![]() Looking at the late numbers for Tranquility in 2012, we have 350,000 users. So the simple answer seems to be to find the ratio of concurrent users to known player base numbers from the past to see what estimates that gives us now. We know that the player base is greater than the concurrent users online because not everybody is logged in together, and all the more so for a server that hosts a world-wide player base. The question is, how does concurrency map, if at all, to the player base. For EVE Online though we have the data points referenced above at EVE Offline. Industry wide there has been the claim that going free increases the player base of an MMORPG, but we have to stop talking about subscribers and just talk about players, since not everybody who is playing is necessarily paying.įor EverQuest that is all interesting, but doesn’t help us much. That loosened up with the Arms Race expansion last December, but you still can’t log in more than one unless you’re tricky. They couldn’t cloak, run a cyno, or fly anything beyond a cruiser of their racial choice initially. Alpha clones were free, but could only use a limited skill set and the client blocked you from multi-boxing Alpha clones. This was a somewhat traditional free to play, with the nostalgia server bonus for Daybreak.įor EVE Online the free plan meant the introduction of Alpha clones with the Ascension expansion back in November 2016. At that point the live servers were free but you needed to buy at least the latest expansion if you want to play the new stuff and if you wanted to play on one of the nostalgia servers you had to subscribe. And since the end of the data points for both EverQuest and EVE Online both have gone free to play in their own way.įor EverQuest went free to play back in 2012 for its 13 birthday. There are no press releases for dropping customers, only for hitting new peaks. The only issue there is that I don’t think that DUST 514 numbers were enough to influence the total that much.Īnyway, by the time we get to 2014 we are out of even estimates as both companies had clammed up. There is also the theory that some put about that the player numbers for DUST 514 were being folded into the overall EVE Online numbers because we were able to drop rocks on them from space and possibly see them in our in game chat. I suspect that CCP switch to world wide data during the Serenity surge because that sounded better. The numbers for Tranquility, which hosts the rest of the world, peaked around 350K at about a year before, after which there is no further data. The Serenity server’s brief moment of popularity fell away rather quickly if you go and look at the numbers at EVE Offline. After that the estimates stop.ĮVE Online is also on that chart and it peaks at 500K worldwide some time at the end of 2012, which coincides with the peak concurrency event for the Serenity server in China. It shows EverQuest peaking at 550K subscribers and then dropping down, with the last number being 100K at some point during 2010. Subscription estimates – 150K to 1 million All we really know are some estimates based on press releases and various guesses and whispered information. Even when it was part of Sony its numbers were buried so deep in the financials of its various parent organizations as to be invisible. However, Daybreak is a private company so we don’t get any financial numbers, much less subscriber or player numbers. It was the gateway drug into MMOs for a lot of people and it retains a lot of nostalgia value. But a lot of people played EverQuest back in the day. The game is coming up on 20 years in age and in many ways feels its age. Neither of us has any insight or information as to how many people play EverQuest these days. Instead Bhagpuss asked the pertinent question, which is the headline for this post. If it was I would be done writing by this point. I shared this with Bhagpuss because we both enjoy these sorts of informational tidbits, but I wasn’t sure it was worth a blog post. I have reason to believe that the player in question is/was in possession of information that indicated this, that it wasn’t just BS on coms but somebody with enough connections in the industry to know. A player opined rather firmly that EverQuest currently has more players than EVE Online. ![]() I dropped him a note about something I heard on fleet coms a while back. I do, on occasion, communicate with people via sources other than the main page of this blog. This is a question that came up in an email exchange with Bhagpuss. If we still had Blog Banters going this is one I would throw out as a topic because it is an exercise in estimation given incomplete data.
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