The Wrong Side Of History?

This morning I read an article on Massively about Aion's new expansion, Invasion.  Among the features listed is a new system that rewards players for logging in every day.  Of course, Aion is not the only game to do this.  When I played Neverwinter, sometimes all I would do was log in, press a button, receive a reward, and then log back out.  The longer my streak of logging in every day, the greater the rewards I could obtain.

Contrast that with what occurred in the Phoebe release on Tuesday.  CCP removed the 24-hour limit on the skills queue.  That's right, CCP now believes they receive more of a benefit from not forcing players to log in frequently to update their skills queue.

So who's right?  Possibly both.  Aion and Neverwinter are both free-to-play games, which depend on their cash shops.  Those games need players to log in to have the opportunity to entice them into buying the latest shiny.  EVE, on the other hand, is a subscription game, and allowing players to only train skills with out logging in gives CCP as much money as if they play 3 hours a day.

However, I think CCP will act as an outlier in the future as more game companies will become desperate for players to simply log into its games.  Daily quests are bad enough, but at least people are playing the game.  Getting rewards for just logging in?  Been there, done it, didn't like it.

The Digital Dozen: 29 May 2012

The rankings of the top twelve MMORPGs as determined by the players of the Xfire community from play on Sunday, 27 May 2012.  For more details about the methodology, click here.  Historical data can be found here.

Rank	Prev Week	Game	Score	Hours Played
1	1	World of Warcraft	52.9	44,900
2	2	Star Wars: The Old Republic	9.7	8,214
3	4	Aion	7.8	6,611
4	5	Eve Online	5.6	4,756
5	3	Tera	5.3	4,500
6	7	Metin 2	3.7	3,152
7	8	APB: Reloaded	3.5	3,009
8	6	Lord of the Rings Online	3.4	2,855
9	9	Guild Wars	2.5	2,123
10	10	Need For Speed World	2.0	1,709
11	12	Maple Story	1.9	1,573
12	11	Star Trek Online	1.7	1,479

 Total MMORPG hours played Sunday:120,053 

Overall, the Xfire gaming community spent 5.9% fewer hours playing MMORPGs than it did the week before.  The week's big gainers in terms of hours played were Eve Online (+19.6%) and Aion (+15.3%).  The week's big losers were Tera (-33.9%), Star Trek Online (-23.4%) and Star Wars: The Old Republic (-18.3%).

Setting The Universe On Fire:  CCP's Eve Online led the Digital Dozen with a 19.6% gain in the number of hours played based on the strength of the launch of Inferno, the game's 17th free expansion.  While CCP faces player discontent over the new unified inventory feature, players still showed an interest in the game, with the actual server numbers from Eve Offline showing an average concurrent user increase of 3.6% over the previous Sunday.  Will Eve suffer from a post-expansion drop-off next week or will the end of Hulkageddon V yesterday combined with damage control efforts on the unified inventory keep the numbers high?

The Free Month Is Over, Part 1:   The game that saw the largest drop in interest on Sunday was Blue Hole Studio's Tera.  Launched on 1 May, Sunday was the last day those who purchased the game at launch would get to play before playing a subscription fee.  Apparently players who had already made their decision to not renew also stopped playing.  The biggest beneficiary of this trend appears to be the free-to-play Korean import Aion.

The Free Month Is Over, Part 2:  The failure cascade for Star Wars: The Old Republic continues after a week that saw layoffs at Bioware's Austin studio, the home for SW:TOR's development and customer relations staff.  For the first time, the Xfire community failed to play SW:TOR for at least 10,000 hours on a Sunday and the game recorded its first Digital Dozen score of under 10.0.  The near-term future looks grim as this was the first Sunday after the expiration of the free 30 days of game time that was granted to all accounts containing either a level 50 character or having a legacy level of 6.  I believe that the granting of the free game time was an effort to make the subscription numbers look good for the end of year conference call and that players will stop playing in greater numbers over the course of June.

