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EVE Evolved: Fixing EVE's player activity
It's been a sort of running gag in EVE Online throughout the years that players spend inordinate amounts of time docked in stations and spinning their ships around in the hangar, but this is oddly close to the truth. Those of us who have been hooked to EVE for years know just how intense the game can get at its most frantic and how incredible it is to be present for historic events and important PvP battles, but those moments are rare, and there's typically a lot of downtime between periods of activity. For every PvP battle fought, incursion fleet formed or wormhole op organised, players often have to spend hours in stations or in space amusing themselves or doing busywork. With gamers now spreading their increasingly limited free time across a growing catalogue of online games, some EVE players log in for only a few minutes per day to queue skills, chat with corpmates, and see if anything interesting is happening. The recent announcement that the upcoming Phoebe release will contain infinite length skill queues has some players concerned that people will lose the motivation to pop their heads into New Eden each day and see what's going on. Since the best sandbox gameplay is emergent in nature, just getting players to log in so they're available to take part in something awesome when it happens is extremely important. In this edition of EVE Evolved, I ask whether EVE is in trouble due to its recent decline in player activity, look at the impact of people with just a few hours per week to play, and suggest a new app idea that could help solve all of those problems.
Steam tops 8 million concurrent users as sale draws to a close
Steam is quite popular during its Summer Sale thanks to its massively discounted games. How popular? As it turns out, the PC game distribution service reached a new peak of concurrent users, 8,020,792 to be exact, according to stats provided by Valve. Steam broke the 8 million mark as the storefront updated on Sunday for the final day of the Summer Sale. Valve revealed in January at its Dev Days event that Steam reached 75 million active users in total, up from the 65 million it had in October. The Summer Sale ends at which ends at 1:00 p.m. ET (10:00 a.m. PT) today, and includes games like The Wolf Among Us ($8.49), Tomb Raider ($4.99), Civilization 5 ($7.49), Dishonored ($4.99) and the Complete Edition of Metro: Last Light ($6.49). [Image: Steam]
Path of Exile boasts 3.7 million registrations, prepares for patch next week
Path of Exile's team is celebrating a gangbuster 2013, but has plans for an even better 2014 starting with a new patch next week. A forum post from the devs lists all of the accomplishments from 2013, starting with the fact that the game went from closed beta to launch during that time frame. Other significant numbers include 87 patches, 35 new team members, a peak of 70,000 concurrent players, and 3.7 million registered players. Patch 1.0.5 is scheduled for Thursday, January 9th, and will add an Enlighten support gem, new cosmetic microtransactions, more vendor recipes, unique items, and achievements. The team said that 1.0.6 will be "even larger" when it hits.
Steam clocks in 6 million concurrent users, breaks its own record
Steam captured 6,046,207 people signed in at one time yesterday, setting a record for the service. Looks like those Steam sales are working for someone.In January, Steam reported a concurrent-user high of 5 million during the 2011 Holiday Sale, along with more than 40 million accounts. Today, Steam has an excess of 50 million registered users and more than 2,000 games for them to play.And, at least for now, some of those games are super cheap. Don't think of the Steam sales as blatant, bold ploys for your user numbers; just think of them as win-win situations.
Guild Wars 2 hits 400k concurrent users before launch
If you were enjoying Guild Wars 2 during the headstart weekend, you weren't alone. In fact, chances are 400,000 others were doing the same thing at the same time. Although Guild Wars 2 only officially launched in the wee hours of this morning, the game has already hosted 400,000 users online concurrently. At the same time. Yes. ArenaNet and NCsoft have also announced that over one million copies of the game were pre-sold, not counting the one-day pre-orders. Of course, that number will rise as folks purchase the game now that it has launched. President and co-founder of ArenaNet Mike O'Brien stated, "This is the culmination of a five-year journey and to be greeted by this level of enthusiasm by our fans is truly amazing. But really our work is just beginning. Now our focus is shifting to building on this living world we've delivered, continuously refining our game and improving services to ensure our players have the best possible experience." If you are joining in on the launch-day fun, be sure to check out Massively's GW2 launch guide. [Source: NCsoft press release]
Dungeon Fighter Online counts over 3 million concurrent Chinese users
Concurrency is a big deal for most MMOs. Total numbers of accounts and subscribers might tell you how many people play the game, but concurrency tells you how many people actually play the game on a regular basis. So when Dungeon Fighter Online breaks its previous concurrency record in China, that's good news for the game and the development team. After setting an earlier record with 2.6 million users, the game peaked at just over 3 million concurrent users in June. Neople, the developer of Dungeon Fighter Online and a subsidiary of Nexon, has been working with Tencent Games to help adapt the game for the Chinese audience, as China has a long list of rules about what is and is not acceptable in a game. If you want to see what all the fuss is about, you can play the game now on your PC or an XBox 360, depending on your preferred platform.
