173 Million Hours (Account/Player Estimates)

Preyfar

"...players have logged more than 173 million hours of playtime."
http://www.bethblog.com/2015/05/27/7-things-you-need-to-know-about-the-elder-scrolls-online-tamriel-unlimited/#more-29605

If the average gamer puts, say, 100 hours into ESO that'd put it at around 1.7 million gamers people playing ESO. At 200 hours of a collective average, that puts the player count a little under a million (865K). I imagine the average per account is somewhere in between there.

Since ZOS has never given out a proper subscriber/player count, that's pretty much the best estimates we have to go on at this point. I imagine there's some larger variables (I know I've put in waaaaay more time than the average player), but I also know people who gave the game 10 hours and went "Nope!". So the average is probably definitely skewed.

Food for thought.

Dionysusjones

ESO is dying head for the hills cancel your...... yeah ok who cares again? console is coming out an i will play again with my friends. Pls PC scrubs keep paying for rainbow brite mounts.

SeptimusDova

nb4 the lock

wonder why they have never released numbers?

dessert for thought

Preyfar

SeptimusDova wrote: »

nb4 the lock

Why would it be locked? It's not a bad thing, just estimates based on the information they provided.

Preyfar

Double posted. Derp.

Acrolas

I'm betting at least 3.5 million of those hours were spent waiting for the guy to say the rune names followed by the boosh.
Somebody should cancel that guy's animation or something.

Rosveen

173 mln hours over 60 weeks gives 2.9 mln hours per week. Anyone cares to estimate how many hours a week people play on average? 10-15?

SeptimusDova

How much of that was Lag? How much switching between toons/alts. How much from relogging to refresh the mail server after buying items from a guild store?

Stikato

I don't care how the numbers are spun. Hours of playtime. Registered accounts. Whatever. The fact is not a lot of people play this game. There are 15+ year old MMOs that have more players.

I wish it wasn't the case. I don't regret buying the game, or spending time in it. I got my money's worth. But out of all the time I have been playing, I have been in a different copy (from a friend) of an open world instance (Deshaan) a grand total of one time. (other than the ridiculous phasing system)

This is essentially a one server MMO. Mega-this or that, there is really only enough PC players to support one "old-school" server. Even less if you go to the vet zones.

Spin it however you want. My eyes, experience, and inactive friend list/guild roster tell me that this game is essentially devoid of players, Stonefalls bank alts notwithstanding. A million actively playing PC accounts is a pipe dream.

Elsonso

There are 17,000 of us who play 24 hours/day. I dunno what the rest of you do with your time.

StaticWax

This game was designed for console. This is where the proverbial bread will be buttered.

Once console launch arrives, PC means squat. You all might as well go play Wildstar or something. ESO now belongs to the console.

Stikato

StaticWax wrote: »

This game was designed for console. This is where the proverbial bread will be buttered.

Once console launch arrives, PC means squat. You all might as well go play Wildstar or something. ESO now belongs to the console.

Agreed, except that it already means squat. That phase began months ago.

Powtreeman

SeptimusDova wrote: »

nb4 the lock

wonder why they have never released numbers?

dessert for thought

lol why do people post nb4 lock if theres no reason for it to be locked?
Ive seen this troll post in so many threads that do not get locked.

Bloodfang

StaticWax wrote: »

This game was designed for console. This is where the proverbial bread will be buttered.

Once console launch arrives, PC means squat. You all might as well go play Wildstar or something. ESO now belongs to the console.

Wildstar is dead (40-60k Subscribers), even F2P wouldn't save them anymore.
We'll probably see Wildstar shut down by the end of the year.

Lenikus

I really don't think you can make an 'average'... Some people only play on weekends, and others, as myself simply live in the game.. if they have like 100k hours of gameplay on 2 days straight, (wild example), the first day could be a little more than 4.170 people online the whole saturday, and the next be 200k casuals playing half an hour on a sunday morning.

,,, It's fun to guess, tho'

Nerio

Saying the average account has logged at least 100 hours is a very generous estimate.

