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World of Propogandacraft
TheReporter
Member Posts: 3
Hello friends, I bring to you an op-ed piece about one of the biggest* MMOs on the market.
(* based on the statements of Blizzard Entertainment)
Blizzard Entertainment's popular World of Warcraft is perhaps one of the most trumped up, over bloated examples of self-praise on the market today. Blizzard currently boasts that their game has over 6 million active players, a number which only serves to increase the popularity of the game in the public perception. But is this number true?
The truth of the matter is that, of World of Warcraft's 6+ million players, 5.9 million are from China alone. According to online game company The9's financial statement for the third quarter of 2006 which was released yesterday , a total of 5.9 million account keys have been activated in China since the game's release there in June of last year. And those are not still all active, that is purely the amount that have been activated. These also include any free trial keys that may have been issued.
The9 reports a peak usage of 595,000 concurrent connections, and an average of 280,000 concurrent connections during the third quarter. Since the game's launch, the highest peak of concurrent connections was reported at 660,000.
The9 also reports that World of Warcraft provides 99.1% of all revenue from online gaming sources. With a total gross revenue of $30.5 million attributed to online game services, it can be projected that $30.225 million of these were from World of Warcraft subscriptions. At $0.057 per hour (0.45 CNY), this attributes to a total of just over 630,000 active accounts by the most conservative estimates, assuming all players adhere to the law of only 9 hours of playtime in a 24 hour period.
This shows that of their 5.9 million activations, only about 11% are still currently active. If this is typical behavior for purchasers of World of Warcraft, then the total worldwide playerbase is more accurately stated as being between 660,000 - 770,000. Not nearly as impressive as their inflated advertisements would have gamers believe.
So, the next time you consider which online game to purchase, if you are drawn by the number of other players that you'll be able to connect with, keep in mind World of Warcraft's actual numbers when making your decision.
Comments
great post. keep it up.
I picked it up and covered it here http://mmostrategyguides.com/world_of_warcraft_inflates_sub.html
shoot me an email I'll send you the address in a PM.
http://codmw3.me
Didn't think WoW had that many numbers...
Seems logical since each server holds about 2000~3000 players and they have 100+ servers... nothing that could hold in the millions.
Maybe you should research what you are saying in your op-eds a little better.
Taken from here
Quote
"Customer base reaches 6 million players worldwide as Blizzard Entertainment® prepares its award-winning MMORPG for continued growth in Europe"
So there we run into your first problem. You are basing many of your conclusions from a chinese release. These numbers say nothing about what is going on in North America, or Europe.
Another one for you from that site
"World of Warcraft's Customer Definition
World of Warcraft customers include individuals who have paid a subscription fee or purchased a prepaid card to play World of Warcraft, as well as those who have purchased the installation box bundled with one free month access. Internet Game Room players that have accessed the game over the last thirty days are also counted as customers. The above definition excludes all players under free promotional subscriptions, expired or cancelled subscriptions, and expired pre-paid cards. Customers in licensees' territories are defined along the same rules."
Oh and BTW, I am far from a WoW fanboi, I only started playing about 2 months ago.
Maybe you should research what you are saying in your op-eds a little better.
Taken from here
Quote
"Customer base reaches 6 million players worldwide as Blizzard Entertainment® prepares its award-winning MMORPG for continued growth in Europe"
So there we run into your first problem. You are basing many of your conclusions from a chinese release. These numbers say nothing about what is going on in North America, or Europe.
Another one for you from that site
"World of Warcraft's Customer Definition
World of Warcraft customers include individuals who have paid a subscription fee or purchased a prepaid card to play World of Warcraft, as well as those who have purchased the installation box bundled with one free month access. Internet Game Room players that have accessed the game over the last thirty days are also counted as customers. The above definition excludes all players under free promotional subscriptions, expired or cancelled subscriptions, and expired pre-paid cards. Customers in licensees' territories are defined along the same rules."
Oh and BTW, I am far from a WoW fanboi, I only started playing about 2 months ago.
I've fully researched everything my article claims. I provided my source at the bottom of the article, if you'd like to refute it's validity, and can provide evidence that the source I quoted is false, please feel free to do so. However, refuting my statements with a press release from Blizzard themselves does not negate them, it in fact confirms them. The subject of the article is that statements made by Blizzard concerning the sales, and mainly the popularity, of World of Warcraft are false and/or misleading. Showing an article from Blizzard which makes claims that a financial statement contradicts only serves to strengthen the case against Blizzard.
I also bring attention to part of your second quote. "The above definition excludes all players under free promotional subscriptions, expired or cancelled subscriptions, and expired pre-paid cards". This shows that Blizzard claims that their definition of "customer" does not include anyone who only played a free trial, or anyone who does not have a current, active, payed account. Expired and Cancelled subscriptions are not included in their claims of the number of customers they have. This shows that Blizzard does in fact claim over 6 million active paying customers. A number which financial records clearly contradict.
