Actually I'm thinking if they will open new dimensions for free trial? Most seem to be full whole weekends and evenings and I wasn't even able to create an alt to my dimension at first. Had to do it early in the morning.
They may have to, or expand the cap. I tried making a new character last night, and all the english-speaking dimensions were full and locked, except for 1 RP realm.
Originally posted by Bhorzo Originally posted by PiiritusActually I'm thinking if they will open new dimensions for free trial? Most seem to be full whole weekends and evenings and I wasn't even able to create an alt to my dimension at first. Had to do it early in the morning.
They may have to, or expand the cap. I tried making a new character last night, and all the english-speaking dimensions were full and locked, except for 1 RP realm.
Great thing is they don't have to procure a physical solution! Just Create more virtual servers that dynamicly scale!
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Originally posted by stragen001 Well they are already offering free trials and its not even a month since launch, so I reckon its not doing so well......
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back to OP, I would say not nearly as well as they hoped, publishers get most of the box sale money and all indicators show they were not all that. If I had to guess I would say in the 300K range plus or minus 50 K
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Thats a once off event, The continual free trial is 24 hours.
back to OP, I would say not nearly as well as they hoped, publishers get most of the box sale money and all indicators show they were not all that. If I had to guess I would say in the 300K range plus or minus 50 K
Not bad considering that they got more than 50% of the target numbers in the first month alone.
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Originally posted by stragen001 Well they are already offering free trials and its not even a month since launch, so I reckon its not doing so well......
From Friday, August 3rd at 4pm GMT until Monday, August 6th at 7am GMT, we invite you and your friends to participate in this exciting celebration!
back to OP, I would say not nearly as well as they hoped, publishers get most of the box sale money and all indicators show they were not all that. If I had to guess I would say in the 300K range plus or minus 50 K
300k seems about right. It's a shame that they didn't really advertise the game better.
Originally posted by Bhorzo Originally posted by JackdogOriginally posted by NitthOriginally posted by stragen001Well they are already offering free trials and its not even a month since launch, so I reckon its not doing so well......
How so? its only a day pass3 days accorfing to FChttp://forums.thesecretworld.com/showthread.php?p=1304351#post1304351From Friday, August 3rd at 4pm GMT until Monday, August 6th at 7am GMT, we invite you and your friends to participate in this exciting celebration!back to OP, I would say not nearly as well as they hoped, publishers get most of the box sale money and all indicators show they were not all that. If I had to guess I would say in the 300K range plus or minus 50 K
300k seems about right. It's a shame that they didn't really advertise the game better.
Hopefully if they pay respect to their customers, it will grow as eve did.
TSW - AoC - Aion - WOW - EVE - Fallen Earth - Co - Rift - || XNA C# Java Development
Funcom had quite a reputation after AoC and I think they did wisely not hyping up TSW. It's a good game and a supporting word going around is the best advertisment imho. Good MMOs tend to grow but bad ones fail no matter how many millions are being spent on marketing. I think that FC has a very good foundation now to build up an excellent game and it depends solely on them if they manage to do that.
My estimate is between 300k and 600k, mostly online. It had as much as 60k users online at the same time at one point, averaging around 30k concurrent users.
It had very limited brick-n-mortar shop distribution and advertisment, so they didnt spend much on royalties for distributors and vendors. I think the sales of TSW are not surprising, neither positive nor negative.
No subscriber numbers have been released. Had they been particularly high I'm sure we would have seen "TSW has sold X million copies" press release like every other MMO has. See what info comes out of the Funcom shareholder meeting I guess (which I seem to recall someone said was in late August).
The free weekend is directly after the release of their first contact back (tomorrow night) so perhaps that has something to do with it. Over half of the new content coming in the July update is in the first 3 zones so anyone doing a trial will be able to see it without having to level all the way through to the end zones.
No subscriber numbers have been released. Had they been particularly high I'm sure we would have seen "TSW has sold X million copies" press release like every other MMO has. See what info comes out of the Funcom shareholder meeting I guess (which I seem to recall someone said was in late August).
