This article is entirely original, any similarities between this and [redacted]’s Fishery financial presentation are completely coincidental.
MMO Fallout Year 2 statistics:
It’s been a great second year here at MMO Fallout. We wrote a lot of articles, caught a lot of crab, and despite the obvious workplace issues with some trolls, some threats, a few damaged boats, we made it through to see year three.
- Over 148 thousand viewers caught, most along the coast of California
- Busiest catch: February 15th, 2011
- MMO Fallout looks to break an annual viewership of 100,000 in 2011, with a minimum amount of loss to damaged equipment (lines, nets, harpoons), and will beat last year’s traffic by the end of August.
- 800+ articles posted (That is one article caught every day with change)
- These posts spread out over 90 categories.
- Those posts further break down into over 1,400 tags.
- The most popular tag is “Sony Online Entertainment” with 74 articles linked.
- More than 325 comments posted.
- Akismet caught 13,794 spam comments, a 900% increase in spam attempts.
- MMO Fallout currently tracks over 70 MMOs
- The most popular game was Champions Online for a second year running.
- The following MMOs launched since last year, among others:
- Clone Wars Adventures
- DC Universe
- Earthrise
- Free Realms (PS3)
- Final Fantasy XIV
- Gods & Heroes
- Hello Kitty Online
- Lego Universe
- Perpetuum
- Rift
- Vindictus
- Xsyon 2012
- World of Tanks
- The following titles shut down since last year, among others:
- All Points Bulletin
- Chronicles of Spellborn
- Earth Eternal
- Exteel
- Fantasy Earth Zero
- Lineage
- The Agency (pre-release)
- The following titles transitioned to free to play in the past year:
- Age of Conan
- Alganon
- APB: Reloaded
- Champions Online
- Everquest 2
- Global Agenda
- Hellgate Global
- Pirates of the Burning Sea
The second year of MMO Fallout brought a crap load of controversy in ways I had never imagined. Looking back through the old articles, the first big name to pop up is, of course, All Points Bulletin, and Realtime World’s promises that the game was their focus, the company wasn’t going anywhere, all the while working on this side project MyWorld. I think when the MyWorld team was canned in August, that was the first indication that Realtime Worlds wasn’t going to make it financially. Then we learned the company was in administration (Chapter 11 bankruptcy), and about a month later the game just shut down.
This was also the year that Jagex started reminding us that their products were not just Runescape and the failed FunOrb project. Between Stellar Dawn (which is hopefully starting beta this year), a third unnamed MMO, Transformers Online, and 8realms, Jagex’s name now sits on War of Legends, Undercroft, Polarium, and a few other titles. Speaking of Runescape, however, the game has reintroduced free trade after three years and has once again filled with bots, despite Jagex’s claims to the contrary.
I don’t think this list would be complete without a mention of Final Fantasy XIV. Between the game’s launch with next to no content, there was no dearth of bad things to say about the company in the first few months, not least of which being the wholesale firing of the FFXIV development team. You have to hand it to the Square Enix team, however, the work they’ve put into the game since launch is impressive. I don’t know when FFXIV will get to the point of having a subscription and releasing on PS3, but I’ll be looking forward to it when it does.
Mortal Online has had an…odd history with its patches. As Henrik pointed out recently, it’s pretty much a matter of did their best, and the best wasn’t good enough. Since launch, Star Vault has been consistently in the red financially with Mortal Online, putting the game on rather shaky grounds with regards to how long the company will be able to maintain it. Gathering subscribers isn’t easy when your game suffers issues like patches removing cities, breaking entire features of the game, or servers going down for entire weekends at a time. This really shook up recently when I found that not only had Star Vault double billed some players, but they were taking a stance of non-aggression in the billing, rather Henrik Nystrom treated it as a simple matter of business. The company pretty easily revealed to me that they were taking a stance of “players have to contact us to get their money back. Otherwise, we’re going to keep it.”
Here’s a topic I haven’t talked about in a long time: Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment, and rightly so. Looking back at those articles gave me a migraine, and words can’t explain how relieved I was when MGM finally refused to renew Cheyenne’s contract on Stargate.
Oh and there was that small incident with Sony with the PS3 and Station games, most of you probably didn’t hear much about it so I’ll just move on.
I’m going to have to apologize to Eve Online and CCP: In regards to your promise to never implement non-vanity items to Eve Online’s cash shop, I’m going to have to take your own advice and watch your actions over your words. Your attitude towards players during this whole debacle has been fairly poor, and your opinions towards cash shop items in the leaked newsletter lead myself and others to believe that the current set of vanity items was a toe dip in the water to test a future update. With talks of $10,000 gold paint jobs, I don’t think this is the last we’ll see of Eve’s cash shop.
Here at MMO Fallout, it’s been a great year. Back last year I finished my work on the Where To Buy page, which has received a massive amount of work into it since then. What started out as my covering Steam/Direct2Drive sales spiraled into a growing database. I’ve had the interview with Derek Smart and I have more on the way (keep tuned), with plenty of other projects I’m working on for the year to come.
It’s going to be a good 2012, at least until we all die and burn in hellfire, in which case I will be maintaining MMO Fallout from the oddly-cooled depths of oblivion.
MMO Fallout 