In essence, your rebuttal to my op-ed article merely provides further evidence to my claim. Statements made by Blizzard concerning the number of paying customers they have in World of Warcraft are false.
I do appreciate all the feedback, however. I welcome any and all critique's, especially those that can provide legitimate, verifiable evidence.
You make some very bad assumptions in your write up. Just
one example is that you assume that all revenue from generated from the
game goes to the9 which isn't anywhere near the case.
You are also basing your write up on just the financial statement of this
company who has licensed the right to publish and promote the game in their
country with no knowledge of the publishing agreement between Blizzard and
the9. As a side note of interest, it is the law in China that you have to partner with
a Chinese company.
You should check out some of the census sites for WoW that have also pretty
much confirmed the numbers in Blizzard's press releases. The extrapolated
numbers of server population and breakdown using in game mods gave a decent
picture of actual active players which you can then use a little guesstimation on to add
paying but not being used accounts to equal the numbers in the press releases.
Last I read I think the latest numbers are somewhere around 7+ million now, 1-2
million US, 1 million Europe
and 4-5ish million in China.
In the end though, I believe Vivendi are a publicly traded
company and if Blizzard are lying about their numbers in a press release they would
opening them selves to some very big and
serious legal liability.
In the end though, what I really can't understand is your
point. You are arguing that people shouldn't play this game because there
arent as many people playing it as they claim. This seems to be an odd
thing base ones game playing decision on. I would rather base that sort
of thing on the opinions of people currently playing the game and whether or
not they are having fun and enjoying themselves.
Me personally I have decided never to listen to the
opinions of people who dont have a good thing to say about anything or those
who claim they never watch TV. It seems to be working for me so I'm going to stick with it. No claims made about it working for anybody else though. Use it at your own risk.
The time at which numbers become important is when deciding which server to play on. I try to pick a middle of the road population server. Too few and you have trouble with the economy and finding a good player base to build upon for guilds, raids etc. Too many and non-instanced areas are too crowded, etc etc.
I too do not really understand the point of this thread. It seems like good research, but I just can't get motivated to check on it. Perhaps it has something to do with not seeing the point. Maybe a statement of purpose would help.
As stated before, all one has to do is look at the stock annotations of Blizzard itself to see the true expenditures and profit that the company is getting.
Also, the common sense route: Get WoW, look at how many players are on each server at one given time. Unless all these players are the same person playing on multiple computers, common sense points towards Blizzard's veracity rather than a column on a random website.
LOL
Blizzard has just recently (within the last week or so) released a commercial into public television stating that there are 7 million players playing World of Warcraft. Unless suddenly overnight 90% of those players quit the game, you are most certainly wrong.
I also laughed at the above poster who thinks WoW has only 100 servers. There are probably closer to 400, and I'd be willing to bet that they support several thousand players each. Even a light estimate would put their daily concurrent users higher than 770,000, let alone their current subscriptions.
Most of the players who play WoW are considered "casual" players; that is, players who play only a few hours a week. 9 hours a day? I usually play more than that, but I certainly don't assume that other people do the same. To imply that there are less than a million players playing this game around the entire world is... well... laughable.
I'd also like to point out that posting a link to 27 pages of nonsensical financial statements doesn't really prove anything, and I'm not going to sort through that mess in order to decipher some poor assumption about a Chinese company.
Relm History
There you go, ctrl c the realms into a word document, get rid of community realms ((which is only 16))
Then do a wordcount, you get 315 words, and there are some realms that have 2 words for its name.
So I counted these and that it is approximately 38 extra words, which means 277 US and EU realms.
Now thinking realistically I'm guessing around ~3000 people per server but I'll throw in an extra 2000
due to low/medium/high pop servers, so we are looking at 5000 people per server, per side just to make
the numbers somewhat in your favor.
So thats 277 x 10,000
which is... 2,770,000
So unless those community realms are packing and WoW has another 3.63m customers in Asia they are
a little bit off the mark...
Just a thought, aswell as about 10 minutes worth of year 7 mathematics, mixed in with some logic too.
http://www.warcraftrealms.com/dbstats.php
Just gives a bit of insight into "real" numbers.
Caveats:
Only US / Europe servers
Character count > account count
But still, nearly 1.5 million unique toons seen in the past week, not including China, is pretty impressive. If you go with their numbers for 30 days, you get about 4.5 million unique toons, US / EU only. And it looks like there are about 400 US / EU servers.
I am no specialist. However, the only accurate information we have is the total amount of boxes WoW sold.
The big number they give us, like 7 millions or whatever, this is the SOLD boxes. Each of these subscribers where active subscribtion at a moment or another.
They prolly have less than 2 millions subscribing players for the month of november 2006, but, honestly, only Blizzard could tell us and they won't (maybe they can't, these database are huge and taking into account the free month, given time, promotions and so on might be a nightmare). They rather play with words and the fact they have sold X boxes. Which, from a marketing point of view, make sense.
Anyway, does it change much? It is a LOT of players, more than any other MMO ever got.
- "If I understand you well, you are telling me until next time. " - Ren