority of WoW accounts today pay way less than that in Southeast Asia)?

2) How many accounts are on the same person - that is how much has the RAF program bolstered number of accounts (we know that this number is not insignificant)?

3) What is their estimate of gold farmer population (also a % shoe that is not insignificant)? I am certain that they have a pretty solid view on this as well.

Etc.

What this means is that numbers do not mean much until we have more data. This means that when Zorn states that X million people is playing WoW each month, all we know is that this is not true.

Do not get me wrong though. WoW is the most succesfull game in Revenue per month out there. That we can be certain about. There are alot of question marks around just how big it is though.

Originally posted by Sikhander

  Jason: There are alot of bad posts from both sides of the fence in this thread. However, what Ilgauskas is refering to is the following. Blizzard reports number of accounts - that is the number that is floating around. What they do not report is:

1) How many 15 EUR/USD per month (recurring) accounts do they actually have (since we know for a fact that the majority of WoW accounts today pay way less than that in Southeast Asia)?

2) How many accounts are on the same person - that is how much has the RAF program bolstered number of accounts (we know that this number is not insignificant)?

3) What is their estimate of gold farmer population (also a % shoe that is not insignificant)? I am certain that they have a pretty solid view on this as well.

Etc.

What this means is that numbers do not mean much until we have more data. This means that when Zorn states that X million people is playing WoW each month, all we know is that this is not true.

Do not get me wrong though. WoW is the most succesfull game in Revenue per month out there. That we can be certain about. There are alot of question marks around just how big it is though.

1) Who cares how much someone pays to play wow in one country versus another.  It does not make them any less of an active paying subscriber to the game than the next person. 

2) I would assume that wow has as many or even less people with multiple accounts than any typical mmo.  Since the gameplay does not require "2 boxing" to get most of the content done, there is less reason to have 2 accounts than some other games.  There is no reason to assume more people on average have multiple accounts than most mmos. 

3) Every game has gold farmers if it has a decent population and a functional economy.  Why would it be any larger than any other mmo percentage wise?  If what souldrainer claims was even close to the truth, you could not move anywhere on a wow server without being outnumbered by gold farmers.  Sure they are there and yes there are counted in the subscription numbers if they are paying, why wouldn't they be? 

I think it is safe to say that yes, millions and millions of people play wow.  It may not be 11.5 million unique players and no one means to infer that it is.  People talk about subscription numbers in all games with those basic ideas as built in.  When mythic claimed 300k subscribers everyone read that with the understanding that it includes people with multiple accounts being counted each as a subscriber, any gold farmers paying a fee as a subscriber, people who pay in different currencies each as a full subscriber, etc. 

The total subscription numbers are to be read with all of that taken into account. 

Daffid: It actually does matter how much people pay per year for a game when making comparisons. If it is free/very cheap to get an account and the actual gaming cost you small amounts per time unit/item the universe of comparison becomes very large. And this is exactly the business model that WoW uses in China. This business model has more in common with Sims and multiple asia-only MMOs, than western style MMOs (which almost all have monthly subscription numbers). If someone states that WoW is the largest MMO to date and only include western style/monthly subscription based business models in that comparison that very person is comparing apples to oranges. 

The conclusion will still be that WoW is hugely successful so from that point of view this discussion is very academic but somewhere the 100+ million Runescape accounts since its release (not current players) should as an example be included if full credit is given to southeast asian accounts for WoW.

WoW China is "cheap" in our eyes. For the A) pay for time and B) Their money is worth a hell of a lot more to them than the same amount would to us.

I'm sure you're well aware how much asian people tend to play their MMO's, considering that and the amount they pay for their MMO's I believe a lot of them actually pay more than us relative to their income than many of us do (bar governmental restrictions I guess, not too uptodate on that),

I do agree there's a difference between sub models though. Still even just counting the EU/US WoW outclasses all the Western P2P MMO's on that field.

 Also, there's still a difference between "Number of accounts"(Runescape) and "Number of accounts that paid sub last month" (WoW). (Not sure on the runescape model but first thing I saw on the site was free users click here to play :)

I thought I did say paying mmos in an effort to exclude free to play games.  Maybe I didn't and apologies if that is the case, because free vs pay2play is hard to make a comparison.  There is no barrier to entry for a free to play game for example and accounts created doesn't mean active accounts let alone paying accounts, but I think that is what you were also saying to which I agree. 

However, I don't think it matters how much asian players pay.  Sure western mmos most likely make more revenue person for person than they do in the eastern market, but wow dominates in the east and the west.  The price to play wow is on an even playing field with most mmos in the west and I can only assume (as you have also stated) that wow is competitively priced in the eastern market as well and is enjoying the same type of dominance.  When all is said and done, those asians as still paying subscribers and I bet you any western developer would kill to have wows revenue from just their eastern market alone. 

How many western games have tried to release in the eastern market and bombed or close down the servers.  The same question for eastern games trying to gain a foothold in the western market.

Just to be exakt here: The9 (the Company that runs WoW in China) is a public Company. Their 2008 financial analyst call stated that they had 9.1 million active WoW players (active defined as someone that had payed money to play WoW in the last 3 months) and if you deduce the revenues they have from other games WoW roughly gives 200 MUSD (probably too high but lets use the number anyway).

This means two things:

- What on earth has happened to WoW in the EU/US if China has 9.1 million active WoW accounts out of 11+ in total? I do not really get this part. Maybe there are 'only' 2-3 million users left in the west (would align with initial WotLK sales of 2.8 million copies however)?

- The average subscriber in China paid ~10 USD (including transfer, name change etc payments) for the year of 2008 as compared to a western subscriber that payed 180+USD (does not include transfer, name change etc payments). This means that there is a factor 15-20 in difference in 'value' per subscriber for a Company between China and a Western market. If Blizzard in fact has lost roughly a million subscribers in the EU/US as the numbers actually seem to indicate (surprises me a bit - more than I would have expected) that represents way more money lost than the gain in China.

Would be interesting to get more information about this since it surprises me no one else has done this math (The9 released their information 2 months ago so pretty recent).

Originally posted by Souldrainer

... 

How can you do the math and yet miss my point?  Maybe you were so bent on trying to prove me wrong that you lost sight of the big picture.  I keep forgetting that message boards are a world where you have to put 2+2 together for people, because if you post 50%, 75%, or 99% of your idea, they're going to dismiss it as a partial thought and leave it where it sits. 

  Here is some more math for you:  4.5/11.5 *100 = 39%.  Why is only 39% of WOW's player base even from America (39% or LESS, given the multiboxing trend and given that some users had their accounts banned and bought new copies of the game)?  I know you're going to make something up and say that "world wide this" and "world wide that", but the bottom line is that while many American gamers have WOW accounts, the American audience at large is unimpressed.  Other countries aside, if you're an American game company, (and your game is sold in America), 4.5 million accounts in a 4.5 year span is *garbage* compared to what you'd sell if the customers were truly impressed.

In terms of MMOs, WOW has sold huge numbers, but let's take a broader view.  Diablo 2 sold 4 million + copies wordlwide, but Diablo 2 did not have as many gold farmer and multiboxer accounts, and Blizzard was not very experienced in their overseas marketing back then.  Super Mario Bros. 3 sold more than 18 million copies worldwide and it was pick-up-and-play with no online features at all.  That was also before video games started making more money than box office movies.  Yes, SMB3 sold almost twice as many copies of WOW, and did so in a time when video games were much less popular than they are right now.

When you look at the big picture, WOW is successful, but it's not that big in terms of the global video games market, and there are certainly a ton of gamers who remain unswayed by the flashy numbers.  Furthermore, saying "WOW sells" is not an excuse for shoddy gameplay and a complete neglect for the PVP audience.  If anything, WOW should have the BEST PVP.  Hell, they've made $$$BILLIONS$$$ on the game, and yet their PVP does not play like a billion dollars, or a million dollars.  WOW PVP plays like a 50 cent hoe.

