108290-wildstar-population-ncsoft-2nd-quarter-2014-earnings-report (2024)

NCSoft's second quarter earnings report is up on their website. It shows WIldstar's sales at about $27 million USD after converting from KRW (South Korea Won). If you assume an average box price of $60, with the folks paying for the deluxe canceled out by the folks who got a 20% discount on the box, that's a little over 455 k subs at launch, if I did my math right. (If I didn't, I know some kind soul will correct me.)Anyone want to speculate on what the retention rate of those buyers has been? One in two, one in five, one in ten still playing? We finally have some hard population numbers -- do they support the idea that WIldstar is fine pop-wise, or in trouble?My take: if I did the math right, these numbers aren't too good. Some folks have been suggesting Wildstar is meant to be a "niche hardcore" game like EVE Online, but EVE has 500k subs currently and has been holding steady at that level for a long time. Wildstar started with not quite that many, and has of course lost a lot of early subbers, as MMOs typically do right after launch. So do we think there are currently around 230 k players? (One in two still subbed?) 100k? (One in five still subbed?) or 45k (One in ten still subbed?) And what would those various numbers mean for the future of the game?

This thread is sure to get entertaining a little later on.

You need to count CREDD sales in there as well.

Rentention rate doesn't matter too much when they have enough whales buying credd.

To use EvE as an example, they started out at 25K subs and grew to 500K over the years. The next 6-12 months will tell if we're playing the next EvE or Tabula Rasa.

What marketing?! Seriously, other than a few website advertisem*nts such as full-page ads on MMORPG.com and others, I have yet to see any MAJOR marketing for Wildstar that has even attempted to get an inkling of interest from passer-bys.Where's the commercials?Where's the "Free Trial" disc on Gamestop counters?Where's the actor/actress stating that play this game as XX class doing some space cowboy stuff?The assumption that spent more than $10,000 on advertisem*nt max would be laughable. They invest all the time, resources, and effort into a new IP in the West and bank on it's success, but totally fail on propertly selling the product! Why is that?!

I am going to call it now as Tabula Rasa

EvE is the only game of it's kind on the market. Wildstar has no such advantage.

Could be an advantage later because most players probably didn't know about wildstar. Advertise later when majority of the tedious content is gone.

Actually, EVE has been growing steadily to 500k players. To their credit. They weren't always there.The game probably has about a 50% retention rate, maybe higher or lower by 5%, but half is normal. If your math comes correct, that puts subs at 225k? Better than I thought they were doing (I thought they'd settle in somewhere between 100-200k at first and grow.We'll see how things shake out. I'm curious to know how CREDD factors in, though.

and now that the doom says have hard evidence to call wildstar a flop ( and lets be clear just selling at the rate of an "AAA release" would merit close to duoble those revenue values) the forums are going to get really really fun for the next 3 months/cast flameward/cast doomGuard/cast barrier/cast troll ward

Hm, I feel that's optimistic. I suspect it's more like a one in four or even one in five retention rate, so 25% to 20%. It really doesn't look to me like Wildstar still has half the players it had at launch.

You add to the mix. 190 guilds that complete 1/6 GA for both NA/EU.Assume average there are 30 rosters each guild. meaning only around 5900 ppl.Times it with 2x to get 0/6 GA guilds, so around 11800 ppl who could raid now? Those are professional/skilled players that dedicate to the game so they prolly surely subs.Beside those who reach end game, there are some ppl doing housing, some ppl still dungeoning, some ppl still leveling, but from the look of the Hub city in Widow, it is quite deserted, and i dont think there are much outside the raiding guilds.Some CREED in some server are dirt cheap, so i'm not sure how to calculate the actual subscription from these info either. Some people can play with CREED all months long without the need of playing subs because they played the market right.Carbine should have tell the press by now if the subscription they get is great. By the fact that they silenced about this means there might be population/subscription drops.

Eh, there's a moral narrative to the rant and rave crowd. They will claim the game is a flop because the game company didn't listen to whatever their concern was. Not sure I see how you can argue that if it only sold half a million in the first place. There's not many subs to lose. Wasn't there some WoW video guy who polled his viewers on Wildstar and like 4 in 7 had never heard of the game?

just for the record eve has an abysmal attachment rates, they just have really managed to attach people to spending more money per honest human customer. But CCP also how to get people to try the game and convert to members

Guh!Ack!

• clink*

You Miss! troll ward resisted by 100%

Even though I'd have to agree, I can't help but think, "poor Tabula Rasa"... still think I'm one of a small handful that actually loved the hell out of that game, lol. :P

WAIT!!! ...don't forget to roll the super-die... if you get a 4 you get a successful counter-attack! :D

I know right!? It's one of those things that's been kind of boggling me... several game sites including IGN, Gamespot, etc... all came out raving over Wildstar, giving ratings of anywhere from 8 to 10, etc. Saying it was so awesome, the best MMO ever, how they've missed such content, etc, etc... then, right after their reviews... they don't even play the game or follow it anymore? Only time I ever see them post anything about it is to hype the next content-drop typically. Seems kind of fishy that the review can say how mind-blowing awesome it is, yet no follow-through whatsoever... even games that have been hyped and then flopped in the past had some follow-through, mention, coverage, etc. :huh:

how you you resist a buff on myself/cast dimensional ejection.bye bye

1. SpellPenetrationGotIt

I really enjoyed Tabula Rasa for the short time it was around too. (it basically taught Rift how to Rift and the combat was fun).

Tabula Rasa was actually a really good game that I enjoyed playing a lot.today its too bad it wasnt still around.

No, they can't tell anyone anything. Why, you may wonder? Well, it's because they are owned by NCSoft, which is a publicly traded company. No one at Carbine can release any such information unless it has been approved for release by NCSoft and generally publicly traded companies only release financial numbers through their quarterly/annual reports because those numbers have a direct effect on their stock prices.

