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

[Koster]

> -----Original Message-----
> From:Dave Kennerly
> Sent: Tuesday, May 22, 2001 8:51 PM
> To: mud-dev at kanga.nu
> Subject: RE: [MUD-Dev] [News] NCSoft + Richard Garriott

> As Jake Song wrote some months ago, most NCSoft revenue is from
> cyber cafes, who--in turn--charge their customers.  Therefore, it
> could be 2 million with a high turn-over rate.  That is, these 2
> million change much more rapidly than what you expect, which is
> about 3-6 months for the US MMORPGs.

UO when I was working there, and EQ now, have substantially longer
average subscriber lifetimes than 3-6 months. A year is more typical.

> In this case, if one wants to compare success or "bigness", then I
> would guess direct revenue comparisons are the most applicable,
> first, and second: average daily user volume.  Peak user counts are
> misleading, because peak counts has higher statistical error.  Peak
> volume is not a multiple of the average volume; the two values
> correlate but imprecisely.  For a simple illustration: nobody
> mentions their lowest peak (trough?) user volume.

Peak is not a useful number in many ways. Consider for example that
average play session greatly affects your peak number; if you have
long play sessions, you get higher peaks because of sessions
overlapping longer, but the same number of people are served, and
arguably served the same amount of entertainment ("one session's
worth"). In the case of flat fee businesses, it's even arguably
pernicious; longer play sessions are bad for flat fee businesses, so
reaching for that bigger peak online user figure means you may well be
earning less money per user.

-Raph
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