World of Tanks has 20 million registered users, making double-digit million profits monthly
Wargaming.net is going through quite a growth spurt, and the company's CEO says it's not just about registered user numbers boosted by freeloading players. "We probably have one of the highest payment ratios in the industry, it's around 25 to 30 percent," Victor Kislyi recently told GamesIndustry.biz. Kislyi also offered up some impressive concurrent user numbers for World of Tanks, including 423,000 simultaneous Russian tankers that he said outstrips the entirety of EVE Online's playerbase. As for the "pay-to-win" rhetoric often found in World of Tanks internet discussions, Kislyi says it is what it is. "For casual gameplay, which most players do most of the time, people don't usually use gold or expendables. Of course if you want to win a tournament, if you're competitive, if you play clan wars, if you want to be at the top, we think it's appropriate to expect a little bit of money from you because you already spent hundreds of hours in our game and that's much more than the value of any $50 box."
TERA consolidating servers in Japan [Updated]
While highly anticipated in the West, not all is sunshine and rainbows for TERA overseas. Under assault by bots and bugs, NHN Japan announced that it will be reducing the number of open beta players currently in the game down to 33% by consolidating servers. Players in Japan shell out $38.50 per month to test the game. TERA's been testing in Japan for five months now and has shown promise, with over 48,000 concurrent players logging in at one point. Even though the beta test is shrinking in players, NHN is making tweaks to the game to improve the experience for those who remain. These improvements include doubling the amount of free time for new players and cutting the cooldown time of dungeons in half while increasing the amount of loot dropped. NHN Japan says that the population decrease will help to improve the game's performance as it progresses in testing: "Although the CCU has been decreased from the initial start, it is now more stable than we expected. The server consolidation is to promote better cooperative play." The Korean beta test of TERA conducted a similar server consolidation last May. [Update: While the developers are currently consolidating servers, TERA is no longer in beta testing in Japan. TERA launched several months back as a subscription-based game. We apologize for the confusion.]
World of Tanks tops its own Guinness World Record
If your hard-won Guinness World Record has to be beaten one day, it's best that you do it yourself. That seems like Wargaming.net's philosophy, as the studio just announced that it's already broken World of Tanks' previously established record for Most Players Online Simultaneously on One MMO Server. 250,000 players crammed onto the game's Russian server simultaneously in November, far outstripping the title's earlier achievement of 91,311. CEO Victor Kislyi said that its upcoming technology and software upgrades will enable World of Tanks to do even better: "We are more than happy to watch our World of Tanks win over hearts and minds of gamers all around the world. The multicluster technology will enable us to move steadily towards new milestones and records." We recently gave World of Tanks a close look in our Firing Line column. [Source: Wargaming.net press release]
APB Reloaded welcomes first 2500 beta testers
The APB Reloaded blog has updated and there's good news in store for anxious fans looking to dive back into the city of San Paro. The initial wave of beta invites has officially been sent, and GamersFirst's Bjorn Book-Larsson informs us that the first batch was targeted at American players (primarily on the west coast) who met certain minimum requirements. Book-Larsson also notes a memory allocation issue that cropped up after the influx of players (approximately 2500 in this wave), but says that as long as the system remains reasonably stable, GamersFirst will begin inviting new players on a daily basis. "The current plan is to slowly increase the CCU count (simultaneously connected players) from a few hundred (what it is now) to just over 2,000 simultaneous players this week -- which means close to 20,000 actual invitees," Book-Larsson says.
