[MUD-Dev] Counting Massive Multi Players

[David Kennerly]

Is a national ID to play games common and especial to Korea?  Most
Korean MMOGs, groups, and chats that I've tried require a Korean
national ID number.  Throughout the years during business trips and
working there I tried a few, including Lineage, way back when.  Even
free games and free community portals require it.  The popular
Sayclub requires it, which is analogous to Yahoo Groups ... but
cuter.  The ID is a hurdle to be sure, since non-Korean citizens
usually cannot legitimately get a Korean national ID number,
analogous to a US SSN.

By the way, I heard that one of the initial draws of Ragnarok Online
in Korea, way back when, was that the game server set the gender of
the character to the actual player.  Since this information was
either encoded or publicly available from the Korean national ID
number (I forget which), it was possible.

Besides the national ID, another issue with counting in Korea by
logins, if your aim is to compare it to the States, is that a lot of
people play at internet cafes, so a login does not necessarily mean
a bought box or subscription by the player in this case.  It might,
but it also might mean a site or machine license.  So the count
inflates popularity compared to home users.  As well, many Korean
MMOGs have a free trial of some sort, or even a completely free
service, where only special items cost money.

With all this in mind, my best guess is that annual revenue is the
best comparable indicator of popularity.  For example, a poster ad
claims that Mu (a runaway MMORPG success in Korea) is the most
popular game in the world, with over a million users.  Maybe a
million login, but is over US$10M generated per month?  I don't
know.  Maybe it is, especially counting their presence in China.  I
don't mean to discount the popularity.  Lineage, BnB, The Kingdom of
the Winds, Mu, and others in Korea.  They are huge in terms of
revenue, also.

The lying statistic issue isn't necessarily limited to Korea.  Any
non-subscription business model game, like Achaea or Furcadia, or
shareware/subscription models, like The Kingdom of the Winds or Dark
Ages in the US, would not necessarily have similar ratios of user
logins to revenue that the subscription models do.  So comparing
popularity by their user logins to the subscription games would not
be directly possible.  Comparing average weekly user volume has some
of the same problem because of counting free users, but it at least
avoids some duplication of accounts or national IDs, to the extent
that people don't play multiple MMORPGs at the _same_ time.  While
some do play on two computers at once, I'll guess, until shown
otherwise, that this is less than the proportion of people that own
multiple accounts.

David
_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev