OT: Anarchy Online

[AgentZero]

deccan said:
A survey of mmog market share for anyone who's interested:

http://www.mmogchart.com/

Wow. Between them Lineage and Lineage 2 make up nearly half the MMOG market, yet I've barely ever heard anything about them. Rather odd, no?

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Maybe I should try those out.

A million lemmings can't be wrong, right?

[Gandalf Parker]

It didnt look like I would enjoy it. Im still playing free Ultima Online. And maybe thinking of restarting my account for Star Wars Galaxys. But I will keep looking at each one that comes out

[deccan]

AgentZero said:
Wow. Between them Lineage and Lineage 2 make up nearly half the MMOG market, yet I've barely ever heard anything about them. Rather odd, no?

One word: Koreans.

I'm Malaysian (though I live in the Solomon Islands), so I know of plenty of other asian mmogs that most people in US / Europe don't know about.

Side anecdote: I almost joined the mmog making industry about two years back. A new company in Malaysia was making "Fung Wan Online", a game based on a popular Hong Kong series (subsequently made into a fairly successful movie, english title: The Storm Riders). I went to be interviewed for game designer (probably to make content and levels and stuff), but the pay was too low and the work location (Cyberjaya) too remote for it to be interesting.

[Alneyan]

What really surprises me is the low market share of the older actors: Asheron Call has virtually disappeared, Planetside or Eve Online are doing quite poorly, Dark Age of Camelot is on the wane, and even Everquest is not doing that well given its reputation.

World of Warcraft seems to be doing surprisingly well: it has only been released a while ago, but nonetheless got a big share of the market. I guess it was successful with players new to MMORPGs, as the attraction of your current MMORPG seems quite powerful otherwise (Everquest has a bigger market share than Everquest 2, and Lineage is doing about as well as Lineage 2).

Note that the numbers for Lineage might be a bit too high on the chart, though the two games are definitively the most popular in the MMORPG market, regardless of how you count. A quote from the site Deccan linked to:

In previous versions of this report I did not include Lineage: The Blood Pledge in my graph. Why? Well, two main reasons. First, it completely dwarfed the other MMOGs, distorting the graph and making visual comparisons much more difficult. But more importantly, Lineage uses substantially different metrics for “counting” players. They may have close to 4 million “players”, but most of these players did not buy a box at the local software store and then pay a monthly subscription fee like traditional MMOGs. Instead, they play in “PC baangs”, Internet cybercafes in Korea that buy Lineage access from the company and then sell it at hourly rates to customers. This, combined with the unusual Korean dynamic of rapid deployment of broadband and the fact that imports of Japanese console platforms were restricted, made Lineage unusually popular. Lineage’s lack of success in the United States via the more “traditional” MMOG model only proves this out. However, people still demand to see their data for comparison, and so now that I’ve broken the graph into multiple parts, I’ve decided to include Lineage (and Lineage II). The number I will be using is the worldwide total of “Monthly Access” players. This number is the most comparable to a monthly subscription in North America or Europe; indeed, at least 50% of Lineage players are now on a monthly-subscription as opposed to paying and playing in a cybercafe. NCSoft also tracks a variety of other metrics for measuring player population, such as daily access, peak concurrent users, registered IPs, and so on.

[Gandalf Parker]

Since you mention the "old timers" on the chart Im kindof doubting the numbers on UO. Im wondering if the 300+ free public shards are counted there or just the official pay-2-play shards. And even that doesnt count the many private shards. As crappy as the official servers have become Im not at all surprised at the size of its slice if thats all thats being counted

Gandalf Parker

[Alneyan]

I find those numbers to be quite high too, but I guess it might be the case, if older players stay on the shards because of their friends/guilds... I have found UO to be amazingly boring with the setup of the official shards, much more so than the other MMORPGs (and when you think about it, spending a lot of time raising stats is not exactly fun to begin with).

I do not see how they could count the free shards though. There are plenty of those, and very likely shards in other languages, and those would be harder to check out (do you speak Russian?). And since the free shards do not have paying customers, it would not be possible to have an accurate figure. Speaking of them, I believe the free shards are on the wane, at least in France: we have gone from ten shards or so with a strong community (and quite a few of smaller shards) to just a handful of shards, most of them with fewer players now.

[luke_slovakian]

NO suprise that World of Warcraft is doing well. I mean remember the diablo 2 and warcraft 3...great games. NOw think of it mixed...the onlyt thing that is stopping it from beging REALLY popular is that it cost SIX DOLLARS a month to play. I mean come on

[David E. Gervais]

I'm going to try and log in as many hours as possible this weekend. If you play AO just log into server 2 and look me up. My Character Name is Valorstar. (level 13 but should be at level 15 by the time the weekend comes around) I also have characters with the names Valorhand, Valorclaw.

I hope to do some 'team' missions on the weekend.

Cheers!