1.2 Million Subscribers

zhevon

Neizir wrote: »

To all commenting about fake numbers:

SuperData says that they collect numbers from developers, publishers and payment service providers active in the space. Their about page features testimonials from CCP, Harmonix and Microsoft, and The New York Times, The Washington Post, BusinessWeek and Business Insider among others consider them to be reliable enough to use their data or to give them airtime. I'll trust the word of these entities over those of anonymous internet commenters any day.

One of the companies they alledgedly work with is ZeniMax media. So ZeniMax currently producing any free-to-play games at the moment? After all ZeniMax is a very large and has lots of stuff going on.

Maybe they are legit. Maybe they are fakes. Maybe they are shills. Maybe ZeniMax is planning to make ESO FTP in the long term.

Gyudan

Things to consider:
- ESO was launched in early April 2014, so at least 3 months are missing compared to the other games in those rankings.
- The year 2014 isn't even over , so we don't know if they made those statistics from january14-october14 sales with some form of extrapolation to get a full year, or from october13-october14.
- We don't even know when they stopped gathering data. For all we know, it could have stopped in August given the time needed to analyse it.

It's good to see ESO almost in the top10 though. 2015 statistics will tell how the game is doing and will be doing for the years to come.

Now the bad part (from superdataresearch):

I really hope F2P/Pay-to-win games don't kill ESO.

crislevin

ers101284b14_ESO wrote: »

crislevin wrote: »

Well, it's kinda big deal to know if it includes box sales, each one is 60! Your number will shrink to about 60% if it include box.

Actually I just re read it and it says in game sales only not subscriptions or box sales. Meaning it would be people who, upgraded to imperial or bought a horse. Not sure if that means people who bought it online through ZOS

It is quite difficult to imaging there are 5 million people upgraded game or bought horse in game.

I guess we should first figure out exactly what is counted, as it has substantial impact on how we interpret the data.

GreyBrow

What you should take away from this:

If ZOS has 111 fu***ng million dollars, what in the literal *%#^ is their problem with fixing this game? For 111 million, it shoulda been fixed 3 months ago

Lord_Draevan

Neizir wrote: »

To all commenting about fake numbers:

SuperData says that they collect numbers from developers, publishers and payment service providers active in the space. Their about page features testimonials from CCP, Harmonix and Microsoft, and The New York Times, The Washington Post, BusinessWeek and Business Insider among others consider them to be reliable enough to use their data or to give them airtime. I'll trust the word of these entities over those of anonymous internet commenters any day.

What? How dare you oppose the flaming by presenting reasonable arguments and verifiable facts! Preposterous!

ers101284b14_ESO

crislevin wrote: »

ers101284b14_ESO wrote: »

crislevin wrote: »

Well, it's kinda big deal to know if it includes box sales, each one is 60! Your number will shrink to about 60% if it include box.

Actually I just re read it and it says in game sales only not subscriptions or box sales. Meaning it would be people who, upgraded to imperial or bought a horse. Not sure if that means people who bought it online through ZOS

It is quite difficult to imaging there are 5 million people upgraded game or bought horse in game.

I guess we should first figure out exactly what is counted, as it has substantial impact on how we interpret the data.

Pretty much which is why worrying about it is pointless. I do remember reading that the imperial sold 5-1 against the standard edition so that would make an extra $20 per player.

I think digital sales where much more than box sales also which is probably why the box copy dropped so fast. But who knows on that either.

Maverick827

ESO could have 10 million active subscribers and it would still feel like they have 100k because there's no reason to do any group content.

Hopefully the dungeon changes in 1.5 steer the game in a direction to fix this.

Chufu

First of all: Thank you very much, for that information about the subscribers and your detailed post, @Neizir.

GreyBrow wrote: »

What you should take away from this:

If ZOS has 111 fu***ng million dollars, what in the literal *%#^ is their problem with fixing this game? For 111 million, it shoulda been fixed 3 months ago

Do you really think, that you can fix everything just with money?