There was an article published a few years ago where Blizzard's CEO said that the majority (70%) of WoW players don't reach level 10, which only takes a couple hours to achieve. They do have a trial which skews that number quite a bit, but that still means that of the millions of people who have and still play WoW, only 30% play for more than a couple hours. I'd be very surprised if the majority of ESO accounts had a character above level 5 on it. This is just the nature of MMOs; the time sink isn't for everyone.

If you mean that the average active account has logged at least 100 hours, then I wouldn't disagree, but the total time /played in the blog was referring to all accounts.

Preyfar

Nerio wrote: »

Saying the average account has logged at least 100 hours is a very generous estimate.

There was an article published a few years ago where Blizzard's CEO said that the majority (70%) of WoW players don't reach level 10, which only takes a couple hours to achieve...

Well, the thought was there are players with 1,000+ so I figured it'd "average it out". I have no basis except an assumption, so...

Moonshadow66

SeptimusDova wrote: »

How much of that was Lag? How much switching between toons/alts. How much from relogging to refresh the mail server after buying items from a guild store?

Not to forget the infinite loading screens

Gidorick

ZOS wrote:

"...players have logged more than 173 million hours of playtime."

And 4 of those were lag free!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oShTJ90fC34

Elsonso

Well, here is my take on this...

No matter what we might think of 173 million hours, they think it is a good thing. It is either a sign, to them, that the game is doing just fine, or it just an impressive sounding number that really has no meaning other than trivia. It could be both.

C0pp3rhead

Rosveen wrote: »

173 mln hours over 60 weeks gives 2.9 mln hours per week. Anyone cares to estimate how many hours a week people play on average? 10-15?

Look at it this way: 2.9m h/wk = 414k h/day. Some players spend 5 minutes to log in to feed their horses and collect their hireling mail before logging out. Some play for an hour or two to complete pledges/trials/dsa. Some may play 7 hours on a Saturday or Sunday and not touch the game for the rest of the week. Others play for several hours almost every day.

However, we all know that the current population is lower than it was at ESO's peak. Given that the above figures represent the entire lifespan of this game, it may be safe to assume that the average player logs an hour per day, which means ESO may have as few as 400k "active" players.

JD2013

Something something doom and gloom. Something something *insert that this game has 5 players or less*

Am I doing it right?

firstdecan

Rosveen wrote: »

173 mln hours over 60 weeks gives 2.9 mln hours per week. Anyone cares to estimate how many hours a week people play on average? 10-15?

This is the interesting math that people have not grasped.

At an average of 10 hours a week (technically isn't this median?), that yields approximately 290,000 active players. At 15 hours a week, that gives us 194,000 active players.

Working on the assumption that 10-15 hours is a realistic average \ median for players, this is your global pool of friends. Split that amongst two servers (NA and EU), then split again amongst 3 alliances, and your player peer population is somewhere between 32,000 - 48,000 people. This is about what you see in a small US city or a large US university.

At 15 hours a week, only 9% of that player population would be active at any given time (assuming even distribution). At 10 hours a week, only 6% of that population would be active at any given time. That means that there would only be 2900 people playing in your alliance at any given time (both percentages work out to the same amount of people).

Now, if we assume that everyone logged on is questing in one of the 5 zones for your alliance (and is not in a dungeon, craglorn, dsa, or vet zone), that's fewer than 600 people who are playing the game at the same stage of development as your character. Obviously when you toss in craglorn, dsa, daily dungeons, and vet zone content, that number gets even lower.

So, if the 173,000,000 hours played number is accurate, and the assumptions about average \ median playtime are realistic, you can break that down into some frighteningly small numbers about who is really playing the game. There are dependencies on even distribution over time, but using this as the basis means that the player numbers are smaller than people have been theorizing.

JD2013 wrote: »

Something something doom and gloom. Something something *insert that this game has 5 players or less*

Am I doing it right?

Apparently you're not too far off.

Preyfar

JD2013 wrote: »

Something something doom and gloom. Something something *insert that this game has 5 players or less*

Am I doing it right?