So there are 4.5 million active sub in N America, in one country.  Now there are 5.5million sub in Asia which is a lot of countries combined.  So there are 4.5m in N America comparing to how much population?   Now there are 5.5m in Asia comparing to how much population?  How can you say WoW is less popular in US or that Americans are umimpressed?

39% of WoW sub base come from 1 country.  61% from all other countries over the world.  Do American account for 39% of the world population?  More like 3.9%  That means 10 time more WoW gamers per population in America than the rest of the world, would that revise your point of view?

WoW has 12 million account currently being paid for and presumable active.  I believe they sell far more copies of that, as many are inactive, banned or what not.  Super Mario sold 18 million copies, but do you believe that after 4 years there are still 12 million guys playing Super Mario Bro?

How do you conclude that WoW is not big?  Compared to what?  Drugs?  WoW is bringing in a huge monthly revenue, WoW is generating more and more spin offs.  Heck there are keyboards, t-shirt and such targetted at WoWers.  Shoddy gameplay, neglected PVP audience, do you have any proof?  50 cent hoe?  Any proof?

Edit notes: 4.5m in N America and so on are his figures.  he is wrong both in the figures and the way to present the figures.  I am only showing his errors, not endorsing his figures in the first place

I love his flawed math and dumb statements. 4.5 million to the US? It's 4.5 Million to the EU/US. 

Also, the game is the most popular of any other P2P MMO's in the US. It's not a comparison to other genres (most of which aren't P2P), it's a comparison to the rest of the MMO market, otherwise you're just comparing apples and oranges.

 The game outsold every MMO on the market X-fold, pulled in countless of US people to pay for the game *monthly* and yet somehow he seems to claim it's "garbage" to the US, lol.

I wouldn't be surprised if he actually is dumb enough to mention some other MMO that is better when with that thinking every MMO is utter garbage and all the others even more so than WoW. Not that logic would suit him fron the sound of it ;)

Just a wow-hater making stuff up to justify his hate, nothing else :)

What is the truth behind all of these posts? The truth is we all really love World of Warcraft. That is why so many people here and in every other video game come together to talk about it. The amount of energy and enthusiasm people take to trashing a game reveals how much they love it, or wish their game was as popular. You wish your game was as popular so that your skill in the game actually meant something to a mass of people (besides the 100 people or less playing on your crappy game).

Originally posted by Sikhander

Just to be exakt here: The9 (the Company that runs WoW in China) is a public Company. Their 2008 financial analyst call stated that they had 9.1 million active WoW players (active defined as someone that had payed money to play WoW in the last 3 months) and if you deduce the revenues they have from other games WoW roughly gives 200 MUSD (probably too high but lets use the number anyway).

This means two things:

- What on earth has happened to WoW in the EU/US if China has 9.1 million active WoW accounts out of 11+ in total? I do not really get this part. Maybe there are 'only' 2-3 million users left in the west (would align with initial WotLK sales of 2.8 million copies however)?

- The average subscriber in China paid ~10 USD (including transfer, name change etc payments) for the year of 2008 as compared to a western subscriber that payed 180+USD (does not include transfer, name change etc payments). This means that there is a factor 15-20 in difference in 'value' per subscriber for a Company between China and a Western market. If Blizzard in fact has lost roughly a million subscribers in the EU/US as the numbers actually seem to indicate (surprises me a bit - more than I would have expected) that represents way more money lost than the gain in China.

Would be interesting to get more information about this since it surprises me no one else has done this math (The9 released their information 2 months ago so pretty recent).

 

Revenue per account as paid by time card =/= revenue per account as paid by month.  In China, many players play from internet cafes.  They paid by the hour and play by the hour.  Its a different business model.  They play only when they got down to the cafe, so they play less and paid less.
 