I give you an example with a metaphor:

You want to bake a sweetroll. It's really delicious and you love it. But after baking 30 sweetrolls you think: "oh my god, something is wrong. The sweetroll isn't so delicious as before. But what have I done? I don't know exactly..."

You try to bake it again and again, but you don't know why the sweetrolls are no longer as delicious as they were before. But you made a mistake: You gave your mum a sweetroll and she loved it so much, she wants to have more of them.

Now you have a real big problem. Your mum wants the delicous sweetroll again, but you don't know what's wrong with it. But you don't want to disappoint her, so you decide to search a baker, who can fix your baaad sweetroll.

After a few time of searching you found one. It's delicious, but not exactly the same as before. But it's okay and delicous. You give one to your mum, your dad, your family and they give them to friends and so on.

After a while, thousands of people are knocking on your door and say "WE WANT YOUR SWEETROLLS!".

"Oh ****!", do you think and you decide to open a bakery to get MORE sweetrolls. But they should be delicous... problem, because your new baker can't bake over thousands of sweetrolls.

So you have to search more bakers for more sweetrolls.

At last, you found them, but every sweetroll from every baker taste not the same. Even if you would have the money to buy THOUSANDS of bakers, the sweetrolls from all of them wouldn't taste the same as your starting sweetroll.

"Too many cooks spoil the broth." is an old saw.

In summary: Even if ZOS have the money to buy THOUSANDS of people, it might be, that some problems can't be solved, because the issue is unknown.

Please, think about it.

Xeres14

I think that's a good number and ZOS and Bethesda should be happy about that.

lestaudenmaierub17_ESO

Neizir wrote: »

First, ZOS is a privately held company and doesn't have to release jack to to anyone. But having said that, these numbers are really nothing but good news.

That would be the first reason why I call into question the validity of this article in general.

Neizir wrote: »

So, according to these people, ESO made $111,000,000 in six months essentially. There are a bunch of questions with this number - the largest of which is "does this include box sales as well?". But ignore that

You really can't ignore that at all. If it includes box sales then the total online user base would be $111M / ~$50 = 220,000 people. And that doesn't even include subscription fees, which would further chip away at the total number of subscribers.

If the $111M is only subscription dollars, then you could spin it like this:

(Total Revenue / Monthly Subscription) / Game Lifespan in Months = ($111M / $15) / 6 = 1.2M subscribers.

However, that only assumes people buy one month at a time. A lot of people buy 3 and 6 month subscriptions, which would inflate the revenue and decrease the monthly subscription, while eliminating the actual lifespan of the game from the equation.

So yes, it is pretty important.

Neizir wrote: »

and double that number to annualize it to $222,000,

So you are assuming that every single person subscribed at this moment is going to continue to subscribe for another 6 months?

Rosveen

Neizir wrote: »

I know MMOs and Single Player games are different audiences but did you know that Skyrim sales were 86% console?

Did you know this number is completely false?

I don't know what to take from this article. They say it's microtransaction revenue and they don't count subscriptions for WoW, so presumable not for other sub MMOs either. ESO has no real cash shop. Unless they sold 5 mln Palominos, they couldn't have possibly made $111 mln in microtransactions. So what does this number really include? Subs? Box sales? Who the hell knows, the article sure doesn't explain it.

So while it's great to see their revenue surpass SWTOR's - especially since the game launched in April, so it lost the first three months of this year - I still don't know anything about sub numbers.

Elsonso

Maverick827 wrote: »

ESO could have 10 million active subscribers and it would still feel like they have 100k because there's no reason to do any group content.

ESO could have 10 million active players every day, not just active subscribers, and we would still only see a couple hundred in Daggerfall at any given moment.

GreyBrow wrote: »

What you should take away from this:

If ZOS has 111 fu***ng million dollars, what in the literal *%#^ is their problem with fixing this game? For 111 million, it shoulda been fixed 3 months ago

A few things. First, investors want their money back. Second, they have to pay taxes and expenses. Third, they hinted that they are hiring, according to Paul Sage, but it can take up to 6 months for new people to become fully and independently productive. Fourth, companies do not want to hire employees that they will have to lay off later and given the recent news about layoffs, they will be extra cautious.