Considering the latest dev post I've seen on the subject still says that the reason they can't merge servers, even the low ones, is because there actually aren't two servers at 50% or less capacity to add up to less than 100%. So 50% may be lowballing it a bit for active accounts.Active accounts and accounts online at any one time are two different numbers, though.

I don't know how they didn't think to get people from Firefly or Star Wars to do commercials.

For a second, I was sitting there thinking, "Dude, I see ads for Wildstar all the time; what are people talking about?"Then I realized that was Google ads... spitting Wildstar ads at me because I post about Wildstar on Facebook.It's going to be a while before everyone knows what this game is.

I saw ads on Twitch for about 3 days before head start, and that was it. That's the ONLY advertising I've ever seen for the game.

It seems to be a secret rule that publishers agreed with:You have a new game of a new IP that could be the next big thing? It has no shop with real money? That is focused on impulse purchase? It has a nice uncommon style? It uses a gameplay that requires some training? It has no day-one DLC? It's made by a little and relatively unknown studio? The returns are mostly positive?Excellent, then, we won't take any risk with it! Nuke the marketing department and reallocate the money to the marketing of our big names!

Personally, I think they should be giving out 7 day free trials like candy and advertising that all over the place. What Wildstar has going for it, the most attractive things about it, are all in gameplay. I can understand them thinking that, as awesome as the Chua are in-game to people who know about them, anthropomorphic rodents holding guns haven't really sold games since Jakd and Daxter... and before that probably Jazz Jackrabbit.

I love the "Jurasic Park" version of WoW the environment is, the combat is decent, the dungeon queues blow, and even only at level 40, Malgrave is a ghost town (no pun intended). I don't want to dis the game I want it to do well, but if I'm going to pay $60 for the game and $180 in sub fees for the year, I want to know if I'm investing my time and money in an MMO or am I just going to be playing solo? So the real question is, where did NCSoft fail? And why wouldn't I invest my time and money in a successful game that actually feels like an MMO (high server pop vs ghost town)?

Well, that should make it clear to even the most stalwart of supporters. At that rate the game has not even covered the costs to develop it. If they have higher than a 25% retention rate it would be shocking based on the numerous "this server is empty" posts.The reason it has been so quiet from the devs is it is likely NCSoft is deciding whether it's worthwhile to F2P it or whether it would be better just to sunset it and cut losses (large live content teams are expensive to operate). In the past they've done it to games like Auto assault, Tabula Rasa and more. Unlike Eve which was a pure grassroots effort this will likely not be given the shot to recover.For those that think it is a marketing issues, it is nothing of the sort, otherwise servers would be packed with the players they had at launch and it would be growing vs. shrinking drastically. You don't lose existing players to poor marketing. Right now there is no reason to justify further marketing spend on something that is burning money to keep running and creating live content for. As for the free trials, again it's irrelevant, people are "welcomed" to mostly empty servers and one of the worst new player/tutorial experiences in a major MMO. This was harped on in the beta forums a lot pre launch, but the devs were under the impression people would suffer through the poor experience to witness the "greatness" of the game. While this is true if you dropped money on the box this isn't true if you entered for free. You have about 5-10 minutes to "catch" someone.In the off chance NCSoft gives them more time/funds, the paradigm shift they'd need to make to turn this around would be truly epic and there are absolutely no signs of that kind of focus/understanding/capability on the team's part.I wish it had turned out different Wildstar had so much potential.

Keep in mind that the zones are sharded so you aren't tripping over people during challenges. That threshold is low. Even on Evindra, which has no population issue, you can feel alone if you're just leveling solo.I tend to talk in /zone to stay connected.

I actually do get a fair amount of Wildstar online advertising, its right between the stuff I just bought on Amazon. That has to be the most worthless marketing ever. After I buy something or play a game, then they tell me about it?

I got my advertisem*nt from YouTube and we seem to have a lot of blazzard moles in the forums.

We really do need a FPS MMO with skills magic and such.

Destiny?

Those numbers....not so good.

Well Tabula Rasa is dead becaseu not enough subs.

This.I have never, ever seen an ad for this game. If I hadn't seen it mentioned in a thread about player housing on the WoW forums like a year ago I wouldn't even know this game existed.

There's always Defiance, or maybe Fallen Earth. :D

As one dude said...destiny but it's only console release for now (boo!).There is other shooter type MMOs: PS1/PS2, Fallen Earth, APB (notsure still running lol),and Defiance come to mind. The latter is awful so don't do it.;)Then there is the not so MMO but close in Warframe...possibly the best f2p co-op TPS out there...heck better than most AAAs imo.Anyways...not looked it up but how much have they invested in WS? 27 mill earnings seemspretty low if that's even close to accurate.

New IP, New Studio. Meaning they had no Fanbase from past games. 500k For this is pretty good. It will only grow as it is an amazing game. Again, Any game that has come always brakes records and then dies, but games that go stealth and grow slowly survive longer and become bigger as time goes by. Mmo's that grow slowly are better investments that games that have huge profits and then die suddenly.

I literally have never seen an ad for this game. An acquaintance I competed with on the AH in WoW told me about this game the day the head start started, if not for that I would of never heard of this because I don't window shop at game stores and have yet to see an ad anywhere.Quite brilliant on my competitors part to remove me from the games market. When I seen this was space themed and had telegraphs similar to GW2 I doubled down by canceling my WoW sub then reset my phone to wipe the authenticator so it'll be a pain in the ass to turn the account back on.So please advertise soon.

And don't forget the stunt NC Soft pulled. You know... drafting up a closure document and then forging TR's creator's signature, and then closing the game at their whim. They were sued for 25 million. and lost.

Lets hope they learned their lesson....

I only learned about the game because someone I used to follow on Tumblr praised the animation right after it was announced. >_>After the initial WoD hype dies down, they desperately need to get more aggressive with advertising. Especially if WoD flops.