The Digital Dozen: 22 May 2012

The rankings of the top twelve MMORPGs as determined by the players of the Xfire community from play on Sunday, 20 May 2012.  For more details about the methodology, click here.  Historical data can be found here.

Rank	Prev Week	Game	Score	Hours Played
1	1	World of Warcraft	52.5	48,235
2	2	Star Wars: The Old Republic	10.9	10,051
3	3	Tera	7.4	6,813
4	4	Aion	6.2	5,735
5	5	Eve Online	4.3	3,977
6	8	Lord of the Rings Online	3.6	3,302
7	6	Metin 2	3.2	2,976
8	7	APB:Reloaded	3.0	2,799
9	9	Guild Wars	2.6	2,433
10	10	Need For Speed World	2.1	1,934
11	12	Star Trek Online	2.1	1,930
12	11	Maple Story	1.9	1,705

 Total MMORPG hours played Sunday:127,605 

Diablo 3:  To say that Diablo 3 had an impact on the gaming world last week is an understatement.  Not only did the number of hours the Xfire community played MMORPGs drop 16.8%, but the Xfire community played Diablo 3 over 40,000 hours more than it did all MMORPGs combined.  The big losers were Aion (-28%), World of Warcraft (-21.2%) and Star Wars: The Old Republic (-21.1%).

One Ring To Rule Them All:  Only one game in The Digital Dozen managed to buck the trend and actually see playtime rise.  Lord of the Rings Online, on the strength of the release of Update 7: Shades of the Past, last Monday, managed to pull of a 3.6% gain over the previous Sunday.  That gives hope for games like Eve Online, with Inferno launching today,  and SW:TOR with patch 1.3 due out in June/July, that Diablo 3 will not bury all games for months to come.

The Digital Dozen: 24 April 2012

The rankings of the top twelve MMORPGs as determined by the players of the Xfire community from play on Sunday, 22 April 2012.  For more details about the methodology, click here.  Historical data can be found here.

Rank	Prev Week	Game	Score	Hours Played
1	1	World of Warcraft	55.9	74,254
2	2	Star Wars: The Old Republic	16.2	21,595
3	3	Aion	7.4	9,812
4	4	Eve Online	3.7	4,876
5	8	APB:Reloaded	3.0	4,044
6	5	Lord Of The Rings Online	2.8	3,692
7	7	Metin 2	2.5	3,258
8	6	Guild Wars	2.2	2,898
9	11	Need For Speed World	1.9	2,463
10	10	Rift	1.7	2,263
11	9	Star Trek Online	1.4	1,903
12	12	Maple Story	1.4	1,864

 Total MMORPG hours played Sunday:175,127 

Time to drive:  In a week that saw a drop of 8% in overall MMORPG hours played by Xfire members, two games in the Digital Dozen saw double-digit gains.  APB:Reloaded saw a 40.4% jump based on the release of version 1.7 plus the give-a-way of a 3-day premium code to make up for the server issues upon launch.  Need For Speed World saw an 11.4% increase in time played following the release of the 2010 BMW M6 Coupé plus a 30% off sale in the cash shop.

Luster fades quickly: Two games that experienced gains on the 15th, Star Wars: The Old Republic and Aion, saw those gains evaporate Sunday.  Despite players trying to get that free month of play and another free weekend for new players, the Bioware offering saw almost all its gains from patch 1.2 disappear as its hours dropped 13.7%.  Aion did see the gains from the Ascension launch disappear plus more as the game saw a drop of 15.1% in hours played.

Beta Madness:  With all the games that will come out this spring and summer, open betas are all around.  This weekend saw two open beta weekends of significance, Tera and Diablo III.  Tera managed to pull 1,585 hours on Sunday, indicating that it may debut on the Digital Dozen on the first Sunday of May.  The other beta, Diablo III, attracted 38,581 hours and probably contributed to the 9.5% decline in the hours played in World of Warcraft Sunday.

