15 replies to this topic

[Relishcakes]

So out of curiosity, i looked up how many people actually play on a daily basis. I expected low numbers as a game of this type is definitely niche....what i saw was confusing.

The numbers i saw were between 900 and 1000 people individual accounts each day. At this point from a company standpoint it has to cost more to have it going than to shut it down right? Is the reason MWO is still around literally because they are afraid of the associated backlash of culling a low pop game?

Dont get me wrong, i enjoy the **** out of the game and am glad its up but i dont get why its still up.

[FupDup]

Are you looking at the Steam charts for this? Because I don't think Steam counts the people that play MWO from the standalone launcher (not using Steam).

Either way it's still a niche game.

[JC Daxion]

because there are far more players than 1k per day.. at peak times there aer closer to 2k+ on at one time.. the game has around 35-40k active players

[JediPanther]

I don't play on a daily basis because life,work,other games,mwo get dull etc. I do play a lot just not as heavily as I use to where I'd play 15-25 hours a week. As for mechs I pretty much have them all as far as fast moving or decent playing mechs for me. I'm not a collector who has to have them all so the 85 I've got are fine.

If pgi gave a care this game could have been a lot better and have so much but as russ has pointed out mwo is just the money for mw5.

[Roughneck45]

If it wasn't profitable they would have shut it down long ago.

This fan base is older than most, with money to spend, and a lot come from a tabletop background, so are used to spending absurd amounts on their hobby. Most of the ultimate packs cost a bit more than $60, the standard cost of a new title these days.

How many mech packs do they make in a year? I'd imagine they are doing just fine.

[Relishcakes]

FupDup, on 10 December 2017 - 01:15 PM, said:

Are you looking at the Steam charts for this? Because I don't think Steam counts the people that play MWO from the standalone launcher (not using Steam).

Either way it's still a niche game.

Looking at it it would make sense that those were steam centered charts even though the charts werent actually found on steam...i will need to find them again and possibly post them here because they dont make sense.

[Revis Volek]

Relishcakes, on 10 December 2017 - 01:35 PM, said:

Looking at it it would make sense that those were steam centered charts even though the charts werent actually found on steam...i will need to find them again and possibly post them here because they dont make sense.

Only like 12% of players use the steam client or some sheet...

It was low i know that.

[C E Dwyer]

There is a chart out there which is very complete, based off of the leader boards.

35-40k is the number of people that play ten of more games each month.

I think those that play more than 100 it drops to about half that.

I think it's Tara's charts but if anyone can link them it would answer your question a lot more accurately

[mistlynx4life]

Steam doesn't account for the non-Steam players, obviously, but there's rarely more than 1,200 players playing MWO through Steam when I log in (you can see on the Community tab in Steam). I imagine it'd be hard to get hard numbers simply because of folks with multiple accounts. Times and population vary throughout the day.

[Asym]

Well, everyone has an opinon and there is Steam and the Leaderboard..... But, there are multiple variations of alternate accounts. Last I asked the 8 team players playing a few weeks ago, everyone had a least three and some as many as five (old team account names, newer team but not the current team name, the current team name and an account for clan and another for IS....) Some players with at least 300 vehicles...... So? how many play at any one time: only PGI knows the IP addresses and tracks those numbers...

If I were to guess, non-event days < 900 and that is pushing a guess up to be optimistic. Event days, who in the heck knows. Many above could be right as well....

MWO is a cult niche. It pays the bills because a lot of the, let's say for an arguement, 900 active players buy everything that is offered. Again, talking to the teamates I play with, they buy everything and anything PGI offers..... If you ask "Hey Blue, what about the new SunSpider"; the answer is, "It's been ordered in all of the varities Sunday morning."

Who in the hecks knows. I can tell you that we don't come anywhere close to popular games that can and do drive millions on line each and everyday.... How MWO is still active is a "profitability riddle, wraped in a mystery inside of an enigma, written in a language no one can read....." (taken from a popular saying...)

Edited by Asym, 10 December 2017 - 02:13 PM.

