Sir Bruce updated his
amazing
MMOG stats page sometime in the last month. It now contains a lot
of text explaining the data and where it comes from, along with some
commentary. Two things pop out at me:
- The 150k+
chart shows that
Lineage and Lineage II are enormous, 4.5M users between them,
10x the size of Everquest. These are South Korean
games, totally different userbase.
- The 100k-500k
chart gives you more detail on the non-Lineage games. I'm
surprised how little drop-off these games have. Everquest has had 400k
subscribers for 3 years! (That's about $150M in revenue).
I'm reading
Richard
Bartle's
Designing Virtual Worlds
after seeing it on
Castranova's
syllabus. It suggests that 100k in a year is the benchmark for
MMOG success.