108290-wildstar-population-ncsoft-2nd-quarter-2014-earnings-report

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


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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.


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how you you resist a  buff on myself /cast dimensional  ejection. bye bye
 * 1) SpellPenetrationGotIt


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


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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?


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


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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!


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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.


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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.


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Tabula Rasa was shut down in its fourth month.


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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.


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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.


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


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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...!


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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.


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{| style="width: 100%;" 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. ;)


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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.


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


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


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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.


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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.


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