[MUD-Dev] Casual Crowd vs.Time Rich Crowd [was: Time Debt]

[Koster, Raph]

David Kennerly wrote:

> The above propositions mean that MMPs, although discouraging for
> us underdogs, are a rich get richer medium.  Despite a few
> skeptical posters here, this thesis implies that, for example,
> City of Heroes will remain popular for years.  Mass is a USP.

Near as I can tell from the data available, this is correct--MMOs
not only show a tendency to rich-get-richer, but also exhibit
several other network effects. For example, you can take the user
populations for various games in Bruce Woodcock's latest chart and
graph them as a bar graph, and you'll find a power law distribution.

That said, CoH isn't out of the woods yet--subscriber curves for
recent games seem to indicate a curve where the mature userbase size
isn't evident for a few months, and is typically lower than the peak
userbase size shortly after launch.

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