NCSoft Releases Quarterly Report - Guild Wars Surprises

I just posted up a new blog, but thought I would post the article up here as well:
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Today NCSoft released their quarterly earnings report, and I was quite frankly surprised by some of the numbers for Guild Wars. For the quarter ending Decemeber 2008, Guild Wars had 5,803,000 activated accounts. This number itself was not so surprising as I recall ArenaNet publicizing passing 5 million units sold. What surprised me though was the rate of growth of new accounts over the past year. Here are the numbers from the report for the past 2 years:

1 of them is an extra account I bought. Since xunlai became more known, people buy extra accounts.

There will be new players too, but we don't know the %.

Last thing I think about: the crisis may attract more people to gw, it's a good buy.

If you just look at the figures it's indeed very nice.

Nice yes but as 4thVariety said in the other thread, "For all I care, you might as well be the 5.999.999 million alternate personalities of Bill Gates." To companies, it really doesn't make a difference who owns them. After 4 years, GW is still generating revenue and that in itself is wonderful news to hear.

These figures are probably helped by the new 'versions' of the game now being sold at semi-budget prices in the UK and other places (I recently saw Factions and NF at 2 for £15).

I will admit the likelihood is that a lot of those accounts are Xunlai related. I know my 4 spare activated accounts sorta are..

for someone who hasnt played gw before, there is plenty to do to keep them entertained for many months.

i suspect though alot of the accounts are bought by existing players wanting more mules

Indeed

12Chars...

I seriously doubt that there are almost 6 million "active" accounts on Guild Wars. I think that number is the number of game keys activated, as no account is ever "inactive" in Guild Wars since once you're a member, then you're forever a member. After all, there are no monthly fees, so there's no reason to ever "shut off" your account.

For instance, I had 10 friends that live in my town that were the biggest GW fans. Since the game launch, I am the last person still playing on a regular basis. Some of them quit so long ago that they could not remember their passwords anymore and can't login anymore.

Also, I wonder if that number takes the number of accounts that are banned on a supposed-weekly basis in Guild Wars. According to Regina and other ANet reps, they ban something like 1000 accounts every single week for gold selling and botting. Or that's what they said to us.

At the very least, the chart implies that the number of people playing over time has grown to a number so huge that every town should be busting at the seams with players, and anybody can tell that this is not true. World of Warcraft has over 10 million players actively playing (or at least PAYING) every month to play it. Xfire does show a huge number of users and hours for the game, so it must be true. Look at the numbers for Guild Wars. It's nowhere near that amount... To say that there's six million people playing on Guild Wars would be the greatest exaggeration ever told.

I have several accounts for various purpose. Mainly used as storage or getting zkeys from predictions.

I wonder how long it will take for A-Net to hit the 10 millions mark?

It really doesn't matter why someone bought the accounts and what they use them for. It probably works out better for anet if people do buy 4 xunlai accounts - not only have they sold 5 accounts to one customer, but 4 of the accounts will have very little activity and therefore not be taxing anets servers and so on. Good to hear - means gw and gw2 will be getting the attention they're due.

gw trilogy (sep 08) & gw complete collections (sep 08) says hai
not very surprising at all if u aks me

wrath of the lichking being #1 on sales @ ndp (january) doesnt surprise me either
wow battle chest is #3
wow original is #5
wow burning crusade is #11

i dunno where gw ranks on ndp...but its not in the top20

dead game is dead, but i guess anet has a indirect cash shop with the prediction house. Personally i wonder what would happen to these sells figures if the value fo zkeys drop.

Actually, Blizzard claims to have 11 million active accounts.
That is an exaggeration on its own. There isn't even room for that many people on the 241 servers they have. Log on WoW, and take a look at the different realms population at peak times. See how many are full and how many are medium and low? Theres a good chance that HALF of that number are active.

i plan on getting some few accounts for xunlai :P

Let's say there is no more tonics to get or there is a huge amount floating out there. The zkeys might drop to 3.5k or 4k a piece. I know for a fact that we'll see the same tonics again starting April and onward.

Well, maybe people will buy less accounts to farm zkeys but that doesn't stop them from getting one still.

You guys might want to listen to the conference call on the quarterly earnings report: http://www.ncsoft.net/global/ir/quarterly.aspx

Although it's mostly about Aoin and the increase of Lineage2 accounts in Japan, there is one question about GW2 @46:50.. (not the exact words)
reporter: Currently Guildwars 2 is scheduled for a 2011 release, why the delay?
Chris Chung (CEO of NC West): During development we changed our plan and decided to make the game bigger and add more content as previously planned.

I realize even simple math is hard for some people, but come on....

March 08 - Dec 08: 12.5% growth
March 07 - De 07: 37% growth

All these numbers tell me is that a lot fewer people activated accounts during a time when no new content was released than they did when new content was released. You certainly can't claim the game is growing (or shrinking) with the numbers you've presented. All you have is new account activations, which is only half the data: you need to know how fast people are LEAVING as well to say whether its growing or not.