You say 500k is good but how many of those players are still around? This game is not growing slowly if you had not noticed it's the complete opposite

We have no data, aside from what happens to every mmo out there that population dies after the first 6 months then slowly grows up. If you like the game, why are you worried? Or in order for you to like it, every other person has to like it?I could care less about the numbers, as long as I am having fun; that is all I care.

This is actually the more important question right now, because we do have the hard data on the sales thanks to this report. We don't know exactly how many people were playing at launch because we don't know precisely how much money NCSoft got from each game (what with discounts, retailer share, deluxe purchases and so on) but we know that it wasn't as high as one million initial purchases and we know it wasn't as low as one hundred thousand initial purchases. 500k players at launch seems like a very reasonable guess.The real question now, as I asked in my initial post, is; What do we think the retention rate has been? I'm positive it's not as high as 50%. But is it 33%? (Retain one out of three?) 25%? 20%? Or could it be as bad as 10%, with only one in ten players continuing past the free month? If it's as low as 10% retention the total game population at the moment could, quite possibly, be as low as 50K players. That would be pretty dismal for a AAA MMO, if true.Folks who are still playing actively: in your opinion, when you log onto the game now, do you see 50% of the activity you saw at launch? or more like 20%? Or more like 10%? And on which server and faction?I think I see more like 10%, possibly 20% of activity at the most, based on folks no longer piling up at the AH/CX in Academy Corner, low activity in my Harvest Circle (100 strong at its height plus our three overflow circles specific to each resource node type), low activity in my main's guild (max 500 members, mostly softcore, most showing weeks since last log on), and talk both in Thayd Zone and in the Housing zone, which has been very, very quiet recently on my server. (Avatus Exile.) Some of those are going to be folks who moved instead of just dropping sub, but I don't know how to tell how many.My take is that Wildstar is currently around 50k-100k total population across all servers, possibly as high as 200k if there are a ton of players at 50 who only come on to raid and don't chat or go to the AH or anything. I'm curious what other folks have as their personal estimates.

On Archon we've actually noticed an influx of new players in the low level areas.I've been told this is because of free trials being handed out?In any case our server, which was completely dead some weeks ago, is now slightly less dead. Here's hoping they all stay until lvl 50 and join us for the endgame.

The free trial is comming soon, you can see that in the Wildstar launcher. They didnt do any advertising for the game, and it had around 500k players at launch, isnt that good?Theres a lot of players who didnt resub right away because theres imbalances and bugs to fix, but theres a lot of them active in the forums waiting for the content they would like to come back.If the devs can keep up with new content drops every months, and keep fixing stuff as fast as they are doing, Wildstar will live for a long time.And BTW any other MMOs that Devs doing two hours streams per week to keep us informed? I dont think so, and the Devs are great, they are like ur friend, not like buisnessmans if you know what im saying.

They DID do advertising for the game, I don't know why people keep denying that.In the week around launch, every single Twitch stream I opened to watch some Dota played the 30s Nexus trailer.

RIP WS 2014-2014

They did a lot of advertisem*nt. Streamers were playing this game A LOT. Then suddenly it faded out, just like server population in most realms. Even PERGO is looking like a ghost town sometimes, but population is still healthy. The economy, not so.

since you asked. yes.RIft for one does livestreams all the time. the devs, the class leads, even the games producer post on the forums and respond to players@Maytree, agree with your guesstimates.

Ah, now I know why RIFT went f2p. No, seriously RIFT was an awesome game but they managed to *cupcake* it up as well. So what?

your post makes no sense, the guy asked if other games did regular livestreams to keep people informed. yes they do, I named just one of them.

You are right.

If you want to make comparisons to other mmo's growth models, you should at least look up at what number EVE started out with and it was 500K, it wasn't a third from 500K to give you a hint.

I totally forgot about that. My friend a total TR fan never touched another ncsoft game since then.

Does the addon site give any hint to how many players in total subbed?I saw 1 download total for around 990k

Gah, yeah those numbers don't look so great.Now, if all those box sales had kept playing, things would definitely be fine. But considering the massive dropoff?I was worried before, now I am wiping nervous sweat. :unsure:

Yeah I wonder about that. Do so many people download stuff several times? Because I really can't believe even the majority of players uses the same single addon. Which is only the reasonable conclusion, looking at the calculated sales numbers from the OP.

Can't say I'd ever call Pergo a ghost town. Its always bustling for me.

Funnily enough i think it would do better in today's mmo market then back then.Strange.I remember all the drop ships pouring out enemies and scrambling to defend posts to be able to hand my quests back in!It got a lil' boring at times due to the endless waves of it, but it was a blast!

455k would be spectacular.

If they kept the majority of them.Which didn't happen. It just didn't. Sorry, I wish it wasn't so.

Why exactly does everyone think these numbers are bad? 27 million in sales just between the months January and June is actually pretty solid (guessing preorders got lumped in here too). MMOs don't need to need massive WoW like income to be profitable enough to warrant continued development. I'm not saying WS is sailing on clear waters right now, but the ship also isn't sinking, regardless of our wild speculation on retention rates.

That is probably the total number of downloads including updates, so each time the plugin was updated everyone (or most people) downloaded again and the counter increased.

Because 500k isnt 1231231 milions.:)

Not sure you can make that call. How do you know? I'd say there are probably around 400k, considering people that left and new people coming in.

And remember that's only revenue through June 30th. Just 27 days of launch time.

Which is a shame, because it showed all the months of pre-orders and everyone who bought the game, but didn't wait another 5 days to show retention into 1st paying month.

Most sales do not come from pre-orders. Also, they can't just "wait" a couple days.

Games Dead... Move along now people... nothing to see here.. :ph34r:

:ph34r:

If you feel the need to make a thread where you list your reasons for quitting, that's one thing.But don't come in other threads proclaiming the game dead, most of us are still having fun ty.Why are you still on the forums if you quit anyway? You add nothing of value and you won't be missed, feel free to leave.