I do not know how Blizz's 12m active subs matches the 9.1m subs from The9.  Until we got full definition of how these 2 companies defines and tallies their figures its a wild guess.

Blizz do not earn money directly from the sub base in China, its like a shared business.  The same in Taiwan.  From what I know, the Taiwanese paid a lumpsum to Blizz and only a small share per sub to Blizz.  So for Blizz, its more to their interest selling the right to the game to another company in that country.  Sub base in those countries brought proportionally less revenue to Blizz.  Once again the contract to Taiwan differs from that to Russia or Korea or China.  No generalisation there.

I do not think Blizz is seriously losing clients.  They are opening up more and more servers, and yes the servers are never ghost towns.  Less people log on now than the days when Wotlk first launch, not surprisingly.  But with every major patch these people comes back, and the queues re-appear.  With pathc 3.1 coming, I bet it will be 2 hour queue time again, and new servers.  How many games can maintain that kind of real interest after 4 years?  None.

Interesting discussion you have above, but we need far more information to draw hard conclusions.  One thing I learn after lots of painful experience.  Do not trust company reports or statistics from China.  They sometimes means totally different things than common sense suggests.  And the Chinese do not provide details on what their statistics actually mean.

---

Originally posted by Sikhander
  Jason: There are alot of bad posts from both sides of the fence in this thread. However, what Ilgauskas is refering to is the following. Blizzard reports number of accounts - that is the number that is floating around. What they do not report is:
1) How many 15 EUR/USD per month (recurring) accounts do they actually have (since we know for a fact that the majority of WoW accounts today pay way less than that in Southeast Asia)?
2) How many accounts are on the same person - that is how much has the RAF program bolstered number of accounts (we know that this number is not insignificant)?
3) What is their estimate of gold farmer population (also a % shoe that is not insignificant)? I am certain that they have a pretty solid view on this as well.
Etc.
What this means is that numbers do not mean much until we have more data. This means that when Zorn states that X million people is playing WoW each month, all we know is that this is not true.
Do not get me wrong though. WoW is the most succesfull game in Revenue per month out there. That we can be certain about. There are alot of question marks around just how big it is though.

---

To be fair, which you are not being at all with the above statements, these comments could apply to any game across the board and Blizzard more than any other company are very open about the figures they give out.

They can do no more than look at the number of accounts that have been payed for in any given month, which is the definition of an 'active' account by any conpany, not just Blizzard. As for your points directly;

1 - Blizzard have never defined an 'active' account by the amount that someone pays for it, just that they have paid to activate within that month. Someone may pay their $15 and only log on for a couple of hours that month, the account is 'active' non the less whether they are or not. On the other hand, someone in china may play for 40 hours that month, ok they may have paid less that the less active player but in relative terms to income and average prices it may be a lot more to them.

2 - How many other games have people with multiple accounts and report them as seperate, i am guessing all of them as there is no way of knowing for sure if there is one or many playing that account. I pay for two accounts personally, but my sons play the second one, so you also have to ask how many single accounts are being played by multiple people, so the specualtion can swing both ways??? Again, it is all speculation and all Blizzard can do is report how many actual active accounts there are rather than speculate on the actual amount of players.

3 - Gold farmers do exists, but in nowhere near the numbers that some would have us believe. If you actually play the game then you will have seen the amount of gold adverts dropping off sharply over the last couple of years as Blizzard have made it harder and harder to trade and actually farm in the first place and at the same time made it easier for people to aquire their own gold while playing. One of the most annoying things is people harping on about chinese gold farmers being everywhere on asian, US & EU servers, which is not only offensive but innacurate in the extreme. If those people understood how much the Chinese internet structure is restricted and censored in their own country and the HUGE personal penalties that someone there would face for breaching those boundries it would shed a little more light on this silly idea. As for gold farmers in general, just go back to my silly figures to understand how much they would have to make if they were in such huge numbers.

