Tag: Dungeon Fighter Online

I love me some Massively.com. Aside from being great reading material to begin with, I will admit that Massively is one of the biggest sources of MMO news that makes its way on to MMO Fallout (although without my cheeky commentary). One issue I do take with Massively, being the cynic that I am, is that certain unnamed editors, one of whom calls himself Justin Olivetti, seem to lap up figures by Nexon and other free to play developers as if they are something to be impressed by.

Most recently, Nexon announced that Dungeon Fighter Online has amassed 197 registered accounts, even more impressive as the game hasn’t even launched in North America. Almost two hundred million would have sounded great on paper, albeit suspicious to people like myself: When a company flaunts registered users rather than active users, the active users are always a fraction of the total number. This goes for every game. Technically, Warhammer Online has at least 1.5 million “registered users” as that many preordered the title. Virtually every MMO in history, sans a few (World of Warcraft, Eve Online, Fallen Earth, among others) has seen its peak user population around launch, followed by a steep dive after the first free month, followed by gradual decline with occasional instances of upped user count. So please don’t think I’m singling out free games.

Dungeons and Dragons Online I allow to slip by because they also announce figures for paying members. Runescape I do not consider for the category because there is no “launch” to go off of, as the game began as a one man project with the intent of drawing in no more than a couple hundred players playing for free.

As is with any situation, Nexon made this much worse for themselves, and much more fun for me, by continuing on with statistics that show Dungeon Fighter Online must have a retention rate in the single digits. Let’s break these two statistics down, shall we?

• First off, players have “invaded over 25 million dungeons.” Assuming every player invaded just one dungeon and then quit, this statistic reveals that 175 million players signed up and then never went into a single dungeon. I’m going to go the ultra-conservative route and say that each active player raided ten dungeons and then quit. If every player raided only ten servers each, this would leave Dungeon Fighter Online with a meager 1.2% retention rate, and we’ve just passed the point of registration and downloading the game.
• Over 1.6 billion monsters have been killed. Well, if you look at our ultra-lenient 2.5 million players, this 1 billion starts making more sense. After all, this turns into a distributed 640 monsters per person.

I want those of you reading this to note that I am not in any way insinuating that Nexon is doing badly in the market, especially for a free to play developer. Nexon reported a 35% increase on-year revenue in 2009, and will undoubtedly keep making money. The purpose of this is to show you that 197 million is not 197 million, not even close. Nexon may not be lying, persay, but they are pulling the equivalent of telling the cashier “I’ll pay you five dollhairs (sounding like dollars)” and then attempting to call him out when he doesn’t accept your Barbie follicles.

I do not understand why free to play games feel the need to mislead the public about their titles. If Nexon had come out and said “we have over 2 million active players,” that would certainly be impressive. Not really impressive compared to other Korean free to play MMOs, but impressive nonetheless.

Because of their easy access and generally less dedicated players (no initial monetary investment), free to play MMOs see a much lower retention rate than your mainstream paid MMOs. Remember: That 1.2% retention rate was based on every player playing only ten dungeons. If you want to go even further and say every player played 20 dungeons on average, you end up with a 0.6% retention rate, and again we may still be in the realm of too lenient.