With regard to other comments that I am not going to quote...

The graphic for F2P vs P2P revenue does not take into account the number of games in each category. It only shows the total accumulated revenue. There are more F2P games out there than P2P. If you were to see a per-game breakdown the graph would probably look very different. Also, that graphic includes revenue from mobile games, a market foreign to ESO.

Rosveen

nvm

Michaeljdaveyb16_ESO

Vatter wrote: »

I call BS. guild after guild that I am in are becoming ghost towns. This seems like a marketing ploy to get more people subbed.
They might have gotten a large return on their investment when they launched because of the name but people have seen how bad this game is and quit long ago.
This game has become an industry cautionary tale on what not to do.

I get where you are coming from, but I dont think that guilds are quite becoming ghost towns! (however, this is from my perspective of being in 3 PVE guilds, 1 PVE PUG guild, and a trading guild) so perhaps the servers are losing PVP population quicker than PVE population.

I also believe there are a lot of people levelling new characters, and that a large proportion of the population is probably not yet V14 (social/casual players). You have to bare in mind that the Elder Scrolls series has never had an MMO before, so a lot of players will be new to MMO's and are in the game solely for the ES experience, not the MMO experience per se.

fromtesonlineb16_ESO

Right now those that bought 6-month subs on release still count towards the number .. wait till mid-November to see how many didn't renew.

Elsonso

fromtesonlineb16_ESO wrote: »

Right now those that bought 6-month subs on release still count towards the number .. wait till mid-November to see how many didn't renew.

That number will be offset by the new people who have subscribed. For some reason people are thinking that the Nov 5 date is magical. They are treating it like nobody has subscribed to the game since May and everyone purchased 6 month subscriptions.

Loneshard

Rosveen wrote: »

Neizir wrote: »

I know MMOs and Single Player games are different audiences but did you know that Skyrim sales were 86% console?

Did you know this number is completely false?

http://www.statisticbrain.com/skyrim-the-elder-scrolls-v-statistics/

I expect a huge success on the consoles for ESO!
If ZOS does everything right

Pallmor

Lord_Draevan wrote: »

As I said when the figures were estimated at 750,000 subscribers a few months ago...
"People who dislike the game will say 'This is proof the game is failing'.
People who like the game will say 'This is proof the game is doing well'.

Moral of the story: no matter what proof is presented, both sides will view it according to their opinion.
And the arguing will continue :P"

700K+ regular subscribers is a pretty respectable number, if you can keep them. It's no WoW-killer, true. But no other MMO is a WoW-killer. Anyone who thinks they're going to even come close to matching WoW's numbers is destined for disappointment. A success like WoW is a fluke that comes along maybe once in a generation.

Rosveen

Loneshard wrote: »

Rosveen wrote: »

Neizir wrote: »

I know MMOs and Single Player games are different audiences but did you know that Skyrim sales were 86% console?

Did you know this number is completely false?

http://www.statisticbrain.com/skyrim-the-elder-scrolls-v-statistics/

I expect a huge success on the consoles for ESO!
If ZOS does everything right

These percentages were taken from VGChartz (which doesn't track digital copies) in the first week after Skyrim's release and haven't been updated since. Neither Bethesda nor Steam ever revealed sales numbers divided by platform.

Xeres14

It's a very respectable number especially considering it's a subscriber based game. Now the tough part - keeping these people around.

TehMagnus

111M/6= 18,5M per month.

If you divide that amount by 15euros per month which is the subscription fee, you do get 1,2M subs.

Problem is you're forgetting the # of sales from the game aka ~60 euros and the money they make from selling goodies.

If you take into consideration the fact that many people who bought the game aren't actually playing it and that ~ 1M people have actually bought the game (which is pure speculation, and in my opinion is above that) it means they earned about 60M with just game SALES (which is not a really accurate number since the imperial edition was more expensive).

