MMO Fallout

Free Realms is a browser based MMO aimed primarily at the tween market, a relatively small niche also occupied by Cartoon Network’s Fusion Fall (which you may remember is set to go free to play this year). What Free Realms does for its market is take the usual MMO grind, and throw it out the door. Yes, the game does have grind out the wazoo, but Sony did their best to make the grind as least apparent as possible. Each “job” has its own goals and methods of reaching said goals, that varies so widely that you are unlikely to not find a class in Free Realms that doesn’t suit your tastes. Cook’s gather cooking ingredients and cook, all in its own mini-game, and all of the other jobs function as you would expect them to (racer’s race, soccer players play soccer, etc).

So I give a lot of praise on MMO Fallout for Sony’s games, which judging by Sony leading the “Company I’ll Never Buy From” poll, not to mention the feedback I get on such praise, a vocal community disagrees with. One thing I have hit Sony for in the past is their ability to lie like a Senator: What they say isn’t technically a lie, but can’t be reputed through normal means, like “the freshest produce in the West!” or “Fair and Balanced.”

SOE Press, on behalf of its Free Realms title, published an announcement that the fledgling MMO had hit eight million registered users. Eight million sounds great, until you factor several questions:

1. How many actually played the game? Before Dungeon Runners shut down, its small development team noted that somewhere around thirty percent of the people who registered an account for the game quit before they even downloaded it.
2. How many are paying? For every account in a freemium or item mall title that pays, there are countless more that do not. For games that are force free players to watch advertisements, those ads generally make up less than 10% of the title’s final income.
3. How vocal are they? I’ve seen games with small communities that fill up their forums with all forms of discussion. Likewise, one simply has to take a look at Second Life, whose forums are shutting down because, out of the millions of players, about 700 know the forums even exist.
4. Most importantly, how many of those accounts are active? Reports like this are akin to the sign outside of Mcdonald’s that says “Over X Billion Served.” The sign isn’t referring to today, or this week, this year, or even this decade, but how many people have enjoyed a delicious sawdust sandwich over many years.

So eight million, when you break it down, is meaningless when put in the terms of Sony’s aim: talking about how many people play their game. Although it doesn’t tell us much, what it does tell us is enough to run wild with and speculate with. Someone might ask, why don’t they just announce the number of active accounts rather than an inflated number?

That is an easy question: Because the number of active accounts is nowhere near eight million. This isn’t to say Free Realms is low quality, but that they simply need to accept the fundamental rule of any MMO: You can expect a good retention rate to be around half. Even if Free Realms has just about two million accounts active, Sony is still likely floating around the top of the free play MMO genre.