If we measured the growth rate in populations that way we'd think this planet was currently inhabited by hundreds of billions of people....

Considering the last expansion came out in August 07, i'd say 08's growth was still pretty damn good.

Old accounts don't make any money for Anet - new accounts do.

If they get 200,000 new accounts per quarter (let's say 65,000 per month), at an average discounted price of USD 20 per account - they would have gross income of USD 1.3 million per month. I'm not sure but it does not sound like a lot of money to keep on running GW and develop GW2 in the meantime...

Lots of new players does not make a good, healthy game. The reason GW is dying is because experienced players are leaving because they have nothing worthy left to do.

And yes, I've heard some rather sad individuals have 30+ accounts.

to those who r bad with numbers:
(this was already done in a previous thread without the dec08 numbers...but heres a new chart including the latest numbers)



important dates:
aug 07 - eotn released
mar 08 - platinum edition released
sep 08 - gw trilogy & complete collections released

Again... you have no idea if the game's active population grew, shrank, or stayed the same. All you can say is that the number of activated accounts grew, and the activated accounts can only do one of two things: 1) grow, if at least one person buys the game and logs in or 2) stay the same if nobody buys a new copy.

Secondly, you have no idea from just those numbers whether it's "pretty damn good" or not. You'd have to find a similar time period of no updates to compare to. It could be stratospheric growth compared to other periods of non-expansion, or it could be dismal. You don't know because you don't have a comparison.

Lord almighty people... stop hurting numbers like this, they never did anything to YOU.

Yeah, who cares about hard numbers and facts? Lets just keep doom and gloom. Troll troll troll.

GW is of course on a decline (most old games do that), but it is still turning out quite a profit and there are still a good number of people in game. People need to remember that less then ten MMOs have ever even passed the 100,000 people mark (and yes, that is accounts, not games sold, so a.net's figures are high, but they are still over 100,000).

i think we need to differentiate sales growth from population growth
they do not mean the same thing

from a marketers perspective, u can argue the other way
package deals like platinum edition, trilogy, complete collections, etc r ideally expected to increase sales growth
-not- keep them at a steady rate or decline at a slower pace

platinum edition had little to no effect on sales
trilogy and complete editions were moderate successes for a short while
but i dun expect it to last through '09

jus my personal opinion
we'll see wut happens in 09...only time will tell
nuthin is planned between jan and march
they have a "big" (aka small) update in april, and who knows wut past that

So I'm a troll because I said the game is dying, which you admit, and that I only beleive this preception of grow is due to people getting alt accounts just to get their monthly zkeys, which a number of people beleive and have testified in doing. Yeah lets put a positive spin on something that you sit in game, you can tell that is not happening. I doubt this growth is due to actively playing accounts.

So uh wait...is it 5,803,000 units sold or 5,803,000 accounts? There is a big difference. I bought 4 units but only have 1 account. I would believe there have been 5,803,000 units sold (as Anet announced 5 million units) but I would not believe 5,803,000 different accounts.

They are Units sold. Arent you guys so called anets listened to all the QQ from the so called elites. Dead game is Dead. Plain and simple. You want to argue the fact that there isnt roughly less than 300k active accounts go ahead.

What I want to know and actually care about:

1. Whether "activated accounts" means "the number of email addresses that have access to the game" or "the number of Guild Wars campaign/expansion codes that have been activated".

2. How many currently active accounts there are. Obviously, there must be accounts that have been opened and not touched for years or months. I'd like ANet to track/reveal how many accounts have been actively used in the past month, week, or however long might be fitting to deem an account as "active".

3. How many and which players own more than one account? Given the way the Tournament House is set up, it's not uncommon for people to have more than one account to tap into those rewards. There doesn't seem like any reason other than this for a person to say that they own more than one, but knowing this would prevent one person being registered as multiple people in determining how many active players there are.

I think that with the combination of those three pieces of data, you can work out how many players are playing GW now, which seems a lot more important to me than how many boxes ANet can sell.

My assumption would be that it's actually a pretty small percentage. Sure, there's people in here saying "I have three accounts for Xunlai" and stuff like that, but my guess would be that for every one person that has multiple accounts, there's probably at least 10-20+ that just have one account.

Also I'd like to point out that while yes, units sold doesn't necessarily equal accounts activated, it might be a closer number than most would assume. Not everyone buys all three campaigns and EOTN. I'd hazard that most people don't, in fact.

Point is, the people who tend to get hardcore into a game (or anything, for that matter) always make up pretty much the smallest minority of the userbase.

And meh. People can complain the game's dead all they want. Me, I only just got into GW a few months ago and I'm enjoying it fine. Can't wait to see what's going to happen with GW2, of course, but GW itself is going to last me a good long time as it is, so personally I'm not worried (also helps that at any given point in time I have another half-dozen games I'm playing). Most new players won't care about or even notice any 'deadness'.

