If there is any sympathy for Capcom over Umbrella Corps, you’d have to look long and hard in order to find it. Umbrella Corps, the game that was met with severe skepticism and ultimately negative reviews, appears to be dead in the waters just a few weeks after launch.
According to Steam Charts, the game averages less concurrent players than your average Battlefield server. Just 20 as of this writing and an overall peak of 45 over the last day or so. Steam Spy’s figures paint an even more dismal picture. The tracking service estimates that the PC version has only sold around eight thousand copies, with only about 35% of those playing over the past two weeks.
Perhaps Umbrella Corps should take a page out of Evolve’s playbook and make a sharp turn toward free to play territory. There is no guarantee of success, but at this point there isn’t much left to risk.
Carbine Studios has revealed over Twitter that an update is coming to address population issues on servers. No more details are available at this time.
When TERA announced that player numbers had doubled, and that number was now “over one million,” I had a feeling that since Gameforge was making the announcement that the figure did not include regions outside of Europe. Turns out I was right. In a press release by En Masse Entertainment today, the publisher has revealed that free to play has similarly risen to over 1.4 million users. Maximum concurrent players has also risen dramatically, increasing over ten times its previous number.
“We’ve been blown away by the waves of players logging into TERA, and we’re seeing amazing growth in both registrations and daily users. It’s always great to eclipse the one-million-player mark, and at our current rate, it won’t be long before we hit two million,” said Chris Lee, CEO of En Masse Entertainment. “This success is pushing En Masse even harder to deliver more content and improve our service, so stay tuned!”
To celebrate, from March 20th through the 24th players will be able to hunt Big Ass Monsters for high end equipment and rare drops.
Wizard101 launched two years ago to the wide open arms of children and some adults alike. Since then, the game has seen numerous major updates, including player housing (something many MMOs still can’t attest to), a fairly intuitive and advanced pet system, among other updates. For the kid’s MMO, one that oddly enough has a “death magic” class, Wizard 101 has been skyrocketing to popularity while running off of a freemium payment model (Players can play for free, pay a subscription, or purchase perks individually using a cash shop).
Kingsisle Entertainment’s game has become so popular, in fact, that the servers are being bogged down with the sheer number of people trying to log in, resulting in this week’s announcement that a temporary limit to players will be instated until server issues can be fixed.
Given the titles that are closing up shop, or consolidating a large portion of their servers, it’s good to see at least one title that is doing well enough to have troubles accommodating all of their players. More on Wizard 101 as it appears.
Wizard101 launched two years ago to the wide open arms of children and some adults alike. Since then, the game has seen numerous major updates, including player housing (something many MMOs still can’t attest to), a fairly intuitive and advanced pet system, among other updates. For the kid’s MMO, one that oddly enough has a “death magic” class, Wizard 101 has been skyrocketing to popularity while running off of a freemium payment model (Players can play for free, pay a subscription, or purchase perks individually using a cash shop).
Kingsisle Entertainment’s game has become so popular, in fact, that the servers are being bogged down with the sheer number of people trying to log in, resulting in this week’s announcement that a temporary limit to players will be instated until server issues can be fixed.
Given the titles that are closing up shop, or consolidating a large portion of their servers, it’s good to see at least one title that is doing well enough to have troubles accommodating all of their players. More on Wizard 101 as it appears.
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.
Some time ago I wrote an article discussing how games that have full, unrestricted PvP are doomed to fail. The games create a griefer’s paradise, where Player Vs Player combat is no longer about finding the most powerful person to take down, but rather how many people you can gank out of their starting area before you are removed for a few hours. Developers create the games with the knowledge that the title will be niche, but fail to realize just how many players will not make it past their first free month of gameplay.
MMO Fallout 