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Etherdrifter

Long Term Player Count Observation

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2 minutes ago, Ekcin said:

Care to explain the 1500$ spending? Over which timeline should that happen?

I read the figure in a magazine. It didn't say over what sort of timeline particularly but when you consider subscriptions it gives you an idea of the avg point of retaining players..ofc you'll get players either side of that

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At

 https://playsive.com/how-much-money-does-the-average-person-spend-on-video-games/

 

I read

Quote

This is a rough estimate, based on figures provided by the ESA and Statista we believe the average American gamer spent 216.64 dollars on games in 2018. We can assume the global average by dividing total video game market revenue for 2018 with the total number of gamers, which is $137.9 billion divided by 2.3 billion giving us $55.16 spent on video games by the average gamer worldwide for 2018.

 

 

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But is that looking more at consoles than MMO's coz sub's for most MMO's are like $20/mth..?

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2 hours ago, Seraph said:

But is that looking more at consoles than MMO's coz sub's for most MMO's are like $20/mth..?

Yes, not consoles only, though. I assume most gamers are casuals, and if they spend money on a subscription MMO, it may be month by month for short periods, or similar. So the figure cited is an average over all gamers, not just us crazies 😉.

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The peak was at when Xanadu was released. Not surprising

Then it started dropping after WU release. Not surprising

 

It isn't really about how hard the game is or might be for new players, or the sloweness of the game, it is the subscription that turns people off, even with a free trial.

 

Most people i used to play with both in WU and WO and spoke to are fed up with the subscriptions and the way the economy works in WO, hence they went over to WU and or just quit altogether. These people will not come back until the subscription is removed, reduced, or the system is changed drastically. Most are also not interested in WO Steam until that happens. 

While i myself don't really have much issues with the subscription system, and you can also earn it purely by playing ingame, it is a huge, if not one of the biggest issues WO is dying, and the steam release won't fix either. 

There needs to be more bonuses and huge changes to the whole subscription system to see players returning

Edited by atazs
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The world is mine; all mine. The thing is not about wurm- its about the advance in gaming itself. More advances less content. Just wait, they will crave the simple life of WurmOnline. Even if.... There are enough of us.

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Appending this to the current thread:


Wurm-Population-July2020.png

 

Quality isn't as good, but...  You can see the general trend.

 

This is here mostly for postarity, to offer a comparision against the population after steam opens up.

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On 9/18/2019 at 2:59 PM, Etherdrifter said:

most notable point of decline was during 2015, magically around the month of WU's release (October saw a massive player drop)

 

 

 

No, actually that October 2015 slump looks trivial and bounced back almost completely in January before continuing the historic downward decline that started long before and long after WU. 

It certainly could not be described under any circumstance as the "most notable point of decline."

Comparatively, 2014 saw "massive player drops" and even the January bump-back did almost nothing to regain lost ground. 

3baLyIG.png

 

If I did not look really really close at the dates, I would never have been able to guess on an unmarked chart where exactly WU even happened.

From your descriptions, I would have assumed it happened in July 2014 or maybe January 2014. Instead, it's a minor blip in an otherwise nonstop slide downward since early 2013.

 

If you had gone back earlier we could have seen the "massive player drops" had actually started in 2013 with the hike in Premium subs costs (the announcement a few months earlier started the exodus). 

Wurm lost nearly 2000 subs in the space of half a year, some of that later reclaimed with the opening of Xanadu and the start of the Player Loyalty program:

 

0iQr592.png

 

 

but hey continue your narrative, it's your story.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited by Brash_Endeavors
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1 hour ago, Brash_Endeavors said:

 

No, actually that October 2015 slump looks trivial and bounced back almost completely in January before continuing the historic downward decline that started long before and long after WU. 

It certainly could not be described under any circumstance as the "most notable point of decline."

Comparatively, 2014 saw "massive player drops" and even the January bump-back did almost nothing to regain lost ground. 

3baLyIG.png

 

If I did not look really really close at the dates, I would never have been able to guess on an unmarked chart where exactly WU even happened.

