[MUD-Dev] [News] NCSoft + Richard Garriott

[Richard Aihoshi aka Jonric]

At 07:02 AM 21/05/01 -0700, Freeman, Jeff wrote:

> What makes me think the 2 million claim is a little on the high
> side:
 
> Based on 2 million subscribers, Lineage is ove 5 times larger than
> EverQuest and bigger than AC, EQ and UO all together.
 
> Based on the number of concurrent users, however (180k), Lineage is
> "only" about twice as large as EQ.

> That's a very large discrepency which makes me question the validity
> of the 2-million subscribers claim.  More to the point, it makes me
> think that "number of subscribers" for Lineage is a fairly
> meaningless number.  Like "10 million people have signed up for The
> Station."

<snip>

> Of course, I'm not saying that Lineage is small.  I'm just saying
> that I've heard "Lineage is bigger than AC, EQ and UO combined"
> about 900 times now, and I don't believe that's quite correct.  Not
> with only 180k concurrent users.  That seems to be a much more
> accurate assessment of a game's "size" than "number of subscribers"
> for a game that doesn't have 75% of its users actually, you know,
> subscribe.

<snip>

This line of thinking would seem to be based on the assumption of
similar play patterns; i.e. about 15 to 20 hours average per person
per week.  However, if we assume the great majority of Korean players
are paying by the hour, it seems reasonable to assume that the average
playing time is lower.  If it's half, to use a simple figure, then
ratio between the concurrent user and total user numbers should also
be half.  So if EQ's ratio is around 4 (90k concurrent to 370k total)
with 15-20 hours per week average usage, then **IF** Lineage's average
usage is 7.5 - 10 hours, the expected ratio would be about 8.
Extending this, 180k concurrent users would project to 1.44 million
total users.  Dropping the average usage to 5 to 7 hours makes the
ratio 12, and 12 times 180K equals 2.16 million.  How much less would
people play EQ if they had to pay per hour?  Rhetorical question.

It's easy to have multiple Lineage accounts, so it seems likely that
two million accounts actually represents a fair bit less than less
than two million people.  But for Lineage not to have more users than
the US big three, the average number of accounts per user would have
to be at least 3.  And that's before reducing the US numbers to factor
out multiple subscriptions.

Two million active users for Lineage may seem unlikely, but having
more than EQ, UO and AC combined does seem credible, at least to me.


Richard Aihoshi - "Jonric"
RPG Vault, IGN Vault Network

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