Can i say absolutely that Blizzards figures on the amount of active accounts are 100.00% accurate, well of course i can't, i don't work for blizzard and don't do their accounts. I can say that i believe they are the most accurate figures out there for any game that does actually release figures (would be nice to see some from others too) and i believe that they get the stick they do because they are so up front rather than hiding behind excuses for not releasing figures.

Why always talk about WoW? Just let the game be.

You dont like it? Dont play it simple as, you grow up you move on to try different things.  Theres no point  bashing the game over and over its just personal opinion at the end of the day.

WoW might have started out good when it was trying to be EQ but more accesible, but now its just trying to appeal to the masses and the kids to make it easy. This is just how marketing works in the 21st century at the end of the day they dont give a rats ass about you enjoying the game aslong as they get paid.

I think its a stupid way of marketing but whatever. I would say that as a customer but i reckon if Myself or you for example worked for them we would think the same way. We just wanna get paid so we do what we are told no matter how right or wrong it is.

I dont play WoW btw ive played the trial and didnt like it.

WoW sucks, so what? Leave it to rot.

why do you care so hard about WoW ?

Its not your company and not your money.

its just a game ....

i would say wow is at one of its weak periods at the moment . since the release of the wrath of the lich king the endgame has been pretty dull . battlegrounds are usually dead . you can still get into them but its rare to see an even match . the endgame instances seam to be unispired and tired . most people i know have pretty much given up there main characters in favour of leveling alts in the hope that the next patch will sort things out . i ve basically put the game on hiatus for the next three months while i play age of conan which i m finding to be a lot better than i thought it would be . after that i take another look at wow for a month but personally i think it ll be the end of this year before wow is fixed enough to be worth playing again . shame really the leveling from 70 - 80 in the lich king was quite a lot of fun . it just once you hit 80 the game nose dives .

Zorn - you cannot state that my posts is not based on facts and then basically come with no facts at all yourself.

The data point you mention is the very solid Nielsen Study that shows ~1,8 million WoW players existed in NA as of end of 2008 (1.4 million in September last year). Now, in March 2007 Blizzard stated that NA WoW subs exceeded 2 million (and 1.5+ in Europe at the same point in time). Since Canda adds another 10% it means that the Nielsen study shows a WoW population in NA that was smaller throughout 2008 than 2 million with quite some margin.This is actually in line with the data that The9 came out with - basically that WoW actually has declined some in the last 2 years in the western world (seems to have peaked early 2007 after the TBC release).

So our sources and data sets actually are aligned with the margin or error one can expect when comparing notes.

Now - this does not make WoW a worse or a better game - it is still in my mind the best game in the last 10 years. But it is coming to age it seems.

And your pot shot at me for commenting on the fact that Blizzard has hit an all time low in creating new content for the raiders is something I do not understand. In my analysis I included Ulduar AND one more 'Ulduar' in 2009 and 2008+2009 will still turn out as the worst years for raiders in WoW history (content wise).

Originally posted by Sikhander

Zorn - you cannot state that my posts is not based on facts and then basically come with no facts at all yourself.

The data point you mention is the very solid Nielsen Study that shows ~1,8 million WoW players existed in NA as of end of 2008 (1.4 million in September last year). Now, in March 2007 Blizzard stated that NA WoW subs exceeded 2 million (and 1.5+ in Europe at the same point in time). Since Canda adds another 10% it means that the Nielsen study shows a WoW population in NA that was smaller throughout 2008 than 2 million with quite some margin.This is actually in line with the data that The9 came out with - basically that WoW actually has declined some in the last 2 years in the western world (seems to have peaked early 2007 after the TBC release).

So our sources and data sets actually are aligned with the margin or error one can expect when comparing notes.

Now - this does not make WoW a worse or a better game - it is still in my mind the best game in the last 10 years. But it is coming to age it seems.

And your pot shot at me for commenting on the fact that Blizzard has hit an all time low in creating new content for the raiders is something I do not understand. In my analysis I included Ulduar AND one more 'Ulduar' in 2009 and 2008+2009 will still turn out as the worst years for raiders in WoW history (content wise).