From your descriptions, I would have assumed it happened in July 2014 or maybe January 2014. Instead, it's a minor blip in an otherwise nonstop slide downward since early 2013.

 

If you had gone back earlier we could have seen the "massive player drops" had actually started in 2013 with the hike in Premium subs costs (the announcement a few months earlier started the exodus). 

Wurm lost nearly 2000 subs in the space of half a year, some of that later reclaimed with the opening of Xanadu and the start of the Player Loyalty program:

 

 

I merely go where the data takes me.

 

In this case my comment was based on looking at 07-2015 till 07-2016 where we see a very steep drop that then slows down (33% of the player base vanished).  The short term jump of Xanadu is an unusual case, and I'd be adverse to using it as any kind of benchmark as there is too much "premium overlap" in that period.  There are also other conflating factors such as the actual land rush itself and the various people who left because the game was unplayable due to lag at that time.

 

Wurm unlimited, however, occurred at a time when little else was changing in wurm (because they were doing wurm unlimited), with no possiblity of "premium overlap".  The sudden freefall of 12 months which reduced the active player population by about 1/3 is definitely suspicious.

 

Not so much a "narrative" as a simple analysis.

 

 

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Nobody even knew about Wurm unlimited in July 2015, not till some two or three months or more later when Rolf dropped his bombshell announcement. So you are taking pre-existing declines in population and ascribing them to something that didn't even exist at the time, while simultaneously waving off as irrelevant all of the actual declines over the past six or seven years.   We didn't lose a third of population from Wurm Unlimited, that is a completely fabricated statistic.  Wurm Unlimited's main impact would be in the time period from its launch to maybe three months to six months afterward. By then, WU sales had pretty much dried up.

 

This is not data driven analysis, this is precisely narrative driving the data.  All one has to do is look at your own chart and see this:

 

mHB0pQU.png

 

You've completely left off the steep declines that followed Xanadu by waving them off as somehow not pertinent to the fact that Wurm has been in nonstop decline since long before WU.  Ask anyone not familiar with this chart, to look at it stripped of dates and pinpoint where this "sudden freefall" started. Where these "massive player drops" started. The chances of anyone picking out the WU launch window are nearly impossible.   It ignores the many many real reasons people leave the game in favor of one favorite scapegoat that is unsupported by any real hard data. This is not data driven analysis . This is not going where the data takes you. This is nothing short of editorializing. 

 

Show me a graph of Wurm premiums or income from the start to the present day, and I highly highly doubt anyone will see anything indicating WU had this huge negative impact on WO that you are conjecturing. I have said it before and will say it again, if anything the temporary massive income from Wurm Unlimited saved Wurm Online's very existence. Wurm was already going under, and WU underwrote years of new additional content for the game. Yes, WU had some impact on player counts, as did at least a dozen and a half other issues, ranging from the state of PVP, to Wurm price hikes, to competition from a growing number of online games, to maybe 15 other things that had as much impact as did WU.

 

Look at that chart. Have anyone outside of this dispute look at that chart and say they truthfully can point to the period on it where Wurm spun into this "sudden freefall" and "massive player drops". My bet is without exception, they will pick a point well before WU or well after. Or that you will decide whatever point they pick, indicates WU.  It is not supported by this data or any other data I have ever seen released. Everything instead points to Wurm having been in a constant, fairly steady decline, with some hills and valleys, ups and downs, but still overall steady since 2013. 

 

 

Edited by Brash_Endeavors
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If you'll read carefully you'll note that I do not ascribe the 1/3 population loss to wurm unlimited.  I merely point out a large drop occurred around then with no other reasonable explaination (such as overlapping premiums expiring, as with the Xanadu case).

 

I have no reliable data indicating a population decline resulting from a price hike, not have you presented any.