I think if the goal is to interpret the numbers and try to gauge the success of the game it's better that the numbers for the first month of subs aren't included. We wouldn't be able to estimate sales because we wouldn't know what part of the revenues is from subs as we don't know retention and we couldn't estimate retention as we wouldn't know rough sales numbers. It would just add another variable to the mix and make our estimates less precise.Personally I think the next earnings report will be much more interesting and indicative of how Wildstar is doing, but my anecdotal evidence (which could be completely wrong) suggests that it is not doing very well.

One thing to remember about the $27 million. Do you think 100% of the $60 people paid went to NC Soft? Do you think retailers make no money? some resellers were giving 20% off the retail price, and they still were making money off the sale. One can assume the retailer is taking at least $20 of every $60.

A chart of EVE Onlines subscription numbers over time.They did not start at 500K.

This came from NCSoft's quarterly earnings, so that was only the money that went to NCSoft. That doesn't count anything going to other retailers.

Cant compare EVE with WS. EVE is a sandbox mmo, meaning they dont need sh*tloads of $$$$ to produce endgame content or whatever, its the players running the show.WS in the other hand is a themepark, and a high profile at that, meaning is costs waaaaaaaaay more to maintain than EVE ever will.

This is correct (well, I don't know about the specific numbers.)Which, since it was an NCsoft revenue report, means that box sales of WildStar were much higher.I seem to recall a post by someone from Carbine over on WildStar Central a long time ago with an estimation of getting about $30 per sale.. so, do that math. If correct, thats pretty good. Really good.Edit: Found it. It's actually much better than I thought...http://wildstar-central.com/index.php?threads/how-many-people-are-working-on-wildstar.7415/

2.5 million sales in the first week would likely make Wildstar one of the best selling PC games in the entire year. Which would be awesome, but is entirely unrealistic; we're not Diablo or The Sims. Of that $60 box, we get maybe 40%, higher for digital sales or sales directly through NCSoft.

I think we're at around 250 people now. Average salary is probably closer to $50-60k. We've actually been in development for over 7 years, not 5. And that doesn't include non-salary things like bonuses, health care, building rent, utilities, computers, licenses, keeping the kitchen stocked, team lunches, crunch food, etc.

Even if we did manage 2.5 million sales, you never retain 100% for first month subscriptions. It's usually around 30-45%; if you make 40-45%, you are doing amazingly well but almost every MMO settles down to 30-35% of total box sales as paid subscribers after 3 months. Plus, as mentioned above, we see maybe $10 of that $15.

Correct, but the $27 million was what led people to assume the number of sold copies of the game.

Developers usually receive around 10% of the total sale price, so in this case of each sold 60$ copy, Carbine receives 6$ if it goes of the normal distribution chain.Publishers take around 20-25% of direct sales.

Tabula Rasa was shut down in its fourth month.

Still a bit of room for "guess work" I'd say. Honestly, if the game started with massive several-hour queues and is now down to "low" populations across the board, there's obviously a huge drop-off somewhere. I know there's all the hub-bub about how the game supposedly has some super-magical formula different than all the others for measuring population... but that aside, at the end of June, after all the "server-cap raising" and/or anything else done, most servers were medium/high... then end of July, most all servers were low (both measured by the same system). So even though exact numbers aren't known, it is apparently obvious numbers are dropping off quite a bit. I mean, several say, "due to higher capacity, low in this game is medium or high in other games"... but the other painful truth is, low could count zero or 1 up to whatever the last count is before medium... so for all anybody knows, low servers might only have one person... and can't say I'd imagine any game programming to show "empty", so some of those low could possibly even be zero people.As for what I personally see and recognize... the "visual count" has DEFINITELY plummeted. I still recall even a few weeks to a month after launch, Thayd would be packed, both auction-houses packed, so much that framerate might hiccup or stutter. Now, even on weekends or prime time, while in Thayd, lucky if I see half a dozen to a dozen people all throughout Thayd... and that's on the RP server. (Even housing chat which used to always be alive, is only somewhat alive sporadically.)Kind of ironic... game launched with massive frame-rate stuttering/slugging issues... what fixes it? Everybody leaving so there's less to actively render and re-render, lol. :DEDIT: Have even attempted to make a couple alts... and lowbie zones are usually/typically ghost-towns... I'm lucky if I ever see one or two other people with new characters in the starter zones.

Another would be FFXIV: ARR -- they still do regular videos on their YouTube channel... https://www.youtube.com/user/FINALFANTASYXIV/videos

it released in november of 2007, and officially closed february of 2009.a bit longer than 4 months I think.

Dude, stop trying so hard. Stop spreading falsehoods based on speculation.And I know he can't see this, so would someone please quote me.

Well since no one else seems to do the math with the latest information that we have, I might as well do it:So what do we know?Earnings $27,000,000 (up until 30th June which basically means box sales/downloads)Earnings per sold copy: Around 40% of $60 = $24 for each boxed copy sold by retailers, a little bit more for digital sales, and even more for collectors editions. Lets assume around $30 in average.so $27,000,000/$30 is....900,000 copies sold, and not the 500,000 we seem to assume all across threads!

