The Digital Dozen: 27 March 2012

The rankings of the top twelve MMORPGs as determined by the players of the Xfire community from play on Sunday, 25 March 2012.  For more details about the methodology, click here.

Rank	Prev Week	Game	Score	Hours Played
1	1	World of Warcraft	57.4	82,619
2	2	Star Wars: The Old Republic	17.3	23,330
3	3	Aion	6.9	9,904
4	4	Eve Online	3.4	4,828
5	5	Lord of the Rings Online	2.7	3,839
6	7	Metin 2	2.4	3,390
7	6	Guild Wars	2.2	3,216
8	9	APB:Reloaded	2.1	2,974
9	8	Star Trek Online	2.0	2,856
10	11	Rift	1.7	2,451
11	12	Need For Speed World	1.6	2,357
12	10	Maple Story	1.5	2,175

 Total MMORPG hours played Sunday: 191,247
Note: SW:TOR numbers updated on 2 April

Overall, the amount of hours spent playing MMORPGs by the Xfire community decreased by 7.3% from the previous week but was still up 4% from 11 March.

SWTOR's Second Free Trial - Last weekend Bioware launched a second free trial weekend for brand new players in Star Wars: The Old Republic.  This indicates that the first weekend was so good that they could maintain the momentum.  The numbers show that the second weekend did not do so well, at least among the less-casual gamers who use Xfire.  In a week that saw a 7.3% overall decline in overall MMORPG play, SWTOR saw its numbers drop 11.2%.  A more troubling indicator for Bioware is that despite two free trials, the number of hours played actually slipped 2% from 11 March to 25 March while the Xfire number of hours played actually increased by 4%.

Expanding the bot rule - When making this week's list, I had to exclude three games, Supreme Destiny (15 hours), Atlantica Online (10 hours) and Silkroad Online (9 hours) from consideration due to the unbelievable number of hours played by the average gamer.

Eve Online and bots - Speaking of bots, CCP has put into place rules that could smooth out the changes in the number of hours played in Eve Online.  At last week's Fanfest, CCP's internet security chief CCP Sreegs announced that botters would be banned on a daily basis.  No more group bannings as occurred at the end of February.

Speaking of the effects of bots, as I pointed out last week I could not gauge the effect of the bots due to the servers not allowing players to log in for a significant amount of time.  Having the servers work all day was a contributing factor in Eve being one of two games in The Digital Dozen (Star Trek Online the other) to see the numbers played increase.  But going back to 11 March, Eve has seen an increase of 6.9% in hours played vs the general increase of 4%.  However, I can't really tell if the increase is due to botters returning or the excitement generated by Fanfest.

Where Is The Originality?

I started to drop out of popular culture long before 2005 when I started playing World of Warcraft.  Television was lame, with reality TV making an introduction with Survivor and American Idol back in 2002.  Movies?  Besides The Lord of The Rings trilogy (2001-2003), I didn't see anything of interest.  Music?  Country music isn't exactly mainstream, although Taylor Swift and appearances on The Apprentice by Trace Adkins and John Rich put the genre a little more into the spotlight.  Books?  Science fiction and fantasy isn't mainstream either.  In short, I was out of the mainstream and enjoying life.

I wasn't aware just how unoriginal popular culture has become until I looked at last year's top 10 list of movies in terms of worldwide gross.  Here they are:

1. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2
2. Transformers: Dark of the Moon
3. Pirates of the Carribbean: On Stranger Tides
4. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1
5. Kung Fu Panda 2
6. Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol
7. Fast Five
8. The Hangover Part II
9. The Smurfs
10. Cars 2

Nine of the top ten movies were sequels.  And after having a drill sergeant we called Papa Smurf, I wouldn't want to watch the tenth movie as I might become traumatized.

But are MMORPGs any better in terms of originality where their intellectual properties are concerned?  Looking at the five most popular Western MMOs from yesterday's Digital Dozen post, the answer is discouraging.

The 800 pound gorilla of the genre, World of Warcraft, started with an IP created for their successful Warcraft RTS games.  By the time WoW launched on the 10th anniversary of the release of the Warcraft franchise, the game was the fourth one set in the world of Azeroth.  While very successful, as an intellectual property not very original.