 

The population went into an extended period of decline between 07-2015 and 07-2016 with a large proportional loss (roughly 33%) compared to even the anomalous Xanadu case (roughly 20% between 07-2014 and 07-2015).  While one would be hard pressed to say "wurm unlimited killed wurm online" one would be equally foolhardy in declaring wurm unlimited the saviour of wurm online.

 

2 hours ago, Etherdrifter said:

 

The short term jump of Xanadu is an unusual case, and I'd be adverse to using it as any kind of benchmark as there is too much "premium overlap" in that period.  There are also other conflating factors such as the actual land rush itself and the various people who left because the game was unplayable due to lag at that time.

 

See here for my issues with Xanadu data.  In essence, the Xanadu case could have generated a large amount of "double-records" for a period (this seems reasonably likely) in your chart, and the technical issues with the servers (so many reboots) could have rendered my login data unreliable for that period.  This marks it as potentially unreliable, and drawing inferences from it would be dangerous.

 

If I had more samples (from different timezones), I could perhaps speak with more confidence about the time around Xanadu's release.

 

As I have told you before, do not assert certain conclusions when working with statistics.  The evidence suggests that it has been in decline since 2013, but it also suggests that the decline was most prominent 07-2014 -- 07-2015.  However, as I mentioned in the original post, this data is also not perfect and is subject to timezone bias.

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22 minutes ago, Etherdrifter said:

The evidence suggests that it has been in decline since 2013, but it also suggests that the decline was most prominent 07-2014 -- 07-2015

 

I do agree that IS easily the most prominent decline looking at the chart. I had thought we disagreed there, but perhaps not.

 

You realize WU did not even exist at any point, even an announcement stage, during  that timeline?

 

It was a surprise announcement in September 2015, two months after the 12 month period that your chart shows having the biggest decline.

 

Edited by Brash_Endeavors

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2015 was an odd year. I think it's due to global variables as well such as the release of Witcher 3 which honestly garnered all the headlines for months on end. Good luck marketing anything with everyone praising W3. Also No Man's sky was a huge flop, which I think contributed to souring people's perception of grindy games.

 

For PvP lack of updates led to Wurm's pvp population decline. Lot of people got tired of the high level requirements to be effective in pvp, it had a high entry barrier (moon gear, needed priests, needed SOTG, enchanted weps, woa horse gear, etc). There's a lot of small factors that individually, they were at best a nuisance, but put together led to population decline. The grindy-burn out nature of Wurm is one. The more you build the harder is it to maintain. Bugs or exploits are another matter.

 

The tutorial, which honestly for hell's sake was 1000x better in 2012 was almost non existent in 2015 from what I recall. It just didn't do its job to properly explain things to new players.

If Steam is going to be a success you need to plot a player experience narrative : 1. What's going to happen in the beginning? What will they learn? What will make them curious ? The first 20-30 mins of the game is vital to make them interested and curious to keep laying. 2. What options do they have in game? How well are they informed about them? 3. Mid-game. What happens after they get a bit established in their deeds, farms, etc. What is the mid-goal there? Missions? 3. End game goal : what happens to players after 1-2 years when they've done a bit of everything in game. Is there any new interesting content?

 

I know most people will say : "But wurm is a sandbox game where you set your own goals" . I find that an insufficient answer. What happens when you've achieved what you set out to do and all that's left is grind, grind , grind?

 

Wurm needs periodic new content to keep people in the game. Retention is indeed a key issue. You get good skills but what happens when the market becomes saturated, when you get tired of deed building or grinding skills? What is left after that? Even the journal goals are grindy.

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6 hours ago, Brash_Endeavors said:

 

I do agree that IS easily the most prominent decline looking at the chart. I had thought we disagreed there, but perhaps not.

 

You realize WU did not even exist at any point, even an announcement stage, during  that timeline?

 

It was a surprise announcement in September 2015, two months after the 12 month period that your chart shows having the biggest decline.

 

Yeah, that would be because I made a 1am typo.  I did mean 07-2015 -- 07-2016 showed the largest proportional drop 😛

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What is it they say, past performance isn't necessarily an indication of future growth, or something like that!

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