Or perhaps stop trying so hard at denying what's right in front of you? Several others in this thread have said the same. Several other posts around the forums say the same. Just pointing out how it is... deny it all you want to... the rest of us exist in this little place called "reality", you should check it out sometime troll. B)BTW, the whole bit about, "could be zero people" is called "hypothetical" and "playing devil's advocate", or simply trying to look at BOTH SIDES of the spectrum as what the range entails. Figured since so many want to boast from the roof-tops, "low still means lots of people, more than medium or high in other MMOs", figured I'd toss out the reality that it COULD, or it could also just mean LOW, since it's a "RANGE" and not a given. It's kind of like an old ex-buddy of mine, they'd read/hear, "nominated for game of the year", and go around telling everybody the game "was given game of the year" even before GOTY was decided and/or when the game was never given GOTY, when it was only nominated... hence the saying about the word "assume". (Layman's terms, it's like when someone says, "it could mean this", and you reply with, "it could, or it could ALSO mean...")Sorry truth and applied-logic makes you butt-hurt bro. #ListPlusOne :DEDIT: Honestly "Lethality", you have just as much power to add me to your ignore list, as I've now added you to mine... if honest facts, truth, and applied-logic, at least from my perspective (as was asked for) bother and obviously unhinge you so badly... please, by all means, do the "grown up" thing and add me to ignore, instead of going out of your way to continue to attempt to spur forum-drama... thank you. :ph34r:

Edited August 14, 2014 by ZombieTechnix

So sales numbers are somewhere between 455k boxes(if NCSOFT took 100% money) and 780k boxes sold ( if NCSOFT only took 60%) ... it could be more if NCsoft took less.Bottom line is people need to stop over reacting... and looking for doom and gloom.

Damn I thought you were ignoring me. I'm disappointed.As you can see, the sales are even higher than estimated based on the typical revenue spread from someone on the inside. Sorry to burst your bubble.It's really hard for anyone to take you seriously when you suggest that "low" population could mean zero.Enjoy.

Well your also forgetting that the 27 mil is NCSofts cut... not carbines cut. number could be worse or less. Box sales are between 450k and 1 mil.

Yes, so it may necessarily be more. Or less. That's what makes this quote so interesting...

The interesting part (that I couldn't find in the PDF) is whether, since this was meant for shareholders, whether that was revenue or profit (essentially what it cost subtracted from what they made).It depends on whether it's more important that we're judging Wildstar on population or revenue. The former is probably what more of us want to know, the latter is more important to NCSoft with good reason.

You, sir, are dead to me. lol

Heh, well, sad truth is, there's not that many FPS story-driven mmos out there. I tried getting into Planetside a few times, both one and two... seemed too "run and gun"-ish or perhaps "deathmatch"-ish of sorts for me... not enough immersion storyline-wise (no traditional quests and all that)... so outside of Tabula Rasa... best that came to mind was Defiance and Fallen Earth. :P

I think it's that last set of numbers in that awkwardly formatted quote that's worth looking at here.30-35% of the box sales.Let's be generous, round up from the top.160k paid subscribers.

:unsure:

LOL. Yea. Destiny would be your closest at this point. Planetside is just "Battlefield 3" with lasers and 2,000 player battles. Not that I complain. Lets me fly around in a bomber and make a whole mess of virtual people dead.I played Tabula Rasa for the first half of it's life. It's BIGGEST problem was content was thrown out the door, untested. And that just started making the game with bugs galore, have crippling bugs on top of the game breaking bugs. Kinda like Auto Assault. Too much at once, without the backend completed. Instead of server latency failures, TR failed to get its QA right. I remember one zone boss that would get down to 10%, and if you were lucky, he'd keep dying. If you weren't, he'd reset.

:unsure:

Yuou're doing the math backwards.

Indeed & Agreed... kind of got really high hopes for The Division... hoping to not be disappointed... game looks/sounds/seems awesome.

Have you seen customer service?This company could give two flux about us.

Good point, I didn't see that, so let's try again:What do we know?Revenue for NCSOFT is $27,000,000Revenue per copy for Carbine is probably around $30So that is unusable... So I went and looked for what a publisher typically gets...Normally the publisher of a game gets around 30% of the retail price and the developer gets around 8% (The retailer takes around 30% and the rest is taxes and costs related to printing, shipping and distribution etc.)However this leads me to believe that the 40% that the carbine developer talked about was actually the total revenue per copy for carbine and ncsoft...Anyway, lets assume NCSOFT gets 30% of box sales and a little bit more for other sales, 30% of $60 is $18, lets up that a little bit to compensate for digital sales and collectors editions, so lets say that in average per sold copy NCSOFT gets $24 Then we have:$27,000,000/$24 equals...1,125,000 sold copiesAnd of course there is so many variables here that it might be more or less, what I basically want to say is that the assumed 500,000 copies might be a bit low.

So what does "Sales (excluding royalty)" mean in this context? Revenue from sales after royalty is subtracted? Earning report jargon is really confusing, especially when english is your second language.

There are ads for WildStar on a lot of cabs and stuff in Boston. I've been seeing them around since before the game came out and they're still all around the city.

I'm not sure what my friends are salivating more over. The Division or Cyberpunk 2077. It's a very close race. The only *gulp* moment I have for The Division is "Ubisoft". That said, that engine they created is amazing. As for Wildstar topic? By December, you'll have a solid idea where they're taking the game. We're still only 90 days out the door. We've had a content drop and a ton of bug patches. So, at least it's in the right direction?

It normally means the amount of money that you have made after having deducted the royalty you pay to royalty holders. In this case it would mean the amount of money that NCSOFT still have left after having payed carbine their share (royalties in games development typically means the share that a publisher pays to a developer)

edit: thanks for clarifying Vic.There's a problem if people just interpret "sales" as whatever they like (best serves their cause/argument), when there's a big difference between sales, revenue, profit, earnings etc. It could be off by as much as a factor of 3, seemingly.

I'm just a fairly well-educated native English speaker, not a financial adviser, so this is the best I can do to explain it."Royalties" are the money paid out to use a license for original content. For example, if you wanted to use the Wildstar soundtrack to launch on an album or if Mattel wanted to make Wildstar toys, and NCSoft let them, they'd make royalties on that money. So what's left without royalties is pure sales numbers, not the stuff people paid in order to use Wildstar's art, figures, music, or whatnot. It gives a more accurate idea of how well the game is selling.I'm not sure royalties are a big part of their sales considering it's a new IP, anyway, but I'm sure Blizz makes a hefty chunk of change on royalties.

