Thursday, July 22, 2010

MMOData Charts version 3.0 is Live !

A few key changes and thoughts :

I added Star Trek Online to the charts, it started not so bad at a bit over 100k in the first month, but declined in the following months.

A remarkable recovery can be seen by Age of Conan, which dropped to an estimated low of 79k but then revived to around 115k. It seems the dev team is focussed on improving the game and it pays off.

Lord of the Rings online had a serious drop in subs since last datapoint from June 2009, so it was only logical Turbine introduced the free to play ( try ) model, especially as it worked so well with Dungeons and Dragons Online. If LOTRO has the same increase in subs as DDO had, then we may look at a 400k subs game this time next year.

EVE Online had it's biggest increase ( 40k ) of month over month since it's release, which is pretty amazing for a 7 year old game. It now has 361k subs. Do note that there were some special marketing actions running, and CCP expects to lose many of the newcommers, still if they can hold on to half of them they will have around 340k subs which is still more than the previous high of 329k in March.
They also scored a new PCU record of 60k.

Second Life PCU is going back up well, still not at the same level as before the new bot policy and enforcement, but they will get there eventually I am sure.
Also got 2 numbers which I can't put in a chart yet but are interesting nonetheless : Unique residents spending L$ per month is at 517k and Monthly Unique User Repeat Logins per 30 days is at 826k. Especially the 517k is interesting because it is similar to subscription based numbers and can be used to give an idea how many "subs" second life has.

Aion looks to hold steady now after a bit of a decline, while Warhammer Online keeps going down.

Version 2.9 - 3.0 notes :

General Changes :

- Added Star Trek Online to the charts.
- Added and/or revised subscription datapoints for following mmo's :
Age of Conan, The Matrix Online, Star Trek Online, The Lord of the Rings online, Everquest II, Warhammer Online, Aion, Dungeons and Dragons Online, Everquest, EVE Online.
- Added PCU datapoints for following mmo's :
Second Life, EVE Online.
- Added WoW datapoints representing the extended China downtime during 2009.
- Renamed PCU on the largest single cluster shards into PCU on the biggest shards.
- Removed some spam/advertisement comments/posts from the site.
- Fixed some spelling errors.
- Expanded the date range for several charts.
- Revised market share genre chart.
- Improved some color codings.
- Made the site better viewable for resolutions of 1200 x 900 or higher.
- Made a seperate section for the site hit counter.
- Re-ordered mmo's from charts Subs-40k-150k and Subs-0-40k into Subs-50k-150k and Subs-0-50k.
- Renamed the links to most of the charts, if you directly linked to the charts you will need to update most links, I made the names more universal so I don't have to rename them in the near future when individual charts expand or collapse.

Internal Changes :

- Added and revised notes and/or links to datapoints for several MMORPG's.
- Added xfire information.
- Added MUURL datapoint for Second Life.
- Added Unique Residents Spending L$ per Month datapoints for Second Life.
- Expanded all sheets to Juli 2010.
- Revised Cas Derivations sheet.
- Changed names of internal charts for easier updating.

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