While unoriginal in its application to an MMORPG, at least Blizzard created the IP, unlike 3 of the other 4 games in the top 5.  The #2 game, Star Wars: The Old Republic, relies on the Star Wars universe and LucasArts is listed as co-publisher of the game along with Electronic Arts on Wikipedia.  The #4 game, Lord of the Rings Online, relies on the world created by H.R. Tolkien, although Turbine does not have rights to works like The Silmarillion.  The #5 game, Star Trek Online, uses the universe created by Gene Roddenberry. 

That accounts for 4 or the top 5 games.  What about the #3 ranked game, Eve Online?  Bucking the trend amongst the most successful MMORPGs (and movies), CCP created an original intellectual property we now know as New Eden.  CCP didn't just create a world and then leave story generation to players.  Over the past nine years CCP has added to the story to the point that the lore information was reorganized into the Fiction Portal in the Evelopedia.  With thousands of pages of information, famed explorer Mark726 of Eve Travel in conjunction with Seismic Stan has published a lore guide on Freebooted that gives a rather long summary of the Eve Online IP.

But Eve Online launched in 2003.  Are we condemned to see major game studios pushing unoriginal intellectual properties to us?  I don't think so.  Last year's surprise hit Rift climbed as high as #5 on Xfire among video games of all genres and last week was the 11th most played MMORPG.  In April, Funcom plans on releasing The Secret World, an MMORPG in the modern world with the premise that three ancient conspiracies are at war with each other and with ancient evils.  A game about conspiracies promises a lot of originality in looking at myths and legends.

Perhaps the most intriguing use of an intellectual property may come from Curt Schilling's 38 Studios.  Schilling hired R. A. Salvatore to create a world for the company's Project Copernicus that was used for the sRPG Kingdom's of Amalur: Reckoning.  In 2004 Blizzard released an MMO based on a world created for a RTS series.  Will Project Copernicus launch to a ready-made player base already invested in the Amalur world?  CCP had a lot of growing pains as it slowly climbed up the charts.  Has 38 Studios found a winning formula, at least as far as their IP is concerned, to avoid that?

The Digital Dozen: 21 February 2012

The rankings of the top twelve MMORPGs as determined by the players of the Xfire community from play on Sunday, 12 February 2012.  For more details about the methodology, click here.

Rank	Prev Week	Game	Score	Hours Played
1	1	World of Warcraft	54.8	91,328
2	2	Star Wars: The Old Republic	21.6	35,943
3	4	Eve Online	3.1	5,105
4	6	Lord of the Rings Online	2.8	4,697
5	5	Aion	2.8	4,602
6	3	Star Trek Online	2.7	4,505
7	8	Metin 2	2.5	4,140
8	7	Guild Wars	2.2	3,687
9	9	Need For Speed World	2.2	3,596
10	11	APR: Reloaded	1.9	3,116
11	12	Rift	1.8	3,036
12	10	Maple Story	1.7	2,810

 Total MMORPG hours played Sunday: 213,883


Why the overall decline in hours played from last week?  Last week was a down week for the hours played in the twelve most popular MMORPGs on Xfire.  The overall decline of 5.6% was lead by four games that saw over a 10% drop in playtime from the previous week: Star Trek Online (-20.7%), Star Wars: The Old Republic (-14.4%), Maple Story (-12.5%) and Aion (-10.9%).  Those 4 games accounted for 82% of the overall decrease in time played.  Why?

Server stability issues hurt - Maple Story continued its decline from its 2012 high of 5,616 hours played on 15 January following issues that began after a game update on 18 January.  These issues required a rollback on 27 January back to a restore point on 24 January.  That was bad enough, but due to continuing issues Nexon made additional offers of free items to players on 30 January, 1 February and 3 February.  As CCP found out last year, the financial situation can get bad when the veteran players become disgruntled.  Maple Story apparently is facing its own problems with hackers, exploiters and bugged content.  CCP took months to recover and wound up laying off 20% of its workforce as financial issues forced the Icelandic company to scale back its ambitious plans.  Maple Story is in free fall, seeing a drop of almost 50% in the past month.

The new internet spaceship smell is gone - Star Trek Online led the decline in percentage terms this week as the game hit the one-month mark as a free-to-play game.  The popularity surged to a peak on 5 February when Cryptic celebrated the two-year anniversary of the opening of the servers by giving away free stuff.  The peak was short lived and players are moving on to greener pastures.

Converting from subscription to free-to-play - The Korean MMORPG Aion is in the process of converting from a subscription based game in the West to a F2P game.  Not only is the game changing payment models, it is also changing publishers.  NCSoft will hand over the running of the game to Gameforge, publishers of Wizard 101 and this week's #7 ranked game Metin 2.  This does pose some short-term problems for the game as some players don't like playing in F2P games.  A bigger issue may be the actual transfer of accounts between NCSoft and Gameforge.  Are players comfortable with the process?  And will new players hold off on subscribing until the changeover is complete?  The wait may be over as closed beta finished yesterday.  So while the numbers are down now, expect a surge from Aion in the very near future.

The fourth pillar is crumbling - I can explain what is occurring in the first three games fairly easily, but what can I say about Star Wars: The Old Republic?  This week's 14.4% decline in time played is just part of a larger decline of 49.1% in time played since 15 January.  15 January is a significant date as it is the last date that everyone who had purchased SW:TOR counted as a subscriber.  Starting on 20 January people could decline to subscribe.  If the Xfire numbers are representative of the entire player base, EA and Bioware are in danger of not having the 1 million subscribers they feel they need to be successful. 

Why is SW:TOR having the huge drop-off?  Don't blame WoW tourists.  Since 15 January World of Warcraft has seen a drop of 13% in hours played.  If I had to guess, the emphasis on the story, which I really liked when I played, isn't enough to keep people playing the game multiple times through.

The Digital Dozen: 12 February 2012

The rankings of the top twelve MMORPGs as determined by the players of the Xfire community from play on Sunday, 12 February 2012.  For more details about the methodology, click here.

Rank	Prev Week	Game	Score	Hours Played
1	1	World of Warcraft	52.7	92,988
2	2	Star Wars: The Old Republic	23.8	41,991
3	4	Star Trek Online	3.2	5,679
4	6	Eve Online	3.0	5,322
5	5	Aion	2.9	5,164
6	8	Lord of the Rings Online	2.6	4,642
7	3	Guild Wars	2.2	3,923
8	11	Metin 2	2.2	3,814
9	9	Need For Speed World	2.0	3,609
10	7	Maple Story	1.8	3,213
11	10	APB: Reloaded	1.8	3,173
12	12	Rift	1.7	2,806

Internet Spaceships Is Serious Business!  For the first time I can remember, the top 3 games not named World of Warcraft are all science-fiction MMORPGs.  Star Wars: The Old Republic is still riding high in the #2 spot based on its very successful launch, Star Trek Online gained new life and soared to #3 after its move to free-to-play on 17 January, and Eve Online is recovering from last year's debacle called Incarna.  If Star Trek Online can maintain its popularity and Eve regains the steady growth it had been famous for over its first 8 years, perhaps we will see more sci-fi MMORPGs in the near future.

Is LucasArts screwing over another MMO?  While listening to The Instance #263 Sunday Turpster pointed out that the EA marketing team is strangely quiet lately.  Has anyone else noticed all the advertising for the 3D version of The Phantom Menace?  Turpster has and thinks that LucasArts had a hand in EA's inactivity.  Looking for evidence, I looked at the script from the EA Q3 Conference Call and noticed that EA planned on increasing their advertising buys during Q4 (p7).  But if they plan on spending more, where is the spending?  I would have thought that the Super Bowl would have been the perfect opportunity to publicize the game, but the only thing Star Wars I saw were adds for The Phantom Menace.

According to the numbers from Xfire, the number of hours played has decreased 40% since 15 January, the last Sunday before the first players who bought the game at launch needed to choose to pay money to subscribe.  This trend is making SW:TOR look bad.  Would the decline be less if EA was more active with its marketing efforts?  Or, for conspiracy theorists, would the decline be less if LucasArts hadn't muzzled EA?  Hey, a lot of people remember Star Wars: Galaxies and the NGE.  LucasArts didn't cover itself in glory back then.  Is history repeating itself?

The Nosy Gamer's Digital Dozen

Is Star Wars: The Old Republic losing subscriptions?  How is Rift doing after one year?  What has been the effect of Star Trek Online going free-to-play?  How badly is World of Warcraft really dropping?  And has Eve Online really recovered from the Summer of Rage?  I can tell you the answer to the last question because CCP makes concurrent user data available to developers through an API so all I have to do is visit Chribba's Eve Offline website and look for myself.  But other game developers and publishers are not as open with sharing information that may place their games in a negative light.  So I have created my own system for ranking the top MMORPGs based on statistics gathered from the Xfire MMORPG games page on 5 February 2012.

