[MUD-Dev] Why doesn't Lineage count as the most popular MMOG ever?

[Dr. Cat]

From: "Jason Smith" <virgil at gold-sonata.com>

> Among other reasons (ameri/euro-centricity, etc...), a major
> reason that the numbers aren't taken quite the same way as most US
> numbers, purposely, are that the comparisons never seem to line up
> in quite the same way.

I would find this explanation a lot more compelling if it were more
of a "mixed bag" - if several of the different questions you could
ask made EQ sound "bigger", and several others made Lineage sound
"bigger".  I could even accept it if the answers to a number of the
questions were murky and not known to people outside of the
companies running those games.

But neither of those seem to be the case.  Most of the relevant
statistics are widely available.  And whichever way you reframe the
question, if you ask the same question about each Lineage tends to
come out on top on almost all of the statistics, many of them by a
huge margin.

And when you get right down to it, the statistic that many
businessmen would look at very clearly favors Lineage - as you said,
it earns about $135 million a year.  Everquest would be more in the
vicinity of half that, would it not?

Which game has had the most players logged on at one moment?
Lineage.  Which game logs the most usage-hours per month?  Lineage.
Which game has the largest number of human beings who play it at
least once per month?  Lineage, by a huge margin.

The fact that less of those are "subscriber-humans paying to play a
game" and more of them are "non-subscriber-humans paying to play a
game" is kind of like arguing "Cat Fancier magazine is really more
popular than M&Ms candies or Coca Cola - they have thousands and
thousands of subscribers, while M&Ms and Coke have artificially high
user numbers since they have all those non-subscribing customers,
but virtually zero subscribers".  It's just a different business
model.  Lineage has more people playing, and makes more money.

One could make the same silly argument about the revenue-per-player
numbers.  Yes, Everquest makes more money per customer.  I'm sure my
local diamond jewelry store makes more money per customer than the
big movie studios, who make less than $10 for each movie ticket
sold, and maybe get to charge $19.95 when they sell a DVD (minus a
hefty cut for the middlemen, of course).  A diamond ring can cost
hundreds or thousands of dollars!  But nobody's arguing that store
is bigger than the big movie studios because they make more
dollars-per-customer.  Generally "bigness" would be measures by
total revenue, whether you want to look at net or gross.  America is
full of companies that are among our hugest corporations because
they got good at selling an inexpensive product in huge quantities.
Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, McDonalds, magazines, superhero comic
books, Heinz ketchup, Wrigley's gum, etc.  Nobody argues they aren't
"bigger" than competing luxury brands, they clearly are bigger.

I tend to buy the whole ethno-centric argument a lot more.  It seems
like the most plausible explanation to me, and doesn't seem to be
particularly far-fetched in any way.

How many Americans know about the Empire State Building and/or the
Sears Tower?  How many can name the country that currently has the
tallest building on the earth (Malaysia) or the city it's in (Kuala
Lumpur) or the name of the building?  *I* don't even remember the
name of the building!

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