[Relishcakes]

mistlynx4life, on 10 December 2017 - 02:02 PM, said:

Steam doesn't account for the non-Steam players, obviously, but there's rarely more than 1,200 players playing MWO through Steam when I log in (you can see on the Community tab in Steam). I imagine it'd be hard to get hard numbers simply because of folks with multiple accounts. Times and population vary throughout the day.

Yeah i usually play nights when i get off work, i am normally playing with aussies as an american i would love to see the ACTUAL number...i would laugh a little if there were like 12 of us just sitting around keeping this game alive.

[KodiakGW]

It really depends on what you consider to be an “active” player. Leaderboards are much better than Steam at gauging that number. I consider a minimum of 80 games a month, which considering all the free stuff they have been giving away, as a good metric. That’s only 20 games a week.

So last month’s metrics:
October to November month over month minimum 10 games
2016 - 37,041 to 35,390 - 1,651 player loss
2017 - 28,479 to 28,078 - 401 player loss

November year over year minimum 10 games
35,390 - 28,078 = 7,312 player loss

October to November month over month minimum 80 games
2016 - 20,074 to 17,250 - 2,824 player loss
2017 - 12,555 to 13,158 - 603 player gain

November year over year minimum 80 games
17,250 - 13,158 = 4,092 player loss

[Mole]

Revis Volek, on 10 December 2017 - 01:49 PM, said:

Only like 12% of players use the steam client or some sheet...

It was low i know that.

I kind of hope this number is correct. If it is, then let's see... average amount of users in-game on steam is roughly 1,000... that would mean there are about 8,300ish people on at any give moment.

[Jay Leon Hart]

Based on about 45,000 "active" accounts, assuming everyone has 2 accounts (most will only have 1, but this accounts for people with more than 2), there should be about 22,500 "active" players as of last month.

This is down from about 205,000 "active" unique accounts since the seasonal leaderboards started.

So we're at about 22% of our player base, account wise.

[mistlynx4life]

At this moment (8pm EST) there are just over 1,300 players on Steam. I know it's mostly guesswork but I cannot fathom that there is ten times that number in the clients. I can't fathom that there's more than a few thousand unique active players across the planet but I'm happy to be wrong.

[Anjian]

Relishcakes, on 10 December 2017 - 01:14 PM, said:

So out of curiosity, i looked up how many people actually play on a daily basis. I expected low numbers as a game of this type is definitely niche....what i saw was confusing.

The numbers i saw were between 900 and 1000 people individual accounts each day. At this point from a company standpoint it has to cost more to have it going than to shut it down right? Is the reason MWO is still around literally because they are afraid of the associated backlash of culling a low pop game?

Dont get me wrong, i enjoy the **** out of the game and am glad its up but i dont get why its still up.

My impression is that PGI is at least able to cut costs and run MWO cost efficiently at the expense of having the game feel like its running on third rate IT.

I would think this game has around 2000 to 3000 players at one time, maybe even up to 4000. That still a sustainable number. When I was in EVE Online on its first three years, the numbers of players I see simultaneously was generally around 1000 to 3000 depending on the times of the day. It of course, may have gone up since then, since that was a long time ago.

A mech game isn't necessarily niche. Mech game on mobile War Robots generally has about a million players or more that logs on everyday or measured in DAU (Daily Active Users), and at one point has gone up to 1.5 million. It has also more than 50 million downloads and consistently ranked among the top 3 in action games in Android and iOS. The gross revenue it generates daily puts it on mainstream numbers. When I try to convince some WR players to try MWO, one response I get is that MWO is "impenetrable", generally complicated and hard to learn. Complexity in a game does not necessarily deter players, but it does on certain types of players. Pokemon is certainly much more impenetrable than this, as well as large RPG franchises. I have been playing Pokemon Go for well over a year now and I haven't figured out what Pikachu's best move set is. But RPG and strat players expect and are ready and relish on the richness of complexity, but action genre players may not.

War Thunder is a niche game but it has around 50,000 to 60,000 players on simultaneously at peak times each day. World of Warships I would estimate to have around at least 60,000 to 100,000 players unique daily logins, and that's also a niche game. I based this estimate by reading the player count numbers of the different regional servers. And so I feel that if MWO is a niche game, its still low for a niche game. I can blame this on the lack of proper marketing for MWO, and the need to streamline the game, especially with regards to skill trees and quirks.