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Newsroom
Free Realms : Officially Hits Five Million Players
Posted Sep 16, 2009 by Michael Bitton
At the AGDC Keynote address, SOE President John Smedley revealed that Free Realms has finally the five million user mark.
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Many other interesting revelations came out of John Smedley's keynote, such as the fact it is apparently quite a challenge marketing to the younger demographic that Free Realms is targeting.
Smedley says that due to the fickle nature of children moving from one thing to the next, and the constant inundation of advertising kids are subject to, say, on TV, it requires a lot more money and effort to keep their game at the forefront of their audiences' minds.
Smedley gives an example, stating, "On TV you see a Free Realms commercial immediately followed by a Wizards 101 commercial, immediately followed by a commercial for Disney's ToonTown or Club Penguin. You see this huge, dramatic amount of advertising for kids and it's definitely something you have to stay on top of."
Via Virtual World News.
This announcement brings to mind the old maxim about lies and statistics. As I write this, Free Realms is ranked at a miserable #433 on Xfire's game list. Draw your own conclusions. My guess is that 5 million players signed up for Free Realms, tried it once, and hastily departed. How about some peak concurrent user numbers, SOE?
I call big time BS on this i have played it and with only 5 servers and 20 people in one area to make it laggy... i have no doubt they havent even reached 1 mil
Those numbers are bull, my 2 SOE accounts seem to have Free realm accounts on them even though I never sighed up
They probably just decided to count all the station accounts lol.
Why does everybody insist on using Xfire for statistics? Xfire is worthless, as are the results it displays.
So, you're right, it is ranked number #433 out of the 9% (being generous) gaming population that used Xfire.
Gratz to Free Realms I say.
it is a neat concept. It is a neat model, and I hope SOE continues to develop on it.
All of a sudden Smedley is talking about "difficulties", "tough market" and "hard to capture audience" in his keynote speech. Those are words used by someone whos game is not doing very well and much more like damage control to cover up how poor free realms is doing. He just does not understand that you cannot market and advertise a boring game.
That is why soe claims 5 million whatevers have signed up on their website, but free realms has 1-2 medium population server and 8-9 others that are empty.
Not that the 10 servers could have handled the amount of people soe claims were trying the game in the timeframe they say. Those servers would have been crushed by the amount of people logging in.
I dont believe that there are 5 milion players for one minute.
That being said, its still a great game for the audience it is targetting.
this is not a game for hardcore pvpers
this is not a game for raiders
this is not a game for roleplayers
this IS a game for the young and the young at heart. Just a piece of fun, nothing stressfull, a game where people can login, have some fun for a few minutes or a few hours and log off.
I play MMO's, I raid, I occasionally pvp, (i dont roleplay, but have nothing against those that do). Normally, I wouldnt have any interest in the type of gameplay freerealms offers.
But, my two daughters like to play games. They are 5 and 9. They get to play as a treat or reward for good behaviour. When they play, I like them to be supervised so I (or sometimes my wife) play with them.
Both love the game. And we all love playing together as a family. Its great to see my youngest girl's face when she first enters a new area, thats spooky or pretty, its great to see my eldest smile when she finally gets her new pet to learn a trick that she has been working on for a while.
Whenever we are online there is always many, many players running about. I've yet to see an empty area. Every other MMO I have played has seemed lifeless at times, I know its still relatively early days for Freerealms, but i really think it has what it takes to see player numbers increasing.
If you are a player of 'serious' mmo's and looking for something along those lines, you will find that freerealms is far from the game for you.
Its not intended for you, so why do so many feel the need to come here and bash it?
I really dont care how SOE inflate their figures. As long as I feel its a safe environment and it keeps putting a smile on my girl's faces, im going to be very happy with Freerealms :)
bottom line what i would like to see is the bottom line
HOW MUCH MONEY HAVE THEY ACTUALLY MADE WITH FREE REALMS???!!!
no lumping, no bumping, just Free Realms all on its own
anyone?
hello............
5 m Registered for Free Realms, great !!!
But woudn't it be more interesting to see how many of those registered players that holds a subscription to this game ?
Or how many of those players that frequently uses the item shop ?.
I'm guessing these numbers are more secret ;)
/junker
Maybe little eight year old children don't use Xfire?
Actually I can almost promise you they dont, only the predators playing free realms do LOL!