 

The Digital Dozen: 17 April 2012

The rankings of the top twelve MMORPGs as determined by the players of the Xfire community from play on Sunday, 15 April 2012.  For more details about the methodology, click here.  Historical data can be found here.

Rank	Prev Week	Game	Score	Hours Played
1	1	World of Warcraft	55.9	82,020
2	2	Star Wars: The Old Republic	17.1	25,028
3	3	Aion	7.9	11,551
4	4	Eve Online	3.4	5,035
5	5	Lord of the Rings Online	2.8	4,104
6	6	Guild Wars	2.5	3,682
7	7	Metin 2	2.3	3,358
8	8	APB:Reloaded	2.0	2,881
9	10	Star Trek Online	1.6	2,358
10	12	Rift	1.6	2,342
11	9	Need For Speed World	1.5	2,211
12	11	Maple Story	1.4	2,122

 Total MMORPG hours played Sunday:190,301 

As expected, the technical glitch I saw with the Xfire numbers was fixed and the total hours played in MMORPGs declined by 21.5%, or close to my estimate of 20%.   As such I'll be doing any comparisons to 1 April instead of to last week's numbers.

Expansions Rule - If you want to see the number of hours played jump, just publish an expansion for your MMO.  The two games with major gains in the Xfire charts, Star Wars: The Old Republic (16.6%) and Aion (10.5%) both launched expansions this week.  Aion: Ascension brings along with free-to-play a level cap increase from 55 to 60, siege warfare that occurs 3 times a day, player housing and mounts.  SW:TOR Update 1.2: Legacy brings a new planet, a new PvP  war zone, UI updates and a pet.  Bioware also did something controversial in awarding 30 days free playtime to those with a level 50 character on their accounts.

The reason for the controversy is that called those with max level characters its "most valued players".  Yipes!  Bioware eventually had to revise its offer from just those who had level 50 characters on 12 April to having either a level 50 character or have a legacy level 6 account by 22 April.  With a month's free game time on the line, the average Xfire member who logged into SW:TOR on Sunday averaged 5.7 hours in the game.

Follow The Money - Why did Bioware decide to give out 30 days of playtime to those with level 50s on their accounts?  If only 10% of the 1.7 million accounts reported on the Electronic Arts Q3 FY 2012 Earnings Call met the qualification, that is over $2.5 million in game time.  With rumors swirling of impending layoffs and a loss of nearly 40% of its stock price since November, why give up millions of dollars in revenues?

The first is that ranked war zones are not included in the patch.  This disappointed a lot of players who were eager to see this feature implemented.  The offer is designed to help mitigate the disappointment and keep players from leaving the game.  The second is to make the subscription numbers look as good as possible before the upcoming conference call discussing EA's Q4 2012 results.  Although EA's fiscal year ended on 31 March, the call is not just about the past quarter but what the game company expects to happen in the coming quarter and year as well.  If the Xfire numbers are reflective at all about the number of players who left SW:TOR, one of Bioware's major products, then the numbers may come as a shock to investors.

One way to lessen the shock could be to make update 1.2 appear more successful than it really is.  If all the accounts are given 30 days of playtime, that means those accounts will still count toward the subscription numbers when the earnings call occurs.  If EA can say that the decline in subscriptions is normal for MMORPGs but that Legacy is bringing in new players and that Bioware's planned content update schedule will help ensure a rising player base, then perhaps the stock price won't take too big of a hit.  If I didn't know about the funny business with the free time giveaway, I would think that a perfectly reasonable analysis.

Daily Hours Played - Xfire

The weird thing is that I actually thought based on the Xfire numbers that SW:TOR had finally reached a plateau and was stabilizing around 15,000 - 17,000 hours played on weeknights and people were just less excited about playing on the weekend.  SW:TOR had since the beginning seen a higher number of hours played per person than the average game.  I just saw the hours on the weekends finally getting down to MMORPG norms.  I planned to write an analysis similar to this last week but then Xfire had the issue where it added one hour to everyone's playtime and I decided to wait one more week to see better numbers.  Or, in other words, I chickened out.