Funcom told on the 6. July that they would give an update on the 10. August.
My estimate is between 300k and 600k, mostly online. It had as much as 60k users online at the same time at one point, averaging around 30k concurrent users.
It had very limited brick-n-mortar shop distribution and advertisment, so they didnt spend much on royalties for distributors and vendors. I think the sales of TSW are not surprising, neither positive nor negative.
I'm think 6-700k atm
TSW is a game that will grow. I got a feeling unless TESO or Repopulation are just knock it out the box better than everything. We'll be talking about TSW for a long time.
Originally posted by stragen001 Well they are already offering free trials and its not even a month since launch, so I reckon its not doing so well......
From Friday, August 3rd at 4pm GMT until Monday, August 6th at 7am GMT, we invite you and your friends to participate in this exciting celebration!
back to OP, I would say not nearly as well as they hoped, publishers get most of the box sale money and all indicators show they were not all that. If I had to guess I would say in the 300K range plus or minus 50 K
300k seems about right. It's a shame that they didn't really advertise the game better.
Yeah I think that number might be pretty low. Double that and I think you'll be in the ball park.
Honestly I so glad the didnt do the mass appeal marking and game design. 500k+ one world is all the long time folowers hoped for at launch. 1mill this time next year would be absolutely amazing. TSW is a tough game compared to you WoW/Swtor/Rifts of the world. Everyone one wont stay around to learn while getting smashed.
Well i have said it before and will say it again. It is important for mmo's especially to have some sort of demo or free trial for players to see 1. if there system can run the game well enough to enjoy playing and 2. If they like the game enough to invest in it. The only good reason to not allow this is to hide a crappy game and hope the marketing reels in sucker fish. I have a pretty good rig, 2.4 ghz quad core amd with 7 gigs of ram and a 1gig ddr3 graphics card from ati. Far from the best but decent and tsw pvp is a no go, slide show for me but the pve seems to run good enough for me to enjoy the game. Computer games are all over the place in terms of requirements and you never know not even by the suggested spec what will perform well. There not like consoles where you know the game will work as intended....
Well i have said it before and will say it again. It is important for mmo's especially to have some sort of demo or free trial for players to see 1. if there system can run the game well enough to enjoy playing and 2. If they like the game enough to invest in it. The only good reason to not allow this is to hide a crappy game and hope the marketing reels in sucker fish. I have a pretty good rig, 2.4 ghz quad core amd with 7 gigs of ram and a 1gig ddr3 graphics card from ati. Far from the best but decent and tsw pvp is a no go, slide show for me but the pve seems to run good enough for me to enjoy the game. Computer games are all over the place in terms of requirements and you never know not even by the suggested spec what will perform well. There not like consoles where you know the game will work as intended....
Originally posted by stragen001 Well they are already offering free trials and its not even a month since launch, so I reckon its not doing so well......
How so? its only a day pass
Lets also not forget that alot of people dumped $260 for life time subs.
not to mention people got to get it out of their head that an MMO does not need 1million plus subs to be considered successful. those times are gone,there are to MANY MMOs out now, so the population of MMOers is thined out between the many various MMOs out now. 200k subs x $15 a month = $3,000,000 per month...not bad.
Look at it this way say there are only 3 MMOs to choose from and 3million MMOers on average each MMO mite get a million subs. Now there are 30 MMOs out, that would average out to 100k subs per MMO. This IS why you wont see many up and coming MMOs with more than 300-1mil subs anymore.
Originally posted by stragen001 Well they are already offering free trials and its not even a month since launch, so I reckon its not doing so well......
How so? its only a day pass
Lets also not forget that alot of people dumped $260 for life time subs.