The title of this piece is very misleading in my opinion. The article clearly states that it hit the 5 million "registered user" mark. To me, there is a huge difference between player and registered user. For example, I play Runes of Magic and WOW. I am a registered user of many games though. And yes, I am one of those that has never played Free Realms but it is on my SOE Station account so I am counted in that 5 million number.
And yes, there is a direct link between Xfire numbers are players of MMO's. It is not a strong link but there is enough data there that Xfire does show trends in MMO gaming. The accuracy is debatable but at least for a rough "estimate" of how an MMO is doing, Xfire is acceptable.
Like a shark hunting in a desert :)
I like Freerealms, its not a game I can play for long periods but its a good game to burn 30 minutes or an hour.
People who bash this game reek of insecurity and Xfire sucks :)
Not 5 million subscribers, but only 5 million registered users, I hate how people try to prmote their game with numbers. Hmm, free realms, a crappy MMO has only 5 million subscribers, yeah right.
Lineage II has 17 million registered users, beat that morons!
Smedley gives an example, stating, "On TV you see a Free Realms commercial immediately followed by a Wizards 101 commercial, immediately followed by a commercial for Disney's ToonTown or Club Penguin. You see this huge, dramatic amount of advertising for kids and it's definitely something you have to stay on top of."
Or, you could try not contributing to the problem!
Actually I don't see free realms commercials on TV anymore. I see the rest on that list, but not a free realms commercial in some months now.
OMG you people are rediculously negative, lighten up. I know it's still fashionable to bash S.O.E. but wtf? Get over the EQ nerfs and the SWG debacle already. First off xfire is garbage you can't trust any stats from there any more then you can believe any publishers reported number. In fact I'm much more inclined to believe the publisher over xfire.
I betaed this game because it came with my all access account and I'll test anything. it is very well done. It's a great game for their target audience of pre teens. Its a very family friendly game. They very well might have millions of players, ever see the numbers Club Penguin or other pre teen games like Toontown generate? Remember, this is promoted by one of the biggest media companies in the world and the basic game is free. Granted a good chunk of the registered users probably aren't active, but you don't really believe WOW has 11 million active users either right? Because they count their numbers the same way. I don't see anybody bashing Blizzard. Of course their special, they can do no wrong in their fans mind.
This game is the closest thing I have seen to a real MMO for young children. Certainly it would be boring for seasoned MMOers but for kid about 5-12 years old it's a great game. My 10 and 12 year old nephews love it.
Well yes obviously its worded to be a bit misleading (not really sure what the supposed benefit is).
Registered users don't pay anything... "members" pay something but the monthly fee for the product isn't that high to begin with.
They released various metrics for EQ2 when the SOE worlds magazine was around (for a couple issues) like various player transactions. I'm not sure I've evern see a "average transaction statement".
I took part in the beta for Free Realms and its pretty good for what it is... This is just an example of PR /shrug
Right, just turn a blind eye to all the other facts that have been frequently posted on this board. How about the fact that only 2 servers are really active, all the other servers are always at low capacity.
This is just a numbers scam being perpetrated by SOE. They lie like the best of them. Seriously you have to wonder if SOE's reputation can sink any lower?
My guess they have around 100-200k active users at best and I am being generous. Most of them not paying.
They are doing weird things with their updates. I can't figure out if they want to make the game more of a grind or more casual. They keep trying to do both at the same time.
I was a member for awhile and got all my jobs to level 20. I cancelled recently because there just wasn't any reason to maintain membership. Sure I can't go to some Members-Only dungeons, but with all my combat jobs at level 20 there isn't much of a reason to worry about those dungeons.
I can see this game being reduced to a skeletal crew of developers to keep it plugging along like many of SOE's games once they start up their next game. A casual Star Wars game using this engine is supposedly in the works. That should be fun hopefully.
The games world environment and environments graphics style are very lovely and quite whimsical and enchanted. It reminds me of those glorious platform games worlds from the n64/ps2 era, and I really like that about Free Realms. But the player character avatars don't really do It for me and the actual gameplay itself isn't totally up my alley.
But for what It is, I think It's a pretty lovely game actually.
The actual quality of the game itself is quite high in my opinion, so I don't see 5 million subs as difficult or unbelievable for Free Realms to reach.