Why the disappointed don't leave...

where are you getting mmo population numbers?

the point is, it is still damn healthy.

All my main points stand.

It is ridiculous. It's why MMO's are at best stagnating and at worst a dying genre.

The industry headed that way because it is easier and cheaper to make a solo game than to make a true group-oriented game. Now they are finding out that people aren't willing to pay a subscription to play solo games because there are zillions of solo games out there that you don't need a subscription for. Modern MMO's offer nothing unique from solo games. They have devolved into solo games with semi-regularly released DLC.

As always, this is not to say that a solo-friendly option is a bad thing, but when it is the only option, what's the point?

EA released numbers recently on TOR. I am paraphrasing here...so bear with me...I might be slightly off.

TOR has around 500,000 sub accounts and close to 2M free/preferred accounts.

That easily puts it in 2nd or 3rd, especially when you consider the massive amount of free players this game has even if 50% of those accounts are inactive.

Yup. What I love is the argument that free players dont count. This short-sighted answer ignores that free players are the ones spending the most in the cartel markets. The game is not a pure sub game anymore, so looking at it from only a pure sub perspective is incredibly asinine. The cartel market is pulling in gobs of cash.

They are counting how much new accounts are created not how much are cancelled. The funny thing is till now you cannot really cancel an account with EA/WARE so their number show a lot of accounts that are really not active at all. Only the payment sub can be cancelled but not the whole account. I, as many other people have tried to totally cancel my account, as to have my data erased from their servers, unfortunately that is not possible. Yay for corporate manipulation of artificially keeping their sub numbers high!

A dying genre? You mean the deluge of MMOs is a dying genre? Every developer on the PLANET wants a piece of the MMO pie. The genre is hardly dying. Its bigger than its ever been...and that's part of the problem. The player base is spread over many, many games and each game has a thin population.

Except for WoW, every game is fighting for a piece of the pie.

The genre isn't dying and its not stagnating. These are buzzwords that uninformed gamers throw around when they just want to say "I don't like the games that are coming out because they don't fit MY definition of an MMO".

well put

That was new accounts since F2P launch. But that is beside the point because they also stated they had a run rate of active accounts at ~1M too.

I got the impression from Bioware comments that subscribers are actually the larger buying force in the CM. Which actually makes sense. That said...it is also clear that nonsubs are significant buyers as well... to get a bump to preferred status, to gain unlocks to expand their Free features, etc.

In the end though...none of that matters. What matters is average revenue per month per active account. This is the industry measure of Freemium games. Game companies like to see a nice distribution across the player demographics in terms of revenue, but in the end.. the macro measure is the aggregate average per active account per month. They also like good conversion rates (which is rate of conversions from free to sub in the active base), and they have made it clear that this metric is exceeding their expectations (ie: better then planned for). Conversion rate tells them how well their free component of the business model is doing (ie: how well it draws in new subs). Sci Fi MMOs tend to have better conversion rates then fantasy in the industry, and Europe tends to have better conversion rates then NA, and conversion rate indicates how well tuned your freemium model actually is. The industry as a whole targets 25% from my recollection of the research papers on the subject.