4 day pass. Aug 3-6. And it is pretty interesting, seeing that the only MMOs to offer free trial in the first two months of being out have all gone F2P within 1 year of release. If they were satisfied with sales, then they would keep relying on word of mouth selling. Their retail sales (physical copies) are almost non-existant now compared to first couple weeks. And if their digital sales are following that same curve, it is NOT good (as profit margin goes). This also is not including the number of people who have not entered sub information (CC number, or the like), which means MORE lost possible profit. They have a good amount of people playing and subbed, but they obviously have not hit the mark they wanted (and it isn't absurd to venture that they aren't close to their goal, either).
EDIT: Remember, this free trial is on top of the buddy keys given to every player. THAT was their "free trial" for people. Now that they are having a weekend long (instead of just 24 hour) free trial on top of those buddy keys is....well, it just strengthens my argument.
Finding out the number of box sales would be interesting and I look forward to their August investor update.
But Funcom isn't shooting for box sales per se. They're aiming for an average monthly subscriber retention of close to 500k in order to hit their 'best case" financial targets.
So there are two questions: 1) how many decided to start playing and 2) how many are planning to stick around, and will there be enough content on a month-to-month basis in order to keep people paying?
We've heard mixed things on how quickly people are consuming content, so their first live update will give players a sense of what to expect going forward.
"Loading screens" are not "instances". Your personal efforts to troll any game will not, in fact, impact the success or failure of said game.
People need to remeber TSW is a graphical powerhouse. It flat out wont play on some rigs.
I gave my long time IRL casual gaming friend a 24 hour buddy pass to see if he could play it on his laptop. He was getting rdy to leave swtor to play with our other friend and myself. It would work for him. He needs to upgrade from his WoW era laptop W/o the 24 hour pass he would of bought and been SOL..
Good move imo.
This is the biggest reason why AoC got so much heat. How many people bought it and couldn't even play it? I played with an old school mmo guild for AoC launch and 3 of us out of the whole guild could play it with no problems. All three of us had bought gaming rigs just for launch.
This isn't the only reason by any means. It is the reason that gets looked over because no one wants to admit that they can't afford a current computer.
Q1 Financial Report Funcom showed some financial scenarios
Target scenario
Client sales 30 % higher than Age of Conan § Majority of digital client sales § Subs/client price as Age of Conan § In-game store sales/uptick amounting to 35 % of subs. revenue § AO: 30 %, AOC: 100 % § Healthy retention; 490,000 average subs
Funcom results § First yr revenue est $ 157 million § Est. game profit margin: 53 %
Conan-like scenario § 1,050,000 client sales first year § Poor retention (a bit better than Age of Conan) 280,000 average subscribers
§ Other assumptions as above
Funcom results § First yr revenue est $ 100 million § Est. game profit margin: 43 %
There is a long history of it with MMOs. IF TSW had sold millions of copies and had millions of subs, they would not be offering a free trial. MMOs only start offering free trials when they arent doing well.
Like World of Warcraft...
Not sure if you are agreeing or disagreeing, but yes, exactly like world of warcraft. Their sub numbers start declining, they introduce a free trial.
WoW had a free trial as long as I can remember.
Ofcourse not in the first months and everyone knows damn well why. Tjeez.
2004 was a different time. How many times do we need to beat this poor dead horse?
Everyone knew TSW was going to be a niche game. Even Funcom themselves knew that.
They let the game rely on viral marketing and mouth to mouth advertising. Start small, grow over time.
These one day passes are part of that.
Fact is! The servers (dimensions) are booming with people. They are still full during primetimes each day. And that after 4 weeks.
So they already doing better than SW:TOR did, that already saw a rapid decline of server activity after just 2-3 weeks.
There is a long history of it with MMOs. IF TSW had sold millions of copies and had millions of subs, they would not be offering a free trial. MMOs only start offering free trials when they arent doing well.
Like World of Warcraft...
Not sure if you are agreeing or disagreeing, but yes, exactly like world of warcraft. Their sub numbers start declining, they introduce a free trial.
actually its not a trial its a buddy pass and can only be given by a person who has already bought the game.
a smart company will release a free trial for a few days as fast as they can . Waiting forever to release one like SWTOR and other games have done is stupid. Why the hell would you not want to get some of the people on the fence to purchase your product?
