Jun 2
Do People Not Understand The Number ‘One Million’?
I love Bruce Woodcock And His Fabulous Charts. I am thrilled that MMOGCharts has been updated, and the discussion it has spurred is wonderful to be seeing again.
Here’s my thing though: Were people not listening when Blizzard said ‘We’ve got 6 Million players’?
Bruce’s charts show that Azeroth has something like a 50% lock on worldwide MMOG players. Not shocking. How many people did you think played MMOGs? I am sitting here listening to the CGW podcast for this week, and they’re registering shock that SOE’s got like 5% of the market. 6 MILLION PEOPLE! When EQ ruled the U.S. market, it bragged 500,000 people. Between all of their games they have maybe 1/10th of Blizzard’s numbers.
Again, as Bruce pointed out at Slashdot, these numbers are very stretchy. Any way you slice it, though, Blizzard has won the Massive market. Raph talks more about these numbers, of course. Weekly uniques would be nice.
My big fear is that in winning the war, Blizzard has broken the battlefield. With that kind of success … what’s the point?
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It’s 6.5mil subscribers. That’s still a huge freakin’ number, but it’s not that many people.
Further, while it looks great on his charts, his charts have always been limited by the information he could actually get. As he should, he only lists what he can get some sort of verification on.
Finally, the number of subscribers as reported is becoming a less relevant measure. It would be ideal if the whole industry would report all numbers the same way so us Day Traders could buy low and sell high. But I doubt that’ll ever happen. As such, companies will continually find new and interesting ways to report their own relevance.
All this means that WoW is doing awesome, better than any other game reporting numbers in the same way. But it doesn’t mean they’ve won. Between the very many unique elements Blizzard/VUG has, game systems that haven’t been tried and the 50 million online gamers in the U.S. that are not playing WoW, there’s a lot left to be tried and a bunch of companies that have no choice but to try because they can’t hope to leverage a warchest nor reach as big as Vivendi’s.