Bolded relevant point.
Guild Wars may have VERY few people now, but relative to other games (ESPECIALLY considering how other games like WoW, WAR, etc split their community up already into servers, basically making any independent chunk of players less then GW) Guild Wars still (even at "less then 300k") have FAR more active account then many successful online games throughout history. Furthermore, with party sizes maxing at 8 (well 12 for a few occasions) there is never any need to form massive raiding parties. GW's instanced structure is designed to work with a smaller player base. If you were having trouble getting 100 people together for a keep raid, I could understand. But since you just need to find 7 other players (which, if you actually take the effort to meet new people instead of complaining about how your friends have stopped playing is rather easy). Stop complaining about a "dead game" when there is more then enough players to still operate the servers. Just because YOU grew bored with it doesn't mean everybody has.

People need to stop playing a game based on some stupid "economic" system. Play the game you enjoy, not what is popular just for the sake of being popular.

It doesn't matter if there are 8 million players playing the game or 600k. That doesn't effect how fun the game is. The interaction levels would end up being about the same. You'd still only really get to "know" a few dozen people via guilds/alliances. I don't see how 300,000 people, the size of a small city, is SO much worse off then things where 3 years ago when we had about 3 times that. Does that really have that much of an impact? Really?

While it may be "declining" or "dying" it is not already "dead." That is just obnoxious pessimism that you see in any video game board. Hell, even WoW forums are full of people complaining about how "this game is dying, wrath of the lich king sucks, what's the point, wah wah wah." Its a really pathetic disconnect that has nothing to do with reality.

You also have to remember that the number of people posting here, saying that they have multiple accounts, will not give you accurate numbers by any stretch. What about the lurkers? What about the thousands of people who don't even go to the forums? The number of people posting on fan site forums, compared to the total number of people playing GW is quite small.

It's games sold not whole accounts created, even while the official document says "# of Accounts activated" it means the individual game codes activated, just look at 2006/2007 figures that were in that time confirmed to be games sold not accounts.

In EVE you see the numbers of players online, same on battlenet. I agree that can all be manipulated. But I'm 100% sure you guys know or measure activity for load balancing and stuff. May we know an average number from example the last month or does that scare Anet? If possible week and weekend stats festival stats... Here I go again.


I'm a little surprised nobody comented on this post. It actually says gw2 will have more content as what originally was planned. Did I miss something because this is interesting news.

QFT

I can barely read guru any more, there is so much QQ about how the game is dying, HA sucks, the game is dying, xyz is imba, the game is dying, when the hell is GW2 coming out, the game is dying, the game is RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GOin dying.

Please, please, PLEASE just quit the game already and move on if all you are going to do is whine. The game is only dead if YOU say it is dead. The glass is half empty, or half full. Either way you look at it, that glass contains 50% of its capacity of water.

Sure, there may be less active people than there used to be. Can you honestly tell me that you are surprised by this? GW is almost four years old, and veterans are getting bored and moving on. Such is the cycle of any game or product. Guild Wars is past it's prime, but it is far from dead.

Looks to me like this dovetails with Guild Wars being number 2 on the number of google searches, say what you will about the new accounts being activated, if it is one guy buying 10 copies of the game or brand new people buying the game it does not really matter. There is still plenty of interest in the game and revenue being generated. I am sure that plenty of people leave WOW all the time to find something else, and some would switch to GW.

I'm sure that plenty of people leave GW all the time to find something else (like games that add new expansions and content regularly), and some would switch to WoW.

I think you are largely underestimating the amount of people who have already quit the game but still post here for kicks and giggles or to reminisce about the greatness the game once had.

yesh, gw prolly has fewer active players now than they did 1 or 2 years ago...
but wut really makes ppl think the game is dyin imo is that many of the active players dun even actually play wit each other anymore

pvp outposts have gown down in numbers
there is less interest in being competitive in pvp
so it has "died"

so that means the majority of active gw players r pve'rs
but we have 3 continents, so that spreads out much of the playerbase too wide
not to mention that pve'rs have h/h so they dun even need to group
so it has "died"


even if u said that the population of gw 2years ago was 300,000 and the population of gw today is 300,000
many will still say that the game is dead because of reasons other than numbers
and i think they should be entitled to that opinion

Ya know Regina,

If you want to debate and defend the number of active accounts, why don't you just say what it is??

well theyve said before your not married to guildwars like WOW/subscription based games. i didnt really play gw for 9months to a year and i came back, i might have another break soon, thats whats nice about gw. and im not sure they need to hold peoples attention till gw2 either.

population wise american is perhaps busier than i remmber, and EU quieter

Dont forget banned accounts, naughty players and botters, chinese gold farmers from back in the day got banned by the thousands and we all know they just go and get new accounts and start over and over and over. Those numbers listed are no indication at all of the number of people playing GW. When taking into account all the banned accounts and people with more than one account (almost all the players i know have access to more than one account) and the players that have just quit playing, I would be suprised if the average number of active accounts on at one time exceeded more than 500,000.