True... another one I'm "hoping" will at least be decent is H1Z1... I know there's tons of zombie games coming out, and several others that have been out (which I love, love anything zombies, hence my username)... just the idea of no real progression and constant killing/looting/building. Seems neat, but kind of wondering if it'll just be another Planetside-style with zombies... it is using the PS2 engine after all, lol. B)[NOTE: I should clarify, love anything zombies, as long as it has depth, environment/atmosphere, story... Dead Rising is "okay", couldn't really get into Left 4 Dead or Nazi-Zombies -- and RDR: Undead Nightmare... super-awesome!]

They should advertise in Ohio. Apparently, the game is extremely popular in Columbus.

Yeah, essentially, it could mean anything from just raw sales from the game overall, or it could mean the money left over after NCSoft paid whoever at Carbine holds the IP copyright. It depends on whether NCSoft now owns just the company Carbine and pays the development house in royalty percentage, or whether NCSoft owns the IP and that little "royalty" bit at the end is just a formality.Either way, just with the original math, Wildstar sold extremely well out of the gate compared to what I was expecting at launch. I figured the game would slowly spool up players, starting at around 150k. I can't imagine they've fallen that far given those initial sales. Especially since they stated they can't merge servers because there aren't two servers below the 50% threshold to merge. At least for now, even if the players aren't online very often if at all, they still have a lot of active accounts on those servers. Financially, the game's not doing badly.It might help the population issue if Carbine made sure there was a reason people would want to log in daily outside dailies. The only other considerations are content and publicity, something that will take time to develop on both counts.It's a strong launch, though. Wildstar's got the best kind of start in life.

So 'sales' in this case would mean total revenue minus royalties (which is normally around 10% of profit from sales)?

Or it might as well be the explanation VicVanMeter gave, I am actually not sure when looking at the text again... (and royalties to developers is around 25% of profit after deductions...(which basically means nothing as deductions can be as high or low as a company wants...))

Just to chime in - panting hard for 2077. Been a fan of Talsorian's cyberpunk vision since it first hit the RPG shelves.

$27 million. Box sales, initial subs, CREDD. I had thought Wildstar would crack nine figures easy for the quarter, now I'm not even sure if they'll make nine figures for a year.Well. *cupcake*.

Oh goodie, the ol' City of Heroes stabbed-in-the-back myth is firing up again. There's been advertising, I remember full page ads on gaming websites at launch and I still can't click on a webpage without finding a chua flash animation in the corner. NCSoft's been pulling their weight as much as NCSoft usually does. Its not the game being failed, man.

I think the only solution is that someone here buys a bunch of NCSoft shares, flies to Korea for the next Conference Call and asks what exactly do the numbers mean.

For comparison: Guild Wars 2 made $42 million out the door a year and three quarters ago.

You thought an MMORPG would make 100,000,000 at launch?That is an insane amount of money to make on launch alone for an MMORPG, especially an original IP. Maybe WoW can make that kind of money.

And remember, GW2 is the fastest selling MMORPG of all time.

I didn't do my research. *cough* I also thought there would be at least a million in box sales, honestly.

ALSO, 'cause its early and the second coffee hasn't totally kicked in yet, GW2 had no initial subs, no initial CREDD surge, and cash shop only.

You are however, completely justified in being disappointed in the numbers. This game has an optional currency (CREDD, as you know), which is a part of this game's earnings. Since CREDD has been more often than not available in some form, people who already have subscriptions/paid for boxes are indeed buying it. The net result is that yes, there are significantly fewer players than many White Knights are letting on-and that server populations overall are not looking great,

And in that post we have some interesting things more like:GW2 sold more than 2 million copies, so each copy generated a sales of about $21. Ugh, isn't GW2 selling at $60 each?Since the retail price is about the same maybee we could assume that NCSOFT makes around $21 for Wildstar too? Then we get almost 1.3 million sold copies...!

And if you look at the next quarter (Q4 2012) you will see that GW2 made a massive 110 million dollars (I used the exchange rate from 2012 for Korean Wons). That bring a new perspective, especially counting that Wildstar was in development substantially longer than GW2 (almost 3 years longer) and therefore probably had higher overall development costs.

CREDD money and subscription money are also included in that figure, so no you don't.

There is no subscription billings before July 3, so no. Anyone that prepaid a subscription is not part of earned revenue yet, so not reported.

I think it should be noted that not all the boxes sold for the full 60 as well. As I recall some people purchased form green man gaming for something like 40-50sh dollars too. Just something to consider...

Yeah, so nobody thought about subscriptions. Remember that GW is the "premier" F2P game. It's not an untested IP; most people knew what Guild Wars 1 was.I mean, if Wildstar even came close to GW2 numbers I'd have probably sh*t a brick. I keep telling people F2P games might suck for us, but they're a lot more profitable because of the stigma of subscriptions, but nobody takes me seriously.Believe me, Guild Wars is the fastest selling MMORPG of all time because it's the most reputable F2P game without a subscription option of all time.

I'm not surprised by these numbers. They boasted making a game for the 1 percenters...someone forgot to mention to Carbine that casuals pay the bills.

The revenue to the publisher is the same.

But no CREDD sales happened in June at all though, right?

and no subscription income either

A lot of people paid $75 retail for their game, though. I saw a huge number of players on my server with the deluxe title and hoverboard. I used the $60 price as a reasonable median between those who paid +$15 and those who paid -$12. I suspect there were more who paid the larger price than who got the discount; I got *both*, and tracking down the discount took a little work on the Internet. I suspect most of the people who bought the game didn't get the 20% discount. (Most of the people here on the forums probably did, but most of the buyers overall probably did not.)But the thing about having the hard sales numbers is that it gives an upper ceiling for the number of starting subs. Pick whatever you think is a good average for "per game price" for Wildstar and divide that into the total and you get your starting population estimate, then factor in your idea of the retention rate, and go from there. No matter how you massage it, you can't argue that Wildstar started with over a million subs, for example, unless you believe that the revenue for the game was $27 per copy sold, or less. You also can't argue it started with less than 250,000 k subs either, unless you think NCSoft earned $100 per copy sold. So you have anchor points for both ends of the "What's Wildstar's current population/sub base?" ongoing discussion.This, of course, in no way stops people from arguing that the game is a success/is a failure/will go F2P/will get shut down/will start adding subs and recovering or whatever. It just puts some hard limits on the crazier claims, which is an improvement over having zero hard data and trying to extrapolate from the number of "!#$!@# UNSUBBING!!" or "I LOVE THIS GAME AND WILL PLAY 4EVAR!" threads getting posted on the forums, right?