Champions Online gains profits and players as a free-to-play [Updated]
Since Champions Online's relaunch as a free-to-play title a little less than a month ago, any player who has logged into the game has undoubtedly noticed the sheer number of folks running around Millennium City and environs. There are spandex-clad super-people everywhere you look, and groups are significantly easier to get. These are all good things for MMO players! Today we're also treated to the first official word on the success of the relaunch from Cryptic Studios and Atari, which both declare that the move to free-to-play has been -- as we suspected -- a huge success. To celebrate, they're offering all players, both subscribed and free-to-play, a thank-you gift for helping to make the game's reboot so great! The present offered is a free experience-boosting item that can be picked up from the Champions Online C-Store for at least the next little while. While the companies have not released any specific subscriber or traffic numbers, they have noted that unique logins, concurrent users, and revenue totals have increased by "over 1,000 percent" since Champions Online went free-to-play. As John Needham, CEO of Cryptic Studios, stated in the release: "We're extremely proud of what the Champions team has accomplished with the Free for All launch. It's a pleasure to thank our fans and welcome new ones with this gift." As for how long the gift will be around and whether it is one per account or one per character is currently anyone's guess as the item does not appear to be in the C-Store as of this writing. The gift appears to be a one-hour, 20% experience boost that you can acquire once per account. They also appear to be tradable! [Update: We've updated this post as the gift is now available in the C-Store, and we've also added the most recent trailer behind the cut. Enjoy! And guys... remember to keep the comments clean and on track with our CoC!]
World of Tanks open beta starts January 27th
Ladies and gentlemen, start your tank engines. World of Tanks is officially rolling towards release, and Wargaming.net has just announced that open beta will kick off on January 27th. The World War II-based heavy armor MMO has been undergoing closed beta for the past six months, and the devs have decided that after 260,000 players (20,000 of them concurrent) and 40 million bombed-out vehicles, it's high time to kick the tires and light the fires. "We've been very pleased to get such a response from our players, that means the direction we are moving in goes in line with the views of our community," says CEO Victor Kislyi. World of Tanks features upwards of 150 authentic American, German, and Russian vehicles, all designed for action-packed 15 vs. 15 battles featuring a mixture of action, strategy, and simulation. You can learn more at the official site as well as sign up for the beta.
MapleStory hits more than 136,000 concurrent players
Concurrent users are one of those interesting things to track in MMOs -- while they're mostly an indication of how robust the hardware supporting the servers happens to be, they're also a decent look at how many players are enjoying the game at any given moment. MapleStory has managed to set a new record for itself, with 136,000 players simultaneously active in the North American version of the game. That's nearly double the previous high-water mark back in July of 2009. Daniel Kim, the CEO of Nexon America, issued a statement concurrent with the record: "This milestone represents a new high point for MapleStory and is a testament to the growing popularity of the game into its fifth year." Said milestone is also coming on the heels of the first two parts of the Big Bang update, with a third part set to hit the game in early 2011. That means a great deal of new content and two new classes for MapleStory players to enjoy, which turns out to be good news for Nexon.
World of Tanks reaches half million active players
Wargaming.net's World of Tanks is different from your usual MMO, and it's not just because your avatar is 25 tons of steel and a large gun barrel instead of the standard orc or elf. Unlike most game makers, the World of Tanks devs are quite open when it comes to their playerbase, freely divulging the number of registrations and active players in various regions around the world. For example, the ongoing US/European closed beta test features 150,000 active players (and 200,000 registrations), while the Russian version of the title boasts 350,000 actives and a half million registered players. Taking a page from CCP's book, Wargaming.net has also released peak concurrent user numbers, which amount to 43,000 in Russia and just over 10,000 in the West. "It's just the beginning of a global legend. We see this game running for at least ten years in the West and Asia with tons of new content coming out every month," says CEO Victor Kislyi. You can find out more about World of Tanks on the official website, and don't forget to sign up for the beta.
Silkroad Online boasts 7.2 million registered users
World of Warcraft is huge by pay-to-play standards. We know that. But if you want to play the numbers game, some free-to-play MMORPGs can stand toe-to-toe with WoW when it comes to registered users. Silkroad Online does, according to Korean publisher Joymax. The company just announced that it has reached a new milestone -- 100,000 concurrent users. That's out of 7.2 million registered users. And that's just on its own servers; Joymax boasts that 18 million people are registered for the game across all providers and regions.18 million users in a free-to-play MMO is not necessarily as good for business as 10 million paying subscribers, since F2P users are only potential sources of income. Joymax didn't share any information about revenues, and it didn't explain what percentage of registered users regularly purchase virtual items with real world currency.Silkroad Online spans the globe in both a virtual and a real sense. Users are registered in countries from Asia to North America, and the game's fantasy setting is based on the historic Silk Road trade route, which has connected Western and Eastern countries for centuries.