This means they earned ~50M from subs in 6 months thus having a player base of 50M/15 ~333k players.

Which actually feels like the right amount.

Then again it's pure speculation, if only 800K people bought the game then it means the game has 600k+ active subscribers but that number doesn't feel accurate, yet, it feels much more accurate than 1,2M .

Knowing the game cost 200M just to produce, they haven't even covered their initial investment after 6 months of launch. Doesn't look good at all. Thankfully Skyrim earned them more than a billion and they still have console launch to earn their money back.

Edit: Oh and ofc, the initial report from that company(which claimed the game had 750k subs) that came out of nowhere was removed from the internet and I really doubt they can be trusted since ZOS doesn't release any information about the money they earn and I expect they demand that the people handling their money respect their privacy.

Elsonso

You are expecting them to earn back their investment in 6 months?

Neizir

magnusnet wrote: »

111M/6= 18,5M per month.

If you divide that amount by 15euros per month which is the subscription fee, you do get 1,2M subs.

Problem is you're forgetting the # of sales from the game aka ~60 euros and the money they make from selling goodies.

If you take into consideration the fact that many people who bought the game aren't actually playing it and that ~ 1M people have actually bought the game (which is pure speculation, and in my opinion is above that) it means they earned about 60M with just game SALES (which is not a really accurate number since the imperial edition was more expensive).

This means they earned ~50M from subs in 6 months thus having a player base of 50M/15 ~333k players.

Which actually feels like the right amount.

Then again it's pure speculation, if only 800K people bought the game then it means the game has 600k+ active subscribers but that number doesn't feel accurate, yet, it feels much more accurate than 1,2M .

Knowing the game cost 200M just to produce, they haven't even covered their initial investment after 6 months of launch. Doesn't look good at all. Thankfully Skyrim earned them more than a billion and they still have console launch to earn their money back.

Edit: Oh and ofc, the initial report from that company(which claimed the game had 750k subs) that came out of nowhere was removed from the internet and I really doubt they can be trusted since ZOS doesn't release any information about the money they earn and I expect they demand that the people handling their money respect their privacy.

@magnusnet As far as I know, this report doesn't factor in box sales, only sub money and digital purchases.

TehMagnus

lordrichter wrote: »

You are expecting them to earn back their investment in 6 months?

Skirim did it in days?

eventide03b14a_ESO

You mentioned the console sales, but have MMO's ever been as popular on consoles as their PC counterparts?

Neizir

eventide03b14a_ESO wrote: »

You mentioned the console sales, but have MMO's ever been as popular on consoles as their PC counterparts?

There's a sizeable subscriber base on FFXIV and quite alot of players for DCUO and Warframe.
Destiny is doing pretty well, but it probably doesn't count because it isn't on PC.

Dominoid

Neizir wrote: »

SuperData Research has released figures for revenue of the Online Games market, including a top 10 list. ESO was at 11, and made $111m throughout 2014, not including box sales.
http://venturebeat.com/2014/10/23/the-10-highest-grossing-online-pc-games-in-2014-hearthstone-dota-2-cant-compete-with-league-of-legends/
First, ZOS is a privately held company and doesn't have to release jack to to anyone. But having said that, these numbers are really nothing but good news.

So, according to these people, ESO made $111,000,000 in six months essentially. There are a bunch of questions with this number - the largest of which is "does this include box sales as well?". But ignore that, cause we're all speculating anyways, and double that number to annualize it to $222,000,000. This method yields 1.2 million subs per month. ($222m/$15/12 months)

Let's look at it a different way. WoW made $728,000,000 with 7.4 million subs. ESO is either around 15% (1.1/7.4) or 30% (2.2/7.4) the revenue of WOW. Meaning ESO has 1.1 to 2.2 million subs as of today.

Either way you slice it, these numbers mean
A: Nothing (see the first paragraph) and
B: ESO has over one million subs.

I know MMOs and Single Player games are different audiences but did you know that Skyrim sales were 86% console? These numbers can only go up.