Not doom and gloom at all. It's an interesting benchmark, and one I'd like to see grow. It'll be very interesting to see if ZOS releases hours played in a year from now so we can compare console growth to PC as well.

Faulgor

My main alone has 280 hours played. That might be above median, but I know the top PvP and PvE players put a lot more hours in than I do. Taken as an average, that would give us about 617k players. But averages are a tricky thing.
But I'm not even sure it's fair to count the people that only played 10 hours if you want an idea about active players.

Preyfar

Faulgor wrote: »

My main alone has 280 hours played. That might be above median, but I know the top PvP and PvE players put a lot more hours in than I do. Taken as an average, that would give us about 617k players. But averages are a tricky thing.
But I'm not even sure it's fair to count the people that only played 10 hours if you want an idea about active players.

100 hours could be too low, but I keep reading about people who -- a year into it -- still haven't gotten to Coldharbour, so there's a lot of weekend warriors and casual players. I figured 100 hours seemed like a decent number.

As for active players, who knows...

Ninnghizhidda

You could write a PhD thesis on the subject with 1000s of pages of lovely guesstimates.

Want some simple truth in a few words? If a company has some truly superb and glowing numbers to show and be proud of, I can see no reason why they would keep those figures "secret", quite the opposite. Right?

Rylana

Ninnghizhidda wrote: »

You could write a PhD thesis on the subject with 1000s of pages of lovely guesstimates.

Want some simple truth in a few words? If a company has some truly superb and glowing numbers to show and be proud of, I can see no reason why they would keep those figures "secret", quite the opposite. Right?

But that is actually a logical fallacy

X + Y = Z

does not equal

Y + X = -Z

In other words, just because theres a good argument for the company to release good numbers, it does not follow logically that they would only refuse to release numbers because they are bad. They could very well just not release them, period. Which in this game seems to be the more likely candidate vs more of this speculative garbage I see every time I type Elder Scrolls Online into google.

leshpar

I don't know where OP gets his numbers, but the average player can't even reach level VR1 in 100 hours. I've put in nearly 300 hours already and I only have been playing for a bit over a month.

Elsonso

Ninnghizhidda wrote: »

Want some simple truth in a few words? If a company has some truly superb and glowing numbers to show and be proud of, I can see no reason why they would keep those figures "secret", quite the opposite. Right?

You could write a 1000 page PhD thesis that dives into the merits of that statement.

Everyone always assumes that if there is good news to spread, people will spread it, but if there is bad news, people will hide it. It seems a given, unless you are in the business of journalism, in which case it is typically the opposite. However, when there is pretty much no information, good or bad, it gets hard to assess whether this is true. The absence of information does not confirm that the information exists.

In any case, it is a given than 173 million presented as good news is good news. If the number was derived from bad news, there is no reason for them to present it in a positive press release. From that, we can postulate that whatever low number that people come up with is too low.

firstdecan wrote: »

that's fewer than 600 people who are playing the game at the same stage of development as your character

We cannot tell game population from within the game, but with diligence, we can tell relative populations. Using the 173 million number to attempt to calibrate in-game observations suggests that your number is too low for the current state of the game. I have not gone back into time to see if there was ever a point in the game where that number makes sense.

Katsibrokos

Bloodfang wrote: »

StaticWax wrote: »

This game was designed for console. This is where the proverbial bread will be buttered.

Once console launch arrives, PC means squat. You all might as well go play Wildstar or something. ESO now belongs to the console.

Wildstar is dead (40-60k Subscribers), even F2P wouldn't save them anymore.
We'll probably see Wildstar shut down by the end of the year.

Don't bet on it. While i play ESO right now and love it, i admit WildStar have became a superb game after the last 2 patches. Check the list of the new features & fixes and you ll see on your own.

You cant imagine how a F2P may benefit a quality game like Wildstar. Dont forget that TERA was a step before closure and after F2P is one of the top earning mmo's. SWTOR was also in a very bad state despite the huge IP. Rift also was a step away from shut down and its an absolutely descent mmo with 2 expansions and a stable population and development.

So dont bet on WildStar closure and dont underestimate the potentials if it goes F2P.