There is a long history of it with MMOs. IF TSW had sold millions of copies and had millions of subs, they would not be offering a free trial. MMOs only start offering free trials when they arent doing well.
Like World of Warcraft...
Not sure if you are agreeing or disagreeing, but yes, exactly like world of warcraft. Their sub numbers start declining, they introduce a free trial.
WoW had a free trial as long as I can remember.
Ofcourse not in the first months and everyone knows damn well why. Tjeez.
2004 was a different time. How many times do we need to beat this poor dead horse?
Everyone knew TSW was going to be a niche game. Even Funcom themselves knew that.
They let the game rely on viral marketing and mouth to mouth advertising. Start small, grow over time.
These one day passes are part of that.
Fact is! The servers (dimensions) are booming with people. They are still full during primetimes each day. And that after 4 weeks.
So they already doing better than SW:TOR did, that already saw a rapid decline of server activity after just 2-3 weeks.
how many people can play on a server ? and how many servers so far ?
the one day trial is not enough to make an idea
in my case : on beta first day it wasnt good, second day i changed my point of view , found the game more interesting than i thought
a couple of days or a free week end could be nice to make your own idea of the game
rift,wow give a lvl 20 trial , in the end i bought rift
so the 1 day trial is kind of ridiculous, i'm sure more people would buy the game if they extend the "free trial", subbing is another question
There is a long history of it with MMOs. IF TSW had sold millions of copies and had millions of subs, they would not be offering a free trial. MMOs only start offering free trials when they arent doing well.
Like World of Warcraft...
Not sure if you are agreeing or disagreeing, but yes, exactly like world of warcraft. Their sub numbers start declining, they introduce a free trial.
WoW had a free trial as long as I can remember.
Ofcourse not in the first months and everyone knows damn well why. Tjeez.
2004 was a different time. How many times do we need to beat this poor dead horse?
Everyone knew TSW was going to be a niche game. Even Funcom themselves knew that.
They let the game rely on viral marketing and mouth to mouth advertising. Start small, grow over time.
These one day passes are part of that.
Fact is! The servers (dimensions) are booming with people. They are still full during primetimes each day. And that after 4 weeks.
So they already doing better than SW:TOR did, that already saw a rapid decline of server activity after just 2-3 weeks.
how many people can play on a server ? and how many servers so far ?
the one day trial is not enough to make an idea
in my case : on beta first day it wasnt good, second day i changed my point of view , found the game more interesting than i thought
a couple of days or a free week end could be nice to make your own idea of the game
rift,wow give a lvl 20 trial , in the end i bought rift
so the 1 day trial is kind of ridiculous, i'm sure more people would buy the game if they extend the "free trial", subbing is another question
Does it matter how many servers there are?
The only thing that matters is how many people continue on playing and so keep the server population healthy.
Sure, SW:TOR sold 1,7mil copies (due to insane marketing) and had 200 servers. But all that means nothing, when the server populations already started to take a nose dive after just 2 - 3 weeks!
Comments
They may have to, or expand the cap. I tried making a new character last night, and all the english-speaking dimensions were full and locked, except for 1 RP realm.
Great thing is they don't have to procure a physical solution!
Just Create more virtual servers that dynamicly scale!
TSW - AoC - Aion - WOW - EVE - Fallen Earth - Co - Rift - || XNA C# Java Development
3 days accorfing to FC
http://forums.thesecretworld.com/showthread.php?p=1304351#post1304351
From Friday, August 3rd at 4pm GMT until Monday, August 6th at 7am GMT, we invite you and your friends to participate in this exciting celebration!
back to OP, I would say not nearly as well as they hoped, publishers get most of the box sale money and all indicators show they were not all that. If I had to guess I would say in the 300K range plus or minus 50 K
I miss DAoC
Not bad considering that they got more than 50% of the target numbers in the first month alone.
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300k seems about right. It's a shame that they didn't really advertise the game better.