What do you think of this figure, folks?

Seriously? Ripping my whole post from another site without so much as a "this other guy said" and running with it as your own?

http://www.reddit.com/r/elderscrollsonline/comments/2kc5x7/superdata_releases_its_top_10_list_of_mmos_by/clk4ajk?context=3

TehMagnus

Neizir wrote: »

magnusnet wrote: »

111M/6= 18,5M per month.

If you divide that amount by 15euros per month which is the subscription fee, you do get 1,2M subs.

Problem is you're forgetting the # of sales from the game aka ~60 euros and the money they make from selling goodies.

If you take into consideration the fact that many people who bought the game aren't actually playing it and that ~ 1M people have actually bought the game (which is pure speculation, and in my opinion is above that) it means they earned about 60M with just game SALES (which is not a really accurate number since the imperial edition was more expensive).

This means they earned ~50M from subs in 6 months thus having a player base of 50M/15 ~333k players.

Which actually feels like the right amount.

Then again it's pure speculation, if only 800K people bought the game then it means the game has 600k+ active subscribers but that number doesn't feel accurate, yet, it feels much more accurate than 1,2M .

Knowing the game cost 200M just to produce, they haven't even covered their initial investment after 6 months of launch. Doesn't look good at all. Thankfully Skyrim earned them more than a billion and they still have console launch to earn their money back.

Edit: Oh and ofc, the initial report from that company(which claimed the game had 750k subs) that came out of nowhere was removed from the internet and I really doubt they can be trusted since ZOS doesn't release any information about the money they earn and I expect they demand that the people handling their money respect their privacy.

@magnusnet As far as I know, this report doesn't factor in box sales, only sub money and digital purchases.

How? 90% of subs and digital purchases are done through ESO's website store which I doubt gives this kind of information to 3rd parties or accepts that the institution transiting the money gives their personal information to 3rd parties.

zhevon

magnusnet wrote: »

Neizir wrote: »

magnusnet wrote: »

111M/6= 18,5M per month.

If you divide that amount by 15euros per month which is the subscription fee, you do get 1,2M subs.

Problem is you're forgetting the # of sales from the game aka ~60 euros and the money they make from selling goodies.

If you take into consideration the fact that many people who bought the game aren't actually playing it and that ~ 1M people have actually bought the game (which is pure speculation, and in my opinion is above that) it means they earned about 60M with just game SALES (which is not a really accurate number since the imperial edition was more expensive).

This means they earned ~50M from subs in 6 months thus having a player base of 50M/15 ~333k players.

Which actually feels like the right amount.

Then again it's pure speculation, if only 800K people bought the game then it means the game has 600k+ active subscribers but that number doesn't feel accurate, yet, it feels much more accurate than 1,2M .

Knowing the game cost 200M just to produce, they haven't even covered their initial investment after 6 months of launch. Doesn't look good at all. Thankfully Skyrim earned them more than a billion and they still have console launch to earn their money back.

Edit: Oh and ofc, the initial report from that company(which claimed the game had 750k subs) that came out of nowhere was removed from the internet and I really doubt they can be trusted since ZOS doesn't release any information about the money they earn and I expect they demand that the people handling their money respect their privacy.

@magnusnet As far as I know, this report doesn't factor in box sales, only sub money and digital purchases.

How? 90% of subs and digital purchases are done through ESO's website store which I doubt gives this kind of information to 3rd parties or accepts that the institution transiting the money gives their personal information to 3rd parties.

Or on steam; I doubt that they are are getting sales information from steam.

SantieClaws

All I can say is what I see and I see plenty of people in game. Was very busy at the weekend when I was levelling my Khajiit alt to 22. I also know people who are long time ES players and were very sceptical about ESO at first. I am seeing them gradually starting to play and loving it.

I know players that are still subscribing, though I know some that have left too.

I would say it is too early to tell really but my feeling is that we are now at the stage where the "hit and run" players are dropping off and we are starting to get a more stable, long term community building up.