Actually the Neilsen study did not show number of accounts active for wow in north america.  It showed number of unique players that connected to wow in north america last december. According to the article it is done by monitoring what programs are launched on the monitored computer, so it would not count anyone with multiple accounts and I assume multiple people sharing the same computer (unless maybe they logged into different computer accounts?).  You are comparing two different numbers to get an unrelated conclusion.

As for the9 reporting 9.1 million accounts, things run differently in China.  Mind you I am no expert on the workings of the interwebz over there, but it is my understanding that every cafe account is only active for a certain time period.  At the end of that time period the player gets a new account.  I really don't understand it more beyond that, but that is how some mmo companies make claims of 20+ million accounts to their games, but only have like 2 game servers. 

9.1 spread over 3 months would be roughtly 3 million users in china alone which seems about right.  That leaves about 2.5 million spread over the rest of asia and the rest of the world combined.  I don't think blizzard has detailed the breakdowns since they announced 10 million subs, so no idea where the last 1.5-2 million spread over.

...and 3.1 comes out today. If you don't like it don't play it, it's as easy as that.

Sigh...Zorn - I do not know if I should call you Bagdad Bob or Pravda :p

I'll stop the discussion with you since data is like water a goose when it comes to you, but please read posts before responding. I also wrote that the Nielsen study was a US study and hence increased the numbers with 10% to mainly also include Canada.

And unless you a completely uninterested in discussions there is something to be found between the March 2007 release that WoW had 3.5+ million subs in the western world, that WotLK around release sold roughly 3 million copies (unclear what is end-user sales and what is Vivendi to retail sales), that Blizzard has stated that WoW in total has 11+ subs and that The9 has stated that they have 9.1 million subscribers in China.

And once again - I do play the game. I emptied the game content way faster than I expected in WotLK which resulted in me scratching my head (I found it way to easy as I have expressed in other threads). I do not have the time to raid as I used to a few years back so 3.1 brings very little for me. Ergo: I play but I level an alt. Right now I play some not because WoW is giving me a crazy level of satisfaction but because the competition is not interesting enough.

And when it comes to you vs me in terms of opinion I can just tell that on my server and the forums I regularly visit the lack of content for people that actively play the game was a problem from 2 months after the release of WotLK. It was just tuned a bit wrong.

Originally posted by Sikhander

Sigh...Zorn - I do not know if I should call you Bagdad Bob or Pravda :p

I'll stop the discussion with you since data is like water a goose when it comes to you, but please read posts before responding. I also wrote that the Nielsen study was a US study and hence increased the numbers with 10% to mainly also include Canada.

And unless you a completely uninterested in discussions there is something to be found between the March 2007 release that WoW had 3.5+ million subs in the western world, that WotLK around release sold roughly 3 million copies (unclear what is end-user sales and what is Vivendi to retail sales), that Blizzard has stated that WoW in total has 11+ subs and that The9 has stated that they have 9.1 million subscribers in China.

And once again - I do play the game. I emptied the game content way faster than I expected in WotLK which resulted in me scratching my head (I found it way to easy as I have expressed in other threads). I do not have the time to raid as I used to a few years back so 3.1 brings very little for me. Ergo: I play but I level an alt. Right now I play some not because WoW is giving me a crazy level of satisfaction but because the competition is not interesting enough.

And when it comes to you vs me in terms of opinion I can just tell that on my server and the forums I regularly visit the lack of content for people that actively play the game was a problem from 2 months after the release of WotLK. It was just tuned a bit wrong.

Wow, you try really hard to bash a game. What's sad is I think you failed horribly, yet you keep going at it like a McDonalds hamburger. Just accept it, World Of Warcraft has the largest population in U.S. and the reason for this is because it is the only good and polished MMORPG out. What you're playing (if you do play) is second rate, and will always be second rate. So, in other words.. get a hobby?