It’s been a long time since we heard the latest numbers for Funcom’s Age of Conan, however with the release of update 6 and their guild ranking system, we can now guesstimate how many subscribers AoC really has. As I did last week with CrimeCraft when I guesstimated there numbers were below 10,000, I went to Age of Conan’s guild ranking system, imported all the guild member numbers from each server and added up the totals. Surprisingly it seems that Age of Conan is well above the 100,000 subscriber count which many people though it was below.
Adding up the guild member numbers came out to 97,167 players. As I did with Crimecraft’s estimate I’ll double this number as many people do not join guilds and like to solo. So then the number of active AoC players comes to 194,334 players. I would bet that is an over estimate, I would seriously doubt that 50% of AoC players are soloing without a guild. So maybe it’s closer to 150,000.
This estimate should obviously be taken with a grain of salt as I am unsure what guild member numbers really means. Do guild members equal active subscribers? Or is Funcom adding inactive accounts into the guild count?
Regardless, I think it is safe to say that Age of Conan is above the 100,000 subscribers mark. It might very well be that Age of Conan is seeing its member base grow now that they have had some time to iron out the kinks. No official word from Funcom.
Can’t you create alts on AoC?
Can’t those alts then be in guilds?
So about 100,000 guild members is probably more like 30,000 actual accounts.
Also as you said, these might even include people without subscriptions.
Even if it doesn’t, how many of these people bought a long term subscription and don’t play anymore?
Thats very true, Im sure a good percentage of those are alts. Although don’t know if I’d go as far as saying only 30% are actual accounts.
I would, I was tempted to say 20%
I figure the standard Age of Conan guild member creates at least 1 or 2 ‘bank alts’ alone. Alts that just hold stuff. They are probably members of the same guild.
Plus add on regular alts people create to play with who are also part of a guild.
Even if every player only has 3 characters per guild, that’s still only 33% of that 100,000
Also, back in December they gave away free unlimited trial access to Age of Conan as long as you stay under level 20.
I’d guess there are some of those, maybe a couple thousand, who created several alts under 20 and put them in guilds.
Based on all that I’d be really surprised if Age of Conan had anywhere close to 100,000 paying subscribers
@ Robert Schultz
Unfortunately, despite the rigor in your argument, you have no factual evidence to support anything you just said. You could apply that situation to any MMO- if that’s true, then only about 4 million people play WoW, right? No. You can’t make assumptions like that. You can’t even make assumptions like the writer of this article did- unless you have solid, concrete facts, then it’s all just a guessing game.
I can prove your numbers are WAY off.
I am in a guild of 24 names. The guild consists of myself, my wife and my son…each with 8 characters.
3 people taking up for 24 slots.
Another issue. Someone mentioned the “trial” accounts. If I am not mistaken, they cannot join a guild. I will need to verify that later…as I also have one of the trial accounts…lol.
My suggestion? Take that number you derived and DIVIDE it by two…then you will see how many players AoC actually has.
Sad really.
Nice try though.
Yeah, waaaay off for reasons already cited. AoC is a game that caters to having lots of alts… it’s easy to level, it’s easy to get gear. I have two accounts (inherited one from a friend that unsubbed), and have 16 characters in one guild. I’d put AoC subs in the 30-50k range.
I have no alts that just “hold stuff”, because with the vet rewards, there is no reason to limit a character to being a mule only.
if we compare the daoc (vn) boards to the aoc (vn) boards, we see a very depressing picture far as aoc is concerned. public activity is a good indication of numbers
You cannot compare DAOC to AOC by VN. DAOC does not have internal forums, AOC does. Why would someone post on VN when they can post on the Funcom/AOC site?
Even with as low as 25.000 subscribers i believe that Funcom can break even with AoC. 25.000 subs should be enough to pay 20 developers + support staff, and i guess that not even 20 developers are working full time on AoC.
And with the expansion releasing soon (hopefully) they maybe be able to recapture some of the close to a million players that initially bought the game, which will surely payoff the development costs of the xpack, and hopefully bring more life to the game.
It’s just sad that the game was ruined by its reputation by the many initial bugs, because it had potential to be a very good alternative to casual friendly games like wow and lotor, for a more mature audience.
Well I tend to go with the person on the AoC-EU forums who did a week long player parse on all the EU servers. During the month of January, he averaged out about 35k subs active during peak hours in Europe. So, if we liken that to the US as well we have roughly 70k subs active. well above 30k and well below 190k. That may subs is respectable given the exodus the game suffered.
I purchased AoC at launch and was over excited but later let down. I have been away for 7 months and just spent about $200 getting the upgrade packs and new accessories preparing for the launch of the expansion tomorrow. I just really hope they don’t let me down again. i don’t want wow to be the only real alternative to mmo gaming
There is over 250 people in my guild which havnt loged on for 310 days
Yet my guild is still ranked quite high and nearly everyone has a couple of alts in the guild.
Your numbers fail
Your numbers (as others have commented) are definitely off as I’d expect several alts in each guild, especially since they made that odd decision to allow high level players to get a free high level alt (desperate move!).
One rule of thumb I have heard bandied around though is that in MMO’s for every player playing there are 2 paying and not online, that would put the 35k number potentially at 100k in Europe alone and support a top estimate of 200k.
But then there are the server numbers, at 18 that’s less then Everquest 2, but it could be deceptive since Everquest 2 (and WoW) would have some servers dated back to 2004 which would handle less players I guess then 2008 hardware. They would not merge downto full so I guess there is some slack there, my guess is an average of 6k players per a server with 2k playing at a time, that makes a player base of ~100k.
With all the indications I’m guessing around 70-100k worldwide here, a respectable number.
I guess that’s enough to feed a dev team of 20, probably more likely at least 30, Everquest 2 I know has around 64 devs working on it (programmers, artists and support etc) and is estimated to have a player base of ~150k-200k,
WoW somehow has triple the number of devs that (beats me what they do all day! although they listed ~60 of them purely working on videos, I’m not kidding there either, I guess they have money to burn yet it shows they have a deliberate policy of not creating too much content).
I quit WoW around 2 years ago. Just got tired of it. But I’ve been dying to play another MMO for quite a while now. And nothing out there seems to make me happy. Tried Warhammer online, LOTRO, AoC, Allods, Runes of Magic and Perfect World. And all of these MMO’s seem to have very low populations. Just no one plays. Is WoW the ONLY MMO out there with the most people playing?! Really?!