OT: Anarchy Online

[Alneyan]

What really surprises me is the low market share of the older actors: Asheron Call has virtually disappeared, Planetside or Eve Online are doing quite poorly, Dark Age of Camelot is on the wane, and even Everquest is not doing that well given its reputation.

World of Warcraft seems to be doing surprisingly well: it has only been released a while ago, but nonetheless got a big share of the market. I guess it was successful with players new to MMORPGs, as the attraction of your current MMORPG seems quite powerful otherwise (Everquest has a bigger market share than Everquest 2, and Lineage is doing about as well as Lineage 2).

Note that the numbers for Lineage might be a bit too high on the chart, though the two games are definitively the most popular in the MMORPG market, regardless of how you count. A quote from the site Deccan linked to:

In previous versions of this report I did not include Lineage: The Blood Pledge in my graph. Why? Well, two main reasons. First, it completely dwarfed the other MMOGs, distorting the graph and making visual comparisons much more difficult. But more importantly, Lineage uses substantially different metrics for “counting” players. They may have close to 4 million “players”, but most of these players did not buy a box at the local software store and then pay a monthly subscription fee like traditional MMOGs. Instead, they play in “PC baangs”, Internet cybercafes in Korea that buy Lineage access from the company and then sell it at hourly rates to customers. This, combined with the unusual Korean dynamic of rapid deployment of broadband and the fact that imports of Japanese console platforms were restricted, made Lineage unusually popular. Lineage’s lack of success in the United States via the more “traditional” MMOG model only proves this out. However, people still demand to see their data for comparison, and so now that I’ve broken the graph into multiple parts, I’ve decided to include Lineage (and Lineage II). The number I will be using is the worldwide total of “Monthly Access” players. This number is the most comparable to a monthly subscription in North America or Europe; indeed, at least 50% of Lineage players are now on a monthly-subscription as opposed to paying and playing in a cybercafe. NCSoft also tracks a variety of other metrics for measuring player population, such as daily access, peak concurrent users, registered IPs, and so on.