The Shrine

http://eu.blizzard.com/en-gb/company/pr ... tml?101007

*Throws your theories on subscriptions out the window*

World of Warcraft subscribers include individuals who have paid a subscription fee or have an active prepaid card to play World of Warcraft, as well as those who have purchased the game and are within their free month of access. Internet Game Room players who have accessed the game over the last thirty days are also counted as subscribers. The above definition excludes all players under free promotional subscriptions, expired or cancelled subscriptions, and expired prepaid cards. Subscribers in licensees' territories are defined along the same rules.

That is very very impressive.

I have considered the game myself, but I would prefer a pay per hour rate rather than a monthly fee with unlimited access; mostly because I can't see myself playing more than spurts of 5-15 hours once every 3-6 months.

Even if they offered something like: Pay 2-3 bucks now for a day of access.

Consider China is regularly pumping out stats like 3 million concurrent users on games nobody has ever heard of I really question the validity of a model where you count anybody who has accessed your game at some point as a 'subscriber'. As far as I can tell the model there works like say I pay $3 an hour (or whatever the rate is) to some gaming pub, and from there I can play any game I want, and if I played 15 games in the span of one hour I show up as a subscriber to 15 different games for that month. This is getting closer to the F2P's model of subscriber base and there's no shortage of games with zillions of subscribers on that model. If you play your game primarily in one of those gaming pubs and you have even a passing interest in WoW you'd almost certainly log the character on at some point in a one month period even if it's just to say hi to your friends during one of your gaming sessions, but you're definitely not a $X/month subscriber in the sense the western world thinks of one.

It's more realistic to look at the revenue under the quarterly reports, though without knowing how much money they get out of each person it's really hard to tell since microtransactions can potentially be a very large part of the revenue so you can have a declining player base and still maintain the same revenue if you're only able to get more money out of each person (airline fees are quite successful at doing this). The revenue for WoW seems to be going up, but without seeing a breakdown of where it comes from it's really hard to make anything out of it. It's not even clear what qualifies as 'MMORPG' (box sales count?) so there's certainly a lot of wiggle room to make the numbers look good.

Here's a chart on peak concurrent users:

http://users.telenet.be/mmodata/Charts/PCU-1.png

Although I don't usually trust these sites you can usually assume very big numbers going straight up almost certainly came from press releases. Sure people can lie about press releases but it gives you an idea of what is a reasonable range to lie about. Note that WoW is the only game that isn't broken down by region (it just says Global). You can see that games regularly can gain or lose a million concurrent users, so it seems like if you need to fluff your population with a million or two you can get that rather easily from Asia. The game at the top is close to 3 milion concurrent users, so how many subscribers does it have? 20 million? Yet I bet you've never heard of that game!

Now you might say if it's so easy to get those numbers why don't WoW just say '25 million subscribers can't be wrong'. Well first I think the difference between 25 and 10 million isn't that significant if you're using it as a 'everyone else is doing it so you should too!' ad campaign. Also, I think if Blizzard comes up with ridiculous numbers people might realize that 95% of those guys are in China and just start disregarding them. I think Asia is almost like your ringer population. If you need to put a press release with large numbers you go to them, but I don't think they actually make you a lot of money. I doubt the top game on that list makes anywhere near what WoW makes.