I remember fondly when bloggers and gaming media roasted Turbine for reporting the millions of characters made in gameto show how successful they were doing.
Then Activision reports this gem:
“World of Warcraft MAUs for 2016 grew 10% year on year, with fourth quarter MAUs spiking to 20% year on year growth. In terms of hours played, the MMORPG saw figures better than Legion’s launch month, and better than any non-launch month in the franchise’s history.” (courtesy link here, italics are mine.)
In terms of hours played – the new subscription metric! Sorry, made me giggle. Just say how many active subscribers you have by region, will you? I am sure it is a hefty number that will make everyone proud. Especially investors.
That number is going to go down by about 10-15 per week as I am now finally completing story missions in SWTOR since they have upped XP gains by 250% until April 10th – even for free to play accounts. I finished Tython in about 1 hour yesterday. Looking forward to seeing how many class story lines I can complete in the time frame – it’s my dream single player RPG outside of Mass Effect. I like Star Wars. And old Bioware single player games. This XP boost makes the game playable for me as the way it always should have been.
Happy Friday!
24 hours played even if only by 8 people sounds better on paper than 16 subscribers logged in for an hour.
I know, but the 16 players playing one hour is more money than 8 players playing 24. Unless WoW changes to a pay per hour model =)
They’d be better off listing how many tokens they sold as a true metric of cash flow =)
I think it’s psychology. Saying subs are down to 3,000,000 may be a concerning number, saying those same 3 million played 90 minutes a day does not sound special. Saying they logged 1,642,500,000 hours of game time is a big number. Kind of a list your house for $499,990 sounds cheaper than half a million. Because that’s a lot of money.