Originally posted by Xiaoki

 

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Originally posted by green13
If Free Realms was half as successful as they make it out to be, I don't think SOE would have recently layed off 5% of its staff.

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They layed off 41 employees which was 5% of their staff.

 

That means they had over 800 employees.

Im guessing the lay offs had absolutely nothing to do with Free Realms and everything to do with that being WAAAAAY too many employees.

Also, none of you know how successful Free Realms is.
That is a fact.
All you have is speculation based on blind SOE hate.

And you have no idea how many employees is WAAAAAYYY too many, and that is a retarded comment to make. They can have as many employees as they can support. Obviously they could support 800 before, and now they can't.

And you are right, none of us know how successful Free Realms is, because the announcements of "registered users" tells us absolutely nothing about how successful it is. That announcement is just PR fluff presented in a way to make them look good to someone that doesn't look at the fine details. But, putting two and two together, if SOE suddenly had a massively succesful MMO on their hands, they probably wouldn't have had to dump 41 people.

Since they have found major success with this model I would not be suprised if they use the same model for The Agency and DC Universe.

There are almost five million registrants to Free Realms.

Those that were able to successfully download the client, log in, and play are less than 5 million.

Of that number, those that play longer than one or more days is less than that.

Of that number, those that actually subscribe for the $5 are less.

Of that number, those that buy extra stuff from the Smed Shop are less than that.

So ultimately, you have 5 million registrants.  But how many of those 5 million are playing today?  How many of those that are playing today are paying today?  And of those that are paying today, how many are paying $15 a month or more?

These are unanswered questions, but questions that need to be answered before people like Min Kim say that micro is the wave of the future outside of Asia.  I mean, this is a genre where the test of a good game is measured in terms of several years of staying power.  Maybe if Smed comes back in five years and says "we have 500 times more features than when we launched, two graphics updates, doubled our servers, and host 10 million users spending on average $20 a month," then I'll be convinced that this model is going somewhere.

But you see, that won't happen.  It won't, because when the live team on this gets some bright idea to f*** up the game mechanics (and they will, because no SoE game lasts two years before the devs f*** it up), the game will be toast.

It's too new to tell if this thing is for real.  About the only thing we know for sure is that the most popular MMO worldwide is a subscription-based game, and is more than two times as popular as the closest micropay alternative.

Originally posted by Xiaoki

 

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Originally posted by green13
If Free Realms was half as successful as they make it out to be, I don't think SOE would have recently layed off 5% of its staff.

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They layed off 41 employees which was 5% of their staff.

 

That means they had over 800 employees.

Im guessing the lay offs had absolutely nothing to do with Free Realms and everything to do with that being WAAAAAY too many employees.

Also, none of you know how successful Free Realms is.
That is a fact.
All you have is speculation based on blind SOE hate.

This is how a business operates.

You employ as many people as you think you need. SOE's number of employees prior to the lay-off would have been based on projected earnings from all of their products, including Free Realms.

Lay-offs mean that projected earnings haven't met expectations.

I hate that game. SOE is trash.

Hell No!

Wow, Smed is a bad enough businessman to actually credit such a system of anything? Just goes to show he's still trying to justify the SOE cash shop and TCG for SWG.

What critera do they judge a 'user' on? Are these accounts that have given money to SOE, or just accounts that have been created? Is this judged on the last time an account was logged into?

RMT games always boast huge 'user' numbers because the critera by which they can determine that is vague at best. Create an account and then about an hour or less in? Congrats! You're a reportable user statistic!

Even putting that aside it couldn't possibly be the hard work the devs put into the game. It couldn't possibly be the child-appealing graphics that makes parents perfectly willing to sign up all their kids and maybe even themselves. No, no, it's -MAINLY- the fact that it uses RMT. Yep, that's the main reason why there could possibly be so many "users". What a freaking shmuck.

Seriously, if I were one of the devs behind FR I would be pissed off at a statement like this. Because there are PLENTY of examples to prove that RMT does not play a major part in garnering large "user" numbers. It's a factor, sure, but not a leading one. You're offering a free client, free account creation and free access, of course people are going to pop their heads in out of boredom merely because it won't cost them anything.

Apply some very vague criteria on how to judge a 'user' and you can create very magical numbers. So tired of Smed and $OE. This is only going to make things worse.

PS: Here's a MAJOR tip to western MMO companies about. You see how pay to play (subscription) MMO's are run in Asia? No retail cost and you only pay for time you're actually playing. It's like a pre-paid phone, only your hours always roll over from month to month. If you play about 10 hours or more a day you start to spend more money than you would on a subscription, but I know not many people do that.

What would this do? It would leave a very friendly door open to anyone who happens to hear about your game. You give every account made some hours of free play time so no one ever has to ask if there's a free trial. There's no a box price, so that never crosses people's minds. People just download, create an account, spend five bucks for some more hours than the freebies and give the game a go. If your game is good enough then people will be willing to shell out more money to keep playing. Your work will have to sustain itself on it's merits.

Or are you too afraid?

The only things these numbers prove is interest. A lot of people are interested. Interest =/= profit.

How many are playing? How many are paying? THOSE numbers are what count.

This game doesn't have nearly 5 million accounts because it has microtransactions... it has nearly 5 million accounts because it's free and anyone can log in and try it out. The microtransactions are there for those who want to take the game to the next step.

This shot is a few days old, but it is the heaviest usage that I have seen any time of day.  I'm not exactly sure I would call this game massively successful or point to it as a changing force in the mmo industry based on that. When this game starts filling up servers with actual players maybe it can be pointed to as successful.   Even the forums cannot break 100 users (registered and guest combined) online at one time currently. 

It doesn't take rocket science to figure out that 5 million users signing up for a game with only 10 servers averages 500,000 users per server.  Most mmos support around 10-15,000 accounts per server just for comparison.

5 MILLION users signing up for the game and it struggles to fill up one server?   That is almost half a milliom players joining every single week and still only 1 heavy server?  In order to make money those users have to actually log into the game at some point.  What game adds 4 million users to their playerbase and doesn't even need to add 1 additional server and can't even fill up more than 2? 

Imagine that was a screen shot of the server lists for either age of conan or warhammer.  Would mythic or funcom be bragging about the success of those games?  Would anyone here be calling those games a success?  Imagine just for one second what would happen if those games had only 10 servers and close to 500,000 people signed up for a free trial each week as soe is claiming for free realms. 

Does anyone remember what the starter areas of warhammer and conan looked like their first week when several hundred thousand players signed up and they each had 50-100 servers respectively to accomodate those players.  It was packed wall to wall with people.  Log into free realms and see if it looks even remotely similar and keep in mind how small the total land mass is. 

I bet you we do not see this type of model in the agency or dcu based on how popular the free realms servers currently look.  Sure it will still be packed with RMT and loot cards, but I don't think this model is working to well for soe right now.  I would not even be surprised if there was some sort of big change to the approach or gameplay of free realms in the near future in an effort to turn its performance around.  Soccer and a new zone just isn't going to cut it.   

On this business model, number of registered users or even number of players playing the game is meaningless.

Its how much cash its making, considering you don't have to pay a dime for playing it.

I played it for a week, casually and got bored, will never go back, didn't pay a dime to SOE.

5 million registered is meaningless, really is.