Subs down 25%

The republic on gamebreakertv is the 25% thread killer.

I really love this game, but at this point they need to do something and fast or we will see a new warhammer, 1.3 is coming, we dont know when, but im scared that ranked warzone wont be in that update, if that happen, im sry but this game will lost so many people at once, Im a fanboy since day 1, but i know what will happen without ranked in the next update.

FWIW it seemed to me too that the meaning of "casual" for a business discussion isn't likely to be the same as we MMO players (and developers) mean by "casual". It doesn't seem likely to pertain to "casual" as opposed to "hardcore" (which was the bone of contention in the discussion with Andryah), but "casual" as in "trying the game casually".

Why is it unlikely? Because the "casual" v. "hardcore" distinction is meaningless in the context of a subscription discussion. It's a distinction that's mainly about how much time a player puts into the game once they've paid their sub. But the businessperson is only interested in the sub itself, they could care less how much the player takes advantage of their subscription.

More sad news http://mobile.reuters.com/article/id...120507?irpc=43

What so many people seem to fail to grasp is what the numbers mean and what time periods they are from. Read the report and think about it. The 1.7 million subs was a number that was current at the end of December as the report says. The 1.3 million subs reported just today are from the end of March. Let's think about this for a minute. It was 1.7 million at the end of December. That means everyone who was playing the game was in their free 30-day period. So anyone who so much as created an account and input their game code was being counted. The report released today is from the beginning of January to the end of March. That means that those who played their free 30-days and then left (very common for MMOs) were part of those 400,000 subs lost. Then, the amount of people who actually had 1-month subs and then left (not as common but common enough) were also counted.

What that leaves are the people who subbed for 3-months and 6-months as far as who invested early and now won't continue to. We won't have any numbers affected by the 3-month subbers until the next report months from now. We won't have the numbers affected by the 6-month subbers until after the summer is over and those are rarely a significant number of subs. According to what was stated before the game even released, the game only needs 500,000 subs to turn a profit. They are still sitting on nearly 3 times that amount. Most MMOs that are P2P or former P2P barely have a couple hundred thousand. Very few or none that I am aware of (please correct me if I'm wrong) can even say that they have or had 1 million subs even at their peak.

The game is fine. The server populations have been averaging 20 to 30% Light for a couple months now. These sub numbers are not recent losses. They very likely took these losses between January 20th and February 20th and then remained stable afterwards. Daniel Erickson likely didn't lie when he said subs weren't dropping because you have to consider when he made that statement. It was well after the end of March. I find it likely that 1.3 million was the stable number after their one-shot subbers and freeloaders left.

Exactly.

I am sorry

What ^ said, particularly when BW sold this game as a groundbreaking, immersive PvE story experience. Which it was until level 50.

Repeating dailies or puttering through PvP that has been intentionally altered to create a slower, more tedious gear grind do not remotely resemble content.

I'm not reading tea leaves. I just happen to be aware that the context of analysts calls is very different then the context of customer discussion. Nothing magic about it, it is common in many segments of the industry that touches mass consumerism.

In the context of the MMO community, "causal" means someone who plays either infrequently, or often solo, moves at their own pace, often have busy RL and RL takes priority, and is in many ways the antithesis of "hardcore"

In the context of an analyst/invester call on a subscription based consumer entertainment product, "casual" means a transitory customer, one who purchases and trys the product but does not retain a subscription to the product (for whatever reason). Then there are "Free Trial" customers (distinguished from actual purchasers of the product).

AND it is telling that they actually lumped "casual" and "trial" together in their discussion as it distinguishes from what they consider a "stable customer" (one who recurringly subscribes, sometimes called "mature" or "stable" in their parlance).

To translate into MMO community context: I guess we could best categorize these players in the MMO community as either A) people who simply won't pay a subscription for a game. You know, like the very vocal "the game needs to be F2P" crowd, which is pretty large these days. or B) people who try the game for a bit but for whatever reason they decide not to continue through to paid recurring subscriptions. In the MMO community this could be a person from any demographic as we know it. C) people who mostly play FPS shooter games and buy and treat this MMO as a single player game to be won and then tossed aside (I actually believe there are a lot of these in the 2+ million boxes sold).

wait? So they were expecting to take on its biggest rival, World of Warcraft? So they copy WoW almost to the T, but leave out so much of the quality of life stuff that WoW has now? I'm sorry, but in order to take on WoW, you literally have to take a huge chunk of their player base away from them, and you do not do that by leaving out so much of the quality of life features that WoW has that the player base has been accustomed to. That is just crazy