To the surprise of no one, Electronic Arts released their Q3 fiscal year 2009 results earlier today. While most of the investor relations release is pretty dry, there are some interesting bits, such as a $641 million net loss for the quarter, and delays to hotly anticipated titles like The Sims 3 and BioWare’s Dragon Age: Origins.
To all of us Warhammer Online fans, the area you’re interested will probably be found under “Highlights” on page 2:
Warhammer® Online: Age of Reckoning®, an MMO from EA’s Mythic
Entertainment studio, ended the quarter with over 300K paying subscribers in North America and Europe.
Funnily enough, that’s the only mention I could find of WAR or Mythic in the entire document. I’ve taken the liberty of bolding the prominent part of the sentence in question.
Now, most of us were expecting some kind of total subscriber count today, based on Mark Jacobs’ comments on the VN Boards from a couple of weeks back. What I don’t quite get is whether this should worry me or not. Looking back at WAR’s early sales counts, and Mythic’s press release from back in October about having 750,000 registered players (which doesn’t imply subscribers to me, just sales of the original boxed game), I was expecting the total subscriber count to be a little higher.
(Syp also has some thoughts and speculation on these numbers over at WAAAGH!, in case you’re curious.)
Maybe I was totally off the mark (err, no pun intended), but to me that looks like less than half of the original purchasers of the the WAR game box actually subscribed past their first free month. That seems pretty harsh, although I’m not really sure what the industry averages are for drop-off between initial purchase and subscription. And from what I can tell, that doesn’t even include anyone who may have signed up for a 3-month sub after their free trial expired, and are now letting that cancel.
Is 300k paying subscribers a good, healthy number of active players? Is that enough to sustain WAR and let the user base build over the course of 2009? EA seems to think so. Mythic and Mark Jacobs seem to think the game is healthy — but what else can we expect them to say? I’m not trying to encourage fear-mongering here, but 300,000 subs is a drop in the bucket compared to the latest count out of the Blizzard camp, which is to be expected, but we’re talking completely different scales of magnitude here.
At my day job, I work for a company of about 75 people and I have a good idea of how much revenue we need on a monthly basis to cover all costs and turn a profit. When I look at 300,000 subscribers, each pulling down $15 a month, that’s $4.5m a month of gross subscription revenue (assuming EA/Mythic even sees all of that $15) to support a team of ~400 people. Not to mention boxed copy sales and other revenue streams. But then again, that subscriber count includes Europe as well; is GOA part of Mythic’s 400 person team, or a totally separate organization? I’m probably talking completely out my ass here, but including salaries and all the other costs and overhead involved in running an organization of that size, I can’t help but wonder what Mythic’s net profits are looking like. I’d assume there’s at least some dough rolling in, even if it’s unspectacular compared to what they probably had hoped for prior to launch.
In the meantime, I’ll be sitting here, scratching my head, wondering which numbers I should be paying attention to — if any.
6 comments
Advertising was really unsufficient, at least where I lived (France). It was only when I decided I was over with WoW and started to look out for a good MMO that I found WAR.
The gaming press in my country is also piss poor. They released completely erroneous info about the game (such as \the whole combat system relies on combos and a more powerful attack cannot be launched right at the start…did they only play BO ?) and rated the graphics sub-par while Wotlk was worshipped like some kind of god. Age of Conan received better ratings also…I’m never buying their magazine again that’s for sure.
When will people start to realize WoW has nothing new to offer since its release ?
I’m just throwing out random numbers here, but I am guessing that Mythic probably has an overhead cost of about 10 – 12 million per quarter, and with 300k subcribers they will bring in about 14 million per quarter. That’s a good sign, and I am sure that number will grow significantly as time goes on. I am meeting new players in the game literally every day I log in.
But then again they could have an overhead of 20mil a quarter and my guesstimate could be way off lol
I’m pretty sure that “registered” players only makes sense in the context of players who have actually opened their purchased boxes and created their accounts. In the States at least, you don’t have to “register” in order to pick up a copy of the box. There was also some number of units shipped to distributors floating around (I recall 1.2 mil?) and I’m presuming that those do NOT get included until they’re sold and used. If I’m right, the number of registered accounts only goes down when accounts are permanently banned, since those registered account holders CAN come back.
Also, the churn could actually be worse than it looks. Mythic had registered 750K by October, and the subscriber number is for December 31 – the game is legitimately in trouble if it didn’t sell more boxes over those 2+ months. This means that the 300K remaining subscribers as of the end of 2008 are a fraction of some number of registered accounts that was larger than 750K.
Yeah, I’m not overly worried. There’s definitely been an influx in new players in my guild and on my server over the last few weeks, and I logged into Skull Throne last night to find my Order guild was mostly in the middle of a fight *in the Inevitable City*, which was a first. Unfortunately I didn’t have time to join them, but it’s a good sign when you login and 10 of your rank 40 guildmates (and we are not a huge guild — we have less than 20 rank 40s total and that’s the bulk of our most active players) are participating heavily in the end-game on a Tuesday night.
And hell, if all else fails, there’s always the next saviour of the MMO world — Darkfall! :p
Its not bad, I mean even wow had a 60% or so retention rate when it first came out. (this game is below 50% retention while competing against behemoths like WotLK) This number though is before the 3 month subscribers canceled their accounts in January. So active subscriptions might even be lower now.
They need to look at the low pop servers, and merge them with the healthy ones. If I was new, and joined a low/low population server I would not resubscribe. However if I joined a high//high server, I would definitely stay on. Currently servers like mine (Azazel) has died out pretty much, but mostly because they are re-rolling on the healthy servers like Dark Crag, not because they canceled.
Yeah, based on the last few days of RvR and scenarios, I’m not concerned at all.
At least, it’s pretty crazy busy on Skull Throne. Better yet, Order has been pushing forts all week. Kinda nice to see things balancing out finally.
3 trackbacks
[...] Reroller also ponders whether players should be worried [...]
[...] And Reroller chimes in with this: [...]
[...] only seems that way because subscription numbers are not exactly meeting expectations but then too, 300,000? Quite respectable if you think about it. Unfortunately this is not a dream economy and everyone [...]