3 days accorfing to FC http://forums.thesecretworld.com/showthread.php?p=1304351#post1304351 From Friday, August 3rd at 4pm GMT until Monday, August 6th at 7am GMT, we invite you and your friends to participate in this exciting celebration! back to OP, I would say not nearly as well as they hoped, publishers get most of the box sale money and all indicators show they were not all that. If I had to guess I would say in the 300K range plus or minus 50 K
300k seems about right. It's a shame that they didn't really advertise the game better.
Hopefully if they pay respect to their customers, it will grow as eve did.
TSW - AoC - Aion - WOW - EVE - Fallen Earth - Co - Rift - || XNA C# Java Development
Funcom had quite a reputation after AoC and I think they did wisely not hyping up TSW. It's a good game and a supporting word going around is the best advertisment imho. Good MMOs tend to grow but bad ones fail no matter how many millions are being spent on marketing. I think that FC has a very good foundation now to build up an excellent game and it depends solely on them if they manage to do that.
My estimate is between 300k and 600k, mostly online. It had as much as 60k users online at the same time at one point, averaging around 30k concurrent users.
It had very limited brick-n-mortar shop distribution and advertisment, so they didnt spend much on royalties for distributors and vendors. I think the sales of TSW are not surprising, neither positive nor negative.
REALITY CHECK
No subscriber numbers have been released. Had they been particularly high I'm sure we would have seen "TSW has sold X million copies" press release like every other MMO has. See what info comes out of the Funcom shareholder meeting I guess (which I seem to recall someone said was in late August).
The free weekend is directly after the release of their first contact back (tomorrow night) so perhaps that has something to do with it. Over half of the new content coming in the July update is in the first 3 zones so anyone doing a trial will be able to see it without having to level all the way through to the end zones.
The Enlightened take things Lightly
Funcom told on the 6. July that they would give an update on the 10. August.
So we just have to wait.
http://www.funcom.com/investors/press_and_players_celebrate_the_secret_world_launch
I'm think 6-700k atm
TSW is a game that will grow. I got a feeling unless TESO or Repopulation are just knock it out the box better than everything. We'll be talking about TSW for a long time.
Yeah I think that number might be pretty low. Double that and I think you'll be in the ball park.
Honestly I so glad the didnt do the mass appeal marking and game design. 500k+ one world is all the long time folowers hoped for at launch. 1mill this time next year would be absolutely amazing. TSW is a tough game compared to you WoW/Swtor/Rifts of the world. Everyone one wont stay around to learn while getting smashed.
Well i have said it before and will say it again. It is important for mmo's especially to have some sort of demo or free trial for players to see 1. if there system can run the game well enough to enjoy playing and 2. If they like the game enough to invest in it. The only good reason to not allow this is to hide a crappy game and hope the marketing reels in sucker fish. I have a pretty good rig, 2.4 ghz quad core amd with 7 gigs of ram and a 1gig ddr3 graphics card from ati. Far from the best but decent and tsw pvp is a no go, slide show for me but the pve seems to run good enough for me to enjoy the game. Computer games are all over the place in terms of requirements and you never know not even by the suggested spec what will perform well. There not like consoles where you know the game will work as intended....
This right here.
What does Guild Wars 2 have to do with this? Don't go jumping to conclusions just because someone disagrees with you, sheesh...
not to mention people got to get it out of their head that an MMO does not need 1million plus subs to be considered successful. those times are gone,there are to MANY MMOs out now, so the population of MMOers is thined out between the many various MMOs out now. 200k subs x $15 a month = $3,000,000 per month...not bad.
Look at it this way say there are only 3 MMOs to choose from and 3million MMOers on average each MMO mite get a million subs. Now there are 30 MMOs out, that would average out to 100k subs per MMO. This IS why you wont see many up and coming MMOs with more than 300-1mil subs anymore.