Rank	Game	Score	Hours Played
1	World of Warcraft	49.8	88,221
2	Star Wars: The Old Republic	25.2	44,717
3	Guild Wars	4.0	7,078
4	Star Trek Online	3.2	5,757
5	Aion	3.0	5,338
6	Eve Online	2.7	4,771
7	Maple Story	2.6	4,540
8	Lord of the Rings Online	2.5	4,465
9	Need For Speed World	2.0	3,559
10	APB: Reloaded	1.7	2,995
11	Metin 2	1.7	2,955
12	Rift	1.6	2,806

I'll give my take on what I found interesting looking at the numbers, but first an explanation of what is in the chart.

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How is the score derived?  The score is a percentage calculated by taking the hours played for a game and dividing that by the total hours played for the 12 most played MMORPGs by XFire users. 

Is Xfire a reliable source of information?  When I first heard of trying to use Xfire to gauge subscription numbers for a game, I was a little dubious.  I still am.  According to Wikipedia, Xfire is a proprietary freeware instant messaging service for gamers, that also serves as a game server browser and has various other features, including recording how long users play a video game and which video games users play. More importantly, Xfire currently has over 20 million registered users, with frequently over 200,000 users online.  That is a large collection of users that should make the information produced valid for my purposes as long as I am careful in how I use that data.

Why create a score?  Why not just use the total hours played?  While the base of users is quite large, the numbers are not consistent across time.  For instance, on Sunday, 10 April 2011 Xfire recorded that users played Eve Online a total of 2087 hours.  Last Sunday Xfire recorded users played Eve a total of XXXX hours.  Does anyone really believe that Eve has grown in use by 50%?  So instead of measuring hours played, I will compare the top 11 games against each other to look at the share of the market they are capturing against the their closest competitors.  But in this case, time, not money, is the commodity I am tracking, which makes sense since a player can own two or more games.

Your list is wrong. Guild Wars is not an MMORPG! - Since I am not an expert on the MMORPG market, I will use Xfire's definition of what games are MMORPGs and which games are not.

Why 12 games?  Because "Digital Dozen" seemed like a cool name.  I originally intended to track 11 games, but eleven is just too odd to use.  The reason for using eleven is that if I wanted to throw World of Warcraft out of the mix to do some analysis, then that list would have had ten games.  But sometimes marketing wins out over analysis.

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The News:  The biggest question is: how is Star Wars: The Old Republic really doing?  According to the Electronic Arts Q3 FY2012 Conference Call, SW:TOR has an average of 1 million players logging onto their servers every day and still maintain 1.7 million of the 2 million players who purchased the game.  But a controversy is brewing over the date that was really referred to on the call.  The key date is 20 January.  That is the date that those who started playing at launch (or in the early period) would need to subscribe to keep playing.  So how did SW:TOR do with keeping players using Xfire?  Not so good.  From 15 January to 22 January the number of hours played decreased by 14.8%, which closely correlates with the approximately 85% retention rate reported on the call.

Looking at the hours played on every Sunday from the beginning of the year, the number of hours played decreased 41.2%  Was that due to school starting again?  I don't think so.  Looking at World of Warcraft, the number of hours played only decreased by 4.4%.  It is possible that SW:TOR is bringing a lot of people new to the genre so the old bitter gaming vets leaving the game may not represent the player population.  But given the correlation between the Xfire numbers and those reported by EA, I don't believe that is true.  The Xfire numbers decreased 36.6% from 15 January to 5 February, meaning that EA could be facing some problems, although 1.3 million subscribers is still excellent.

Star Trek Online is moving up in popularity following its switch to free-to-play on 17 January.  If the numbers are correct, Eve Online has moved from the biggest science fiction MMORPG at the beginning of December to the third largest today despite seeing the hours played in New Eden increasing by 7.5% since the beginning of the year.  Of course, last weekend marked ST:O's second anniversary and Cryptic/Atari was giving out a lot of goodies.  It will be interesting to see what happens with the game over the next few weeks.