Alright, second coffee's kicking in. Here's the lowdown:Gauging population numbers from the first quarter reports is a fool's errand. Unless it comes from Carbine themselves, we're all throwing darts at a very large dartboard.A $27 million opening really isn't that bad for a brand new IP.Its the 3Q report that's important, that's where we see where the numbers start to level off at.

TR died because Garriot's enormous ego barfed all over it. That man couldn't get out of his own way, and dev time went way long, way out of focus, and you got TR.Same thing happened with Hellgate London. Former Blizz employees egos got in the way and they rushed it, half assed the gameplay, and you got a crap Diablo clone with no meat.This is not the case for Wildstar. Wildstar has a solid skeleton, some good tasty meat bits, but they need to finish cooking it, and they need to listen to how their customers want it cooked. I'm not going to eat medium rare just because they say to.And there ends my diatribe and horrible analogy.

But I like it medium rare.

Three short paragraphs doesn't count as a diatribe around here. Try harder. :DAnd I like your analogy, since selecting food is a compromise between quality and price, which I think compares nicely to video games. Do you want to be McDonald's, with crappy food sold by the billions, poorly regarded but profitable beyond the wildest dreams of Croesus? Or do you want to sell only garlic-drenched premium Escargot en Croute for the discerning palate? They can both work, but you need a low price for the crappy so-called "burgers" (blech) and a high price for the undeniably tasty but very low-demand buttered snails for your hardcore eater.But if your preferred customers are snail-eaters who are only willing to pay crapburger prices and keep insisting that everyone else must keep shoving snails down their throats even if they find snails disgusting because snails are good for them and will make them more Leet Eaters if they just learn to eat snails the "right" way....well, that business plan could use a little fine tuning, probably, because unless you tie the diners down to their chairs, they're going to rapidly leave your Succulent Snail Cafe and hit the nearest fast food joint instead.

Well theres other factors to consider..there are new players coming into the scene so they won't be accounted for on this quarter... We moved guild to the other faction and within 7 days got roughly around 45 new recruits most of these players have commented on the fact that they are new to the game and just recently purchased.. So there are new players arriving into the game.Rather than being self serving.. my officers and myself as well as our veteran players decided we would much more proactive than normal in helping out the new players to help keep their attention afloat while carbine works on positive changes to the game.

It's quite a good analogy. The game has good ingredients. Some of it cooked up pretty well. But too much of it has remained barely cooked (bugs etc) or they meddled too much with the recipe and ended up creating a mess (too much RNG and muddled mechanics).Also there's some confusion about what they actually want to have on the menu. It's all very well having the expensive set meals but these only serve a small percentage of diners. You don't have to stoop to offering burgers and fries to widen your menu, there's lots of quality dishes that could be cooked. They need to offer smaller quality dishes for those who don't want or can't eat the full set menu, side dishes and fluffy deserts too. And if diners want a food fight they need a properly balanced environment to do it in that isn't the equivalent of someone armed with a custard pie vs someone armed with a meat cleaver.The ingredients are there, the demand is there, they just need to listen to their diners and get cooking!Have we beaten this analogy into a meringue yet?

But how many subs did EVE START with? They didn't start with that 500K that they are now currently maintaining, did they?

The earliest report for CCP was 25k subs. But one boon EvE has ALWAYS had was their mega-one server for 500K users build. Granted, massive fleet battles took a TON of nifty programming ideas to stop the lag problems, but...

I think #3 is more important for Carbine and NCSoft. Really, #4 is the most important one: why, if the numbers are still passable, do people feel like servers are empty? Is good player housing like suburban housing everywhere, and the main cities where people used to hang out fragmenting the population and dispersing everyone to smaller communities and leaving the inner city empty? Is the playerbase becoming somewhat antisocial and not participating in /zone chat or helping people out the way they were in the beginning? Is the game becoming too heavily backloaded, with everyone at 50 and working on endgame, leaving the leveling zones emptier? Is sharding too terse, leaving too few people in each shard to feel populated? Is it the crushing prevalence of DPS over healing and tanking cranking the queue times for instances up to an hour? Is it because people log in, finish the few things they need to do, then see nothing more to do with the endgame and log out too soon? Are there a lot of active accounts paid for with CREDD that sit unused and may sit unused for a year, but are preventing Carbine from server mergers? Is there actually a very low game population, but Carbine and NCSoft predict refilling them? Are paid transfers worth so much at this point that mergers and free transfers would cost them a lot of potential revenue?There are a lot of questions left, but nobody likes feeling like they're on a dead server. Whether it's dead or not is irrelevant; if it feels dead to the player, it may as well be dead.

Also, with a mere 500k subs and without charging anyone for the game box, EVE Online was #6 on the list of overall revenue generated last year. That puts them over a lot more populated MMORPGs.

The true equation will be if we're making money and gains QoQ. Wildstar is a 9 year development. That's a LARGE investment. If it's showing profit QoQ, they'll keep it going to show a positive RoI. If they're making gains QoQ, they'll invest more into it to further that RoI.

