Comments on: Betcha You Can Guess #1

By: jinstevens

jinstevens — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 00:43:07 +0000

Iconic : What does Tom Chick have to say about the button density of Maple Story?

LOL

By: Angelworks

Angelworks — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 00:27:37 +0000

@hsinclair Especially when L1/L2 are two pretty different games in some respects.

By: Tesh

Tesh — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 00:17:41 +0000

I seem to remember the guesstimate of WoW’s Chinese revenue as being something like 15% of their total take. They don’t pay the same way that Westerners do, and the income per player is lower as a result.

By: Iconic

Iconic — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 23:10:52 +0000

What does Tom Chick have to say about the button density of Maple Story?

By: hsinclair

hsinclair — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 21:24:51 +0000

I can’t figure out why they list out Shanda as a company instead of its individual titles – or lump lineage and lineage II in together, when everything else is individual games.

Also, its difficult to tell what games made the cut as MMOs and which ones didn’t – was Guild Wars considered? Any other number of flash-based pseudo-mmos?

By: Zuzax

Zuzax — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 20:29:01 +0000

LOTRO?

By: Adam

Adam — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 19:17:42 +0000

"Though Warcraft now boasts some 11 million+ subscribers, “You’re lucky to get 5-10 percent [of them] playing at the same time,” he said." Something tells me this is completely inaccurate. More than a year ago, The9 announced concurrency at 800k in China, and that is with the limited play time Chinese are allowed.

By: Lorekeep

Lorekeep — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 19:09:46 +0000

China may have higher concurrency because their population engages in longer playing sessions. Aside from raids, WoW is all about emphasizing the “You can login for 30 minutes and get something done.” mentality.

By: jinstevens

jinstevens — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 18:31:35 +0000

I shake my head at the huge gaps in figures $50 – $150M? $150 – $500M? Those aren’t analyst estimates, those are broad guesses. And can wildly shift the positions of the #2 through #10 ranked games on that list. I’m hoping that the final document might have better “research” than the supposition that the analyst substitutes for fact.

And not to defend WoW, but the analyst dismisses WoW’s concurrent population of saying that merely 5 – 10% are on at any given time. Excuse me, but 5 – 10% of 11M subscribers is still 550k or 1.1M people playing at any given time. Sorry, but that’s A LOT in my book. That dwarfs the total subscription base of many MMOs.

The only thing that is really noteworthy in the article is the point about micro transactions being extremely profitable. I wonder if the hesitation of doing it in a large scale has to do with cultural/historic issues (i.e., US / European players grew up with idea of one-time purchases for video games, Asians have in the past not been able to afford up front costs but been willing to pay as they go).

By: Rog

Rog — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 18:01:52 +0000

So much guestimation.