In the world of PC MMOs, ten thousand subscribers is around the lines of Asheron’s Call, Pirates of the Caribbean Online, and Planetside. For a large company, the number can mean imminent cancellation of a title, as it no longer becomes profitable to develop for, let alone run the servers. Others wing it, limping on with what they have, determined to please those who have stayed loyal, and possibly turn around the trend.
For Tibia Mobile Edition (That is the mobile version of Tibia on the PC), ten thousand subscribers puts the title at WoW status in its league. The first, and now officially the largest MMO recently hit the big ten thousand since its launch in 2003. The number of total active players runs around forty thousand, the ten thousand referring to the premium subscribers.
What is especially impressive about TibiaME is that in 2008, the title saw its subscriber rate double, followed by a 105% growth in the first few months of 2009. Tibia’s massive growth can probably be explained by the surge over the past two years of smart-phones in Europe, where the game is located (All Tibia ME servers are located in Germany), as well as the already low price of the premium, three euros a month.
What’s next for Tibia ME? Content continues to grace the MMO at a rate of every six months, and the company is looking to expand the game onto more mobile products. Will Tibia’s success bring a bigger market to the mobile platform? World of Warcraft is touted as bringing MMOs to the mainstream public, so Tibia could be the title to bring more MMOs to your cellphone.
And if Blizzard make an MMO for the Iphone, God help us all.
Omali “20 bucks says you didn’t know there were MMOs for your cell phone”
MMO Fallout 