Isn't the quarter from April 1st to June 30th? If so, then there would be no paid subscriptions in the mix, but they started selling credd before end of quarter. My first CREDD purchase was June 10th. That definitely waters down the mix, though you can't really say how much.I would think this number includes physical sales, digital sales, and credd sales. I also have to point out that NCSoft most likely sold a large number of digital sales from their own site, which leaves a larger portion in their pocket I would think, but I may be wrong.I think it is a healthy start, regardless, but they need to get on the stick to make it thrive. As it stands now, I'm on a month paid for by CREDD and I'm not even bothered to play. It isn't because I don't like the game, it is just an excercise in frustration and lack of satisfaction. That's coming from someone who finished attunement and messed about in GA some.

I thought they only started selling CREDD a little after launch.

Right, but it is still in the last month of Q2. Unless their quarter is different from everyone elses.

I mean was it that soon after? I didn't buy or sell CREDD, so I didn't know when they released it.

From my transaction history:Jun 10, 2014C.R.E.D.D.Credit Card$19.99Completed

Pretty sure it launched on the 10th of June. Now I'm just speculating here, but my guess is they didn't sell enough CREDD is 20ish days to have any significant impact on those earnings.

Well the game has a few more months to figure it out...Warlords doesn't release until November 13th.

Edited August 14, 2014 by BusterCasey

Language

I really hope the games overall retention rate is better than the retention rate they got with my friends that came to this game:(

Whoops, just looked it up, the comparison that was here earlier was off... seems GTA5 nailed 1-billion not long out of the gate... but still, $100,000,000 (100 mil) for a brand new IP right out of the gate is still an insane expectation/hope in any regard... especially for an MMO, that up until recently, most all MMOs were only on one platform (PC/Mac/Linux).

Not necessarily... I still recall the several posts of people boasting how they paid their sub a year in advance, where others paid 3-6 months in advance. So that'd still be paid subs in the mix... considering, when one pays ahead, it all comes out in one lump sum.;)

I know that feel, bro.I brought close to a dozen people with me.Now it's just me and wife - and I'm pretty sure she's only playing to humor me.:(

I brought a much smaller number (3), only one left standing here with a subscribed account.

I heard the full range of excuses."I have more fun playing <whatever game they've been playing for years> because I don't have to level again.""Oh, I'll be back. Just had some RL things going on." (Two months later? Wow, you're really busy!)"Man, this game is just not relaxing. I can't unwind and enjoy myself.""WoW is better.""I like the art, but the combat makes me crazy."So on and so on ... The one's that made me the saddest were the one's who talked me into being a damn Guild Leader and promptly left me hanging with a guild full of relative strangers. I'm kind of lost at this point, since I had really been relying on those guys to help foster the PVE side of things. These are the people who convinced me to go to Evindra because they weren't going to play on a PVP server. That's just maddening and heart-breaking to me at the same time.

I'm lucky. I played with a lot of people really nostalgic for old MMORPGs, so almost all the people I started with are still playing.They don't get on the forums, though. Apparently, that's the line they draw. But we all play Wildstar at this point.

Same:/ Except it's just me. That's okay though. Someone's gotta hold the fort down.

I've added 5 friends and 2 more family members. Plus the guild has grown by about 40 members since launch.:)

Ok, so are we done crying about whether ot not Carbine and NCSoft made money. They have money, lets play the game. If they continue to add things to the game, lets give them more money. If they don't lets not. GG.

I brought over about 10 people to Wildstar. 7 still play.

And I brought in 10 or so as well and none play, it goes both ways :D

Well said.

You know nothing Jon Snow

Judgeing by how pleasant you are in the forums I am sure it has more to do with Wildstar then your personality . . .

If we are talking about people we brought over and how many we have left, then I brought over 4 and out of them 3 of them remain playing.

The guild I am part of moved from SW:TOR to here because of the content drought and we actively recruited with 20-man raids as a goal. During the first month we had 20+ people logged in every night. Most of us made it to the second month... then we hit the end-game brick wall. We are a capable group and we could have gotten through Attunement... but the combination of punishing + unrewarding just wasn't something we equate to entertaining.The decision was made that Wildstar needed a few more months to bake. The biggest group (including me) opted to move to WoW which will be new to at least half of us. Out of the 30-40 people from our guild that used to log into WS I see maybe three or four others. The thing that shocks me most is that since the move was announced we had one /gquit. Maybe people rerolled on a different server or stayed on Thunderfoot but went Exile. IMO, they've moved on as well.

EVE only has like 100k people, each with 5 subs... on average.

I'll be honest. if you couldn't get attuned, you're not going to have much if any success in the Raids. They are nerfing the attunement so anyone can get attuned now. But they're not planning on nerfing the raids.

Raids will get nerfed, just wait.

That's what they said about Auto Assault... ..that's not exactly what happened.

What part of "just wasn't something we equate to entertaining" meant incapable of completing Attunement to you? It wasn't the difficulty it was the grindyness, addiction to RNG, and wretched Customer Service that killed WS for us.

I brought over me and I'm still playing. That's 100%.

If I like the game why am I worried? Last time I checked this is a mmo not a single player game. It costs money to develop content especially raids. I don't need a huge horde of players but when leveling areas are more populated by bots there is a problem. When players have to wait up to 30mins in a queue for an adventure/dungeon during prime time there is an issue. I need to know how good the game is doing so I don't waste my time because I play mmos for the long run not 30 days then i'm gone to the next one.

I came with 20 people from a previous game. When there were about 8 of us left we guild merged into a new guild. Currently I'm the last of the orginal 20 holding down the fort. My current guild will likely fold soon. I'm just gonna play casual alt's on credd I've decided. I was really hoping this was gonna stick but it doesn't appear in the cards for me.

Well raids are not any "more entertaining" than dungeons. They are harder and more of a brick-wall(wiping for hours everyday, filling raid spots, etc). You are coming from SWTOR and talking about going to WoW, so it would appear you are simply not used to what wildstar brings to the table.

I now know what my grandfather meant when he joked about how business was going, "It started out slow, and tapered off."

Were his quests uphill, both ways IN strain?

Well Said. I'm a little surprised this is such an issue because the report attributed second quarter gains to WS and GW2 Chinese launch and had a generally positive tone.