The Ripple Effects of WAR’s Launch

Every time a new MMO launches, it’s an event like, say, a really big meteor creating the Gulf of Mexico. It takes a few weeks for the dust to precipitate from the air before anyone can see what the new landscape looks like. And because no one’s really sat down and compared the numbers (not in public, anyway), it’s hard to predict future performance with any accuracy. We want to change that.

Part of the problem with making predictive posts, of course, is that with MMOs there are too many variables. The smoothness of the launch is a big factor in the early weeks, but hardly a reliable indicator if the company has a solid product and takes immediate corrective action. (For example, WoW had a really stupendously crappy launch. Crashing servers, overloaded and laggy servers, long queues, the works. However, everyone got over it. As everyone can tell you. Anarchy Online’s launch looked much the same, but the forgiveness never flowed quite so abundantly.) The first patch is a big milestone, as all of the issues that really couldn’t be tested on a large scale can now be addressed. How a company handles that is a big indicator of their ability.

It’s also very difficult to predict what other titles will be affected in the long term by any given launch. MMO players are by and large fascinated by the genre, and will try anything. “Promiscuous” is one word for the behavior. However, WOW is a success in part because they brought a lot of new people to the table. Their customers are not necessarily MMO players, but specifically WOW players.

We here at GamerDNA are keeping a very close eye on the numbers over the next few weeks. AOC created almost no long term disruption to the market leader except among PVP fans who don’t feel fulfilled (or even addressed) by the PVP action in WOW. But the opening numbers for AOC indicate that there is a significant subset of WOW users who are looking for something new, even if they are still sufficiently satisfied by WOW to return should the new experience not meet their needs.

We’ll go back to this theme in the coming months. For now, here’s the opening data.

We specifically looked at a sample of people who told us they intended to play WAR, so bear in mind, this is a group that was never NOT going to try the new game. These were the people anticipating the title, not people who just sort of randomly tried it out. Our sample has 250 people in it, and the number on the Y axis is “days logged in.” 

Please note: To an MMO vet, “days played” literally means the number of 24 hour units have elapsed since creation. That is not what this chart is saying. We simply tracked the number of days in which our targets logged in at least once. So, five hundred days logged in would simply mean that each one of the players in our sample logged in twice over two and a half weeks.

First, let’s look at the first half of September.

People in the beta were playing it, but generally, it looks like the people most looking forward to WAR weren’t playing much of… anything. The beta saw some heavy action, as did Spore, and 316 logins to WOW isn’t too shabby, but still, for the most part our sample group was not really enthusiastic about any of the available toys in the toy box.

Now let’s take a gander at launch day through this morning:

The WAR beta still appears on the chart, even though it was launch day, because putting forth a very minimal effort got you access to the beta a few days before launch – and it’s very likely that a large number of our sample members logged in using that client on launch day before the ribbon was officially snipped. But that little odd byproduct of the soft launch phenomenon aside, check out the interesting factoids:

-          All of our sample players logged in to play WAR, or they wouldn’t be in the sample. They’ve each logged in to WAR an average of just over seven times in the last two and a half weeks.

-          WOW took only the tiniest of hits. WAR players logged into WOW just 2% less than they did before WAR’s launch.

-          WAR players played a lot less Team Fortress (down 41%) and Spore (down 38%), and just a hair less of Warcraft III, Combat Arms, SWG, Guild Wars, and Counter Strike.

-          Now for the crazy part. Getting on the computer to play WAR apparently reminded the WAR fanatics that they had a computer, because overall, their gameplay went UP as a whole. They logged in more often to titles like COD4, Oblivion, and even AOC. But the MMO bug bit hard, and logins to LOTRO and EVE more than doubled after the launch of WAR.

This isn’t actually that big a shock. Once you’ve gotten out of the habit of sitting at the computer, it’s easy to not log in. But hey, as long as you’re sitting there, it doesn’t hurt to say, check in on games you hadn’t looked at in awhile. In fact, the raw number of titles that our WAR player sample logged into since the launch of WAR is more than double the number they poked at in the weeks leading up to launch, and the number of log ins total was almost doubled.

But that’s self-identified WAR fanatics. What was the impact of WAR’s launch on the market leader and AOC? Let’s look at a snapshot of users. This is the number of gamer DNA members who logged in at a particular point on three successive Mondays:

As you can see, WOW was not impacted by the launch of WAR. Neither was Age of Conan. It could be that the people who wanted to play WAR had already quit playing the other titles. I suppose it’s possible that people are logging in to more than one MMO in a single day, although my experience tells me such a scenario is highly unlikely.

Could it be that WAR has grown the market? Has the pie expanded, giving hope to all the MMOs in the pipeline? Did the world actually need another fantasy MMO in spite of the various gloomy predictions?

We’ll be coming back to this topic in the coming months. WAR is off to a great start, without gutting anyone else. As our data pile grows, our ability to make predictions of the success or failure of future titles will also grow. Stay tuned!
 

Tags: Warhammer Online, Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning