GamerDNA Year In Review Part 2

(Note: You may have already seen this article on other sites. This is my clever way of telling you that we’re exploring partnerships with awesome news sites, where they publish our ideas and data as exclusive news, and then we post a few days later. You’ll always be able to find the material here, but probably not on Fridays anymore. But, hey, you’re reading the blog every day, right? Right?! *looks hopeful*)

What a freaking year. The weather outside is frightful for newcomers to the MMO genre, with a Blizzard that’s been going on for so long that no one remembers what swimsuit weather is like. WAR broke out. Expansion packs rained down like meteors, but left no craters in the marketplace. And yet, good news abounds if you know how to read the signs. Come along with us as we look over the second half of 2008.

Today’s column features data from July through December. GamerDNA being a startup, our data collection in the first half of the year was not consistent enough to use for anything but wild guessing and drinking games.

Listen, a start up tech company can make ANYTHING into a drinking game.

We’re using Xfire, and the pool consists of GamerDNA members who have created a profile. This sample pool has grown steadily since the summer – you can look at Part 1 here: http://blog.gamerdna.com/blog/2008/12/19/the-gamerdna-year-in-review-part-1/ We are only looking at the top 100 titles in terms of logins, which means some titles dropped off the chart even though they didn’t lose significant numbers of customers – for example, Pirates of the Burning Sea has found a core of dedicated players, but while their logins remained relatively stable, other titles grew to the point of knocking POTBS off the chart.

The top 100 chart was remarkably stable for the last six months of 2008. Some big launches made a splash – Spore, Fallout 3 – but overall the big players stayed the same. Four titles were in our top ten “most logged in” the entire time: WOW, Call of Duty 4, Counter-Strike: Source, and Guild Wars. Two other titles were up there four out of six months: Lord of the Rings Online and Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne.

December numbers are projections, since December is not yet over. The projections are based on the time played in December up to the point where we pulled the data, and typical player behavior trends during the winter holidays. (Next week, we’ll be doing a feature on player behavior over the holiday. What titles were hot gifts? What games were good enough for the day after Christmas, but not good enough to last until the New Year? Be sure to tune in!)

I have two “outliers” in there to give you all some points of comparison. Call of Duty 4 was, according to Xfire data, the most played non-MMO on the PC in the second half of 2008. And Shaiya has, at least among GamerDNA members, been one of the more popular Asian Free To Play MMOs this year. Having those data points gives you an idea as to the bigger picture outside the MMO ghetto.

Finally, what today’s data is reflecting is the number of playing sessions each game enjoyed with GamerDNA members. It’s not a perfect yardstick – if you logged in at all, it counts. That means the guy logging in to check his auctions is counted the same as the freak who raided for 24 straight hours, you know who you are, and dude, that’s not healthy. What our data does NOT reflect is subscription rates, number of players, or anything like that. You might say these charts reflect interest and motivation, not financial figures.

On to the charts! First, let’s look at trends in log ins. Starting from a baseline set in June, we looked at the percentage changes in log ins from month to month. Raw numbers are important – we’ll get to them in a bit – but here we can compare growth a little more fairly. Tabula Rasa adding 200 users is a big deal. WOW adding 200 users is slightly less exciting than watching CSPAN, in that it may be exciting to wonky dorks with calculator watches, but the rest of us have games to play.

All right, that’s a little hard to read. I just like seeing all the lines together. Let me break it down a little for you:

So, how did the launch of a triple-A title affect the log in patterns of other big MMOs?

The launch of WAR had a devastating effect on Age of Conan. Guild Wars (which is a little inflated with GamerDNA, in that more GamerDNA members play it than would appear in a true random sample. That community was an early partner with us) and LOTRO stagnated during WAR’s launch, but both began growing again the following month. A slight dip happened for Tabula Rasa, but that title immediately rebounded. Anarchy Online, Star Wars Galaxies, and EVE grew during WAR’s launch. The growth rate in the number of played hours for WOW was utterly unimpeded by the launch of WAR.

In other words, the launch of WAR, a highly anticipated title, had no lasting negative effect on any title besides one that was already trending downwards, *and* occupying the exact same playstyle niche. As we saw in other Market Trends columns this year, the only thing WAR seemed to do was to remind people who had stopped playing MMOs how much fun they were. It didn’t eat into other games (besides the one in the same ecological niche), but although players didn’t necessarily stick with WAR, the other PVP games in the genre showed improvement in the weeks following the launch of WAR, particularly Guild Wars and EVE.

Aside from that, what do the numbers tell us? Let me begin with one caveat – GamerDNA’s own growth is not accounted for with these numbers. In other words, a slight growth line is actually a function of more members for GamerDNA, NOT the product. In previous Market Trends columns, we’ve addressed this by using the same group of players and taken snapshots of their playing habits over time. With this year in review column, we are looking at total logins for every member. And since the number of members is growing, so too are the logins. Upward trends are not as good as they appear, and downward trends are actually worse than they look. So keep that in mind as you’re reading.

The impending cancellation of Tabula Rasa is depressing in that any such event is depressing. And certainly given NCsoft’s expectations for the title, the game’s performance and growth was not acceptable. But until the cancellation announcement in November, numbers were trending in the right direction, however slightly. Players were growing more interested in the sci fi MMO shooter, and logins were on the rise. If its development had not been so long, so expensive, and so vastly overhyped and mismarketed, this title could have been left alone to find its legs and found some small measure of success in a long tail environment akin to the Sony Station Pass.

Of concern to EA, the number of logins to Warhammer Online are trending in the wrong direction despite a successful launch. Exact subscriber numbers are unknown (the press releases have described registered users, which counts players on their thirty day trial, and not paying subscribers), but estimates are consistently under a half million and falling. It is too soon to determine a genuine trend, and the situation bears close examination in the coming year. The team behind the title is famous for agile patching, and any game so dependent on PVP balance needs time to find its stride. Considering how good the launch of WAR was for the entire genre, proving beyond a doubt that a rising tide lifts all boats (well, except for the boats with giant holes in the hull), everyone should be hoping for long term success.

WAR’s companion in the PVP fantasy niche, Age of Conan, was trending downwards before WAR’s launch. Logins dropped dramatically during that event, and then resumed the slower bleed. However, AOC can’t be counted out of the game in 2009. Its developer doesn’t give up easily. Anarchy Online, which I included just for this paragraph’s comparison, put up raw numbers close to Dungeons and Dragons Online and Everquest 2 – and had a much more consistent year than either of those two products – and had an even worse starting year. And the numbers for December were very encouraging – players had already played more in the first half of the month than they had in November.

The smoothest, most inexorable trend line on the whole chart is WOW. If you squint, you can see a faint disturbance in the force during the WAR launch, but the infamous juggernaut shrugged it off and kept marching. To me, the big story is how smooth that line is, and Blizzard shouldn’t necessarily be pleased. Remember how I said that some degree of upward trending on this chart is a reflection of GamerDNA’s growth, not the titles? I suspect that is what’s going on here. If you look at the data in this analysis, you can see that WoW was actually very faintly losing ground before the launch of Lich King.  It’s incredibly minor, but it’s there.  

Lord of the Rings Online is performing slightly ahead of WOW, in that regard. Their loss rate was a little bigger than WOW’s before the launch of their expansion pack, Mines of Moria. Their growth rate since then has been slightly ahead of the industry leader.

Turbine in general must be pleased. In addition to the solid performance of LOTRO, DDO has staged a bit of a comeback. It’s not on my line chart, because DDO fell off the top 100 chart in the middle of the summer… but it came back two months ago. Its login numbers have tripled since the summer, and if the trend continues, the game will be a solid performer in 2009.

DDO would probably be even more successful if Turbine offered something similar to Sony’s Station Pass. SWG and EQ2 are living proof. Like DDO, EQ2 fell off the top 100 chart in the middle of 2008, but came roaring back with yet another successful expansion pack (The Shadow Odyssey). It was so successful that EQ2 is now posting the best login numbers out of all of the older/smaller MMOs. SWG is hardly having a bad year – they have stabilized with their core user base, and their numbers remained remarkably consistent.

EVE was tremendously successful in the second half of 2008. Their gains were proportionally more significant than any of the other examined titles, and trended upwards on an exponential line. Their community communication has always been solid, and their content enjoys regular infusions of new material. As resistance to PVP fades (and the fact that player versus player design and balance has been improving steadily in the last five years is probably not a coincidence), and as the market gorges itself on Yet Another Batch Of Naked Elves, a solid Sci-Fi PVP title is in a great spot to take advantage of users looking for something more.

Let’s check out the last chart, for a look at the big picture. The actual numbers belong to GamerDNA, but these bars represent the number of logins for each month. As I said long ago at the beginning of this marathon column: If you logged in, checked your mail, and logged out, it counted as one log in. So no, it’s not perfect – it measures the email checker and the catassing raider as equal – but it’s better than nothing.

Raw numbers can be misleading in terms of showing you the progress a title has (or hasn’t) made. But nothing beats raw numbers for giving you a sense of where people spend their time.

Declining or not, WOW is still hands down the place where the most time is being spent.

If we had been able to show a full year of data, AOC’s initial numbers would look much like WAR’s – and might suggest to some that the premise of a PVP centric game is too niche to support a multiyear development process and triple A budget. For what it’s worth, I don’t think that suggestion would be fair – we have not yet seen an MMO PVP game launch with the balance, the systems, and the technology right out of the gate. When that happens, hold on to your hats.

You can see that EVE and LOTRO are equally successful in terms of the time that people are spending there.

Guild Wars is hard to judge, given their early adoption of GamerDNA and disproportionate presence in our community skews the results. Their lack of subscription fee is also a factor that may be affecting the numbers – when it costs nothing to log in and check out how things are going… why not do so as long as the game is installed on your computer?

Finally, my eye is on Shaiya, and other titles like it. Their costs are lower. Their maintenance is less intensive and expensive. Customer service expectations are lower, as opposed to traditional subscription titles where the customer feels that his fifteen bucks a month entitles him to fast, personal service from a live human. And while it’s no WOW when it comes to sheer market share, getting a Shaiya out the door isn’t the gamble that getting a WOW, a WAR, or an AOC out the door can be. It’s no wonder that many similar games are in development right now – especially as the larger studios are collapsing or tightening their belts.

So that was the year! What do you think we’re going to see in 2009?