The Numbers Game

May 31, 2006 on 1:48 pm | In MMO (Live), General Gaming, Reporting, Industry

In a recent thread over at Grimwell Online, Morgan posted a link to the updated MMOGchart, SirBruce's ongoing effort to track the number of subscriptions in as many MMOGs for which he can get numbers.

I have a lot of respect for this effort, particularly as it is one of the mainstays of the genre now, having been around for so long. However, I have long questioned the value of the comparisons made within his program, and decided now was a good a time as any to discuss it.

SirBruce contends that it would be ideal for everyone if all companies reported all numbers. But to me, the only time a company would even want to do that is if they're breaking all sorts of internal or industry-wide records during a period of growth. What happens when their game plateaus, no longer showing the vibrant growth that had everyone talking? Worse, what happens when the game starts to decline?

The genre is old enough now (aged from when "MMORPG" was coined as a term) for games to have peaked and fallen, and for some to close altogether. The pattern for reporting is fairly young and still not consistent though. Companies love releasing all sorts of glamorous PR about how wonderful their game is doing. Some will show concurrent logins, some will break down their subscriber base by territory and some will report other numbers.

But then the game starts the afforementioned plateau or decline, and the company clams up. Later in that thread, Bruce rightly points out that this quickly highlights to the playerbase (and the interested) the shaky position the game is in. Yet, is it truly in a shaky position? Could it be they just achieved critical mass? Could they perhaps be focusing on retention of their core faces rather than attraction to offset the inevitable attrition? Should they not be allowed some time to bask in former glories, perhaps use their profits to develop new content for an expansion that will draw players back?

The argument has been made, there and previously, that companies with games on the decline would need to conduct more PR to justify the numbers through a refocusing of efforts to attract players, or to simply advertise more. And Bruce agrees that these numbers alone don't tell the whole story, thinking that the more they're used, the more people understand that this is just one metric by which to measure the viability of

And that's the crux of my issue with them as a reported variable. In summary:

1. Why should the companies need to conduct more PR to justify downswinging numbers when they got themselves into this pickle by reporting them during the good days in the first place?
2. If the numbers don't tell the whole story anyway, why bother reporting them?
3. The numbers don't take into account the resources companies could draw upon for development and advertising, and there's no existing metric that could inflate/deflate the numbers appropriately. Eve works for CCP. WoW works for VUG. SWG didn't work for SOE so it had to be changed. Each company works different and has different needs.

The point I raised in the thread is that, given all these considerations, eventually the numbers will be known far and wide as largely irrelevant when considered by themselves anyway. So why should a company support the research?

This is not about whether I support the numbers of course. To me, seeing all these games together highlights the sorts of games most people would rather play. It also highlights the saturation point for derivative thinking, and the sorts of goals one would need to have these days if they wanted to make yet-another-fantasy-themed MMORPG with an item-collection endgame. Showing these numbers basically could drive innovation, if developers used them in their thinking.

But would they?

Beyond their questionable relevance between games, who uses these numbers at all beyond the casually interested and the magazines that made some nice charts of them a few months back?

That's right: gamers.

Gamers will make decisions sometimes based purely on popularity, and subscription numbers are a pretty easy "indicator" of popularity. Forget the nuances of people actually playing vs those just holding onto accounts, or different games offering different experiences, or that one game has 3,000 people per server across a million servers while another has everyone in one place. There are numbers to see and numbers to compare. If a game is below 100k subscribers, why should a recently-departed almost-ex-fan of WoW bother checking it out when there's still a whole string of populary play-alikes to experience?

The number of people playing a game is not an indicator of what's enjoyable or innovative about that game. Unfortunately, sometimes the ideas unique to that game don't get their fair share of the limelight because the game itself is deemed "underperforming".

For this reason, I'd personally rather have each game considered unto itself. But barring that, as he has said as well, I'd be interested in seeing more support for them. What if he also got the revenue, peak concurrencies, geographic breakdown and profit collected from everyone? If everything was reported in one consistent report, it'd help highlight why these numbers should not be considered by themselves, educating everyone on what it takes to make and run one of these games.

Unfortunately, information is power is money. If a company is capable of generating this sort of information, it probably cost them a good amount of time and resources to do so. Why bother giving it away?