4 day pass. Aug 3-6. And it is pretty interesting, seeing that the only MMOs to offer free trial in the first two months of being out have all gone F2P within 1 year of release. If they were satisfied with sales, then they would keep relying on word of mouth selling. Their retail sales (physical copies) are almost non-existant now compared to first couple weeks. And if their digital sales are following that same curve, it is NOT good (as profit margin goes). This also is not including the number of people who have not entered sub information (CC number, or the like), which means MORE lost possible profit. They have a good amount of people playing and subbed, but they obviously have not hit the mark they wanted (and it isn't absurd to venture that they aren't close to their goal, either).
EDIT: Remember, this free trial is on top of the buddy keys given to every player. THAT was their "free trial" for people. Now that they are having a weekend long (instead of just 24 hour) free trial on top of those buddy keys is....well, it just strengthens my argument.
Finding out the number of box sales would be interesting and I look forward to their August investor update.
But Funcom isn't shooting for box sales per se. They're aiming for an average monthly subscriber retention of close to 500k in order to hit their 'best case" financial targets.
So there are two questions: 1) how many decided to start playing and 2) how many are planning to stick around, and will there be enough content on a month-to-month basis in order to keep people paying?
We've heard mixed things on how quickly people are consuming content, so their first live update will give players a sense of what to expect going forward.
"Loading screens" are not "instances".
Your personal efforts to troll any game will not, in fact, impact the success or failure of said game.
This is the biggest reason why AoC got so much heat. How many people bought it and couldn't even play it? I played with an old school mmo guild for AoC launch and 3 of us out of the whole guild could play it with no problems. All three of us had bought gaming rigs just for launch.
This isn't the only reason by any means. It is the reason that gets looked over because no one wants to admit that they can't afford a current computer.
Development costs for TSW was $50mill (300 mill NOK)
Q1 Financial Report Funcom showed some financial scenarios
Target scenario
Client sales 30 % higher than Age of Conan
§ Majority of digital client sales
§ Subs/client price as Age of Conan
§ In-game store sales/uptick amounting to
35 % of subs. revenue
§ AO: 30 %, AOC: 100 %
§ Healthy retention; 490,000 average subs
Funcom results
§ First yr revenue est $ 157 million
§ Est. game profit margin: 53 %
Conan-like scenario
§ 1,050,000 client sales first year
§ Poor retention (a bit better than Age of Conan)
280,000 average subscribers
§ Other assumptions as above
Funcom results
§ First yr revenue est $ 100 million
§ Est. game profit margin: 43 %
http://l3cdn.funcom.com/funcomportal/pdf/investor/2012/funcom_1Q12_presentation.pdf
Page 17
WoW had a free trial as long as I can remember.
Ofcourse not in the first months and everyone knows damn well why. Tjeez.
2004 was a different time. How many times do we need to beat this poor dead horse?
Everyone knew TSW was going to be a niche game. Even Funcom themselves knew that.
They let the game rely on viral marketing and mouth to mouth advertising. Start small, grow over time.
These one day passes are part of that.
Fact is! The servers (dimensions) are booming with people. They are still full during primetimes each day. And that after 4 weeks.
So they already doing better than SW:TOR did, that already saw a rapid decline of server activity after just 2-3 weeks.
actually its not a trial its a buddy pass and can only be given by a person who has already bought the game.
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a smart company will release a free trial for a few days as fast as they can . Waiting forever to release one like SWTOR and other games have done is stupid. Why the hell would you not want to get some of the people on the fence to purchase your product?
how many people can play on a server ? and how many servers so far ?
the one day trial is not enough to make an idea
in my case : on beta first day it wasnt good, second day i changed my point of view , found the game more interesting than i thought
a couple of days or a free week end could be nice to make your own idea of the game
rift,wow give a lvl 20 trial , in the end i bought rift
so the 1 day trial is kind of ridiculous, i'm sure more people would buy the game if they extend the "free trial", subbing is another question
Does it matter how many servers there are?
The only thing that matters is how many people continue on playing and so keep the server population healthy.
Sure, SW:TOR sold 1,7mil copies (due to insane marketing) and had 200 servers. But all that means nothing, when the server populations already started to take a nose dive after just 2 - 3 weeks!