Correction:
WoT has 500,000 plus players on its NA servers ALONE. Those numbers don't count have RU, EU, SEA, CHN and KOR servers, and the EU and RU has a bigger player base much bigger than the NA servers that those numbers must be expressed in terms of multiples over the NA server. Today the RU servers concurrently peaked at 700,000 players alone, and the EU adds another 160,000 over that. It's easy to see why the CEO of Wargaming is now the first Belarussian to be a billionaire. Yet despite this, Wargaming makes less than half of Crossfire and League of Legends, the two biggest F2P games of all.
Wargaming's games are considered among the least predatory among F2P games. I personally consider MWO to be even less predatory than WG's. When you are successful, you tend to change less any broken way you have. The WG matchmaker seems to deliberately punish people with winning streaks by stacking odds against them until their win-loss ratios are closer to 50%. These creates brutal long losing streaks.
While tanks are universally recognizable, so are big robots. Even though the Battletech IP is now reduced to the point of public invisibility, big robots are still universally recognizable as well and MWO failed to capitalize on that. Its like EVE Online or Elite Dangerous. The IPs aren't that well known by themselves, but everyone knows space ships.
I suggest people might be better off using this as a metric.
https://www.google.com/trends/
The number of searches being made on a topic indicates rising or falling trends of interest. This is a powerful marketing tool, not to mention in making predicting political trends.
There is a sharp peak at Steam release for MWO but even when accounting for peaks and valleys, there is an overall decline of interest since. This does seem consistent with the Steam numbers.
In terms of regional interest, Canada is the highest, which also explains the game's low population base, followed by the US. The highest European nation in interest is Germany. Russia appears next. Outside of that, there is Australia.
I do think the game has a problem keeping players.
Edited by Anjian, 27 February 2016 - 01:36 AM.