Massively^™

With all the great bargains going on state-side (and to a certain extent, hooray online deals today!) folks are out in force, scavenging the sales. (Heck, our sister site Joystiq even put together a Black Friday game sales guide.) This morning, we thought we'd ask you - if you saw a ridiculously great price on an MMO that hadn't previously interested you, would you pick it up and give it a try? Perhaps even if only to say you'd played it? Or do you just stick to free trials, and only when it's a game that interests you?

EA released its quarterly financial statements (PDF warning on both that and the Source link) yesterday, and while the typical MMO player will not care about most of the data present, we thought a couple things buried in there were worth mentioning. First of all, EA bragged about the previously-revealed 800,000 subscriber number for Warhammer Online. Madden NFL 09 and Spore also did quite well, but despite those successes, the company still posted a net loss of $310 million.

Possibly as a result, it announced a "cost reduction plan" (doublespeak, anyone?) "which will include the elimination of approximately 6% of the Company's workforce," which Scott Jennings suggests is around 540 people. No details were given about which teams would lose people. We suppose new intellectual properties like Dead Space and Mirror's Edge aren't cheap to develop, and neither is Star Wars: The Old Republic (the existence of which was proudly touted in the report), but it's striking that even amidst sales success by WAR and other titles, the company is still shedding employees.

[Via Broken Toys]

Warhammer Online pulled off some impressive sales figures in the European market this past week. The Swedish sales chart shows WAR at the #1 and #4 (for the Collector's Edition) spots in that country, beating out the highly anticipated Will Wright project Spore. WAR also topped the charts in Spain. In Germany it came in second behind the heavily marketed console game Star Wars: The Force Unleashed.

Of course an MMO dominating sales charts is nothing new. World of Warcraft has done so on and off since its launch four years ago, and Age of Conan debuted at #1 in many regions, even defeating the critically acclaimed BioWare tactical RPG Mass Effect which launched in the same month. It's also worth noting that the Warhammer IP is very popular in Europe, perhaps more so than in North America.

This news jives well with the report that half a million users have registered for the game. On the other hand, similar numbers were thrown out around AoC shortly after its launch. It's doing okay, but it didn't turn out to be a landscape-altering success that some folks projected, and that some are expecting from WAR as well

Business analyst Arvind Bhatia shared his predictions about Warhammer Online's financial future with Edge magazine yesterday. Bhatia, who works at brokerage firm Stern Agee, said he believes EA is ultimately shooting for around 250,000 - 300,000 subscribers once the launch dust clears, with occassional bumps when major content releases such as expansons occur.

Given the hype around the game, those numbers seem a little low, but Bhatia said he based his projections on statements made by EA reps saying that the company hopes to break even on its investment. After the game shipped 1.5 million copies, some initial sales data began to emerge which indicated that sales are meeting but not significantly exceeding EA's conservative expectations. In the end Bhatia expects the company to pull in between $55 and 60 million dollars of revenue from WAR.

Numbers like the ones above would clearly not make WAR a WoW-killer, but they would make it one of the elite few truly successful Western, subscription-based MMOs. Certainly this prediction is a far cry from Paul Barnett's wild bet. But of course even Barnett admits his number is a little outrageous, and he only stands to lose $26 if he loses, y'know.

Warhammer Online Creative Director Paul Barnett said in an interview that he's (literally) betting that WAR will achieve one million subscribers within a year and three million at its peak. Apparently there's an office betting pool at Mythic about this subject. If Barnett's right, he stands to win ... wait for it ... $26. Wow. Enjoy your large pizza, man!

It's an ambitious bet. Even Barnett himself described it as "bullish." Time will tell if another word -- similar to that one but with a relocated "i" and an added "t" -- will be more appropriate. If all 1.5 million shipped retail boxes sell and there's close to 100% player retention after the first month (that last bit is very unlikely), the game will quickly be halfway to the end goal. But we know from past experience that significant attrition can be a problem.

The interview is full of other cocky statements, about World of Warcraft and other topics. If you're interested, grab yourself a grain of salt and start reading!

This year, Activision and Blizzard merged under French media group Vivendi (Blizzard's parent company) to become the biggest, baddest game publisher in the known universe. To make sure investors know just how awesome that event was, Vivendi sent out a press release describing its generally excellent financial condition.

Earnings for Vivendi as a whole were reported to be up 10.2% for the first six months of this year. While game division earnings are still actually down compared to this time last year, that should be no cause for alarm. It can be attributed to the lack of a World of Warcraft expansion. By this time last year, The Burning Crusade had reached store shelves.

Vivendi assured investors that it still plans to release Wrath of the Lich King by the end of this year, so that bump is still coming. But will Wrath be as big as The Burning Crusade? By definition it can't be any bigger, because you have to have played the TBC content to reach the point where you can enjoy most of what Wrath has to offer, right? Apparently we'll see soon.

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We've been quite taken aback by the responses many players direct at Funcom's Age of Conan. We're not sure if the accusations of the game being a "beta version" or just a "total POS" are the product of unrealistic expectations or are just general animosity towards a game that, at launch, lacks the polish of its biggest competitor. If you've got your ear to the ground, all this rabble-rousing would give the impression that Funcom's early success would be short-lived.

The indication from Funcom however, is that this grumbling hasn't affected sales. They put out a press release today revealing that Age of Conan is sitting at over 700,000 registered subscribers worldwide. Game director Gaute Godager made sure to reaffirm the company's focus on shoring up the existing weaknesses in the game, acknowledging that retention is as important as aggressive growth in the MMO game.

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Another week, another round of retail domination by Funcom's indefatigable Age of Conan. They managed to sustain the momentum they demonstrated last week with the latest round of NPD PC game sales information for the week ending June 7. Age of Conan came in at number 1 again, while World of Warcraft followed up in its various retail incarnations in the 5, 7, and 9 spots. While we doubt they're even close to selling through the one million units they've shipped so far, things have to look extremely promising on their end.

It's interesting to see the the twin juggernauts of Age of Conan and World of Warcraft so consistently dominate the PC sales charts. Where once Sims 2 and its expansions were the reigning retail champions, they're finally receiving some long overdue walloping at the hands of the best in the MMO genre. We anxiously await the day when Warhammer Online joins AoC and WoW on the sales charts and completely closes out the top 10.

Since the launch of Age of Conan, Funcom has been enjoying almost constant successes in the media and in the marketplace. However meaningful you feel critical responses are to an MMO, they continue to be strikingly positive (though with a few exceptions, as always). They've knocked huge titles like Grand Theft Auto 4 off of the top of sales charts, and internal metrics have already put the existing player base above 400,000. In the latest milestone for the Norwegian developer, they've announced that they have surpassed one million units shipped worldwide in less than three weeks.

While units shipped is a fuzzier number than units sold in terms of a metric for success, Funcom's VP of sales and marketing is already calling this the biggest MMO launch since World of Warcraft. While we highly doubt that Funcom is even going to approach the numbers that Blizzard has been slinging for years, what's clear is that their game is a tremendous success by most standards. What will be key for them at this point is building on this initial flood of users and doing their best to retain the subscribers they have. It doesn't take long to go from shiny new title to disappearing from your company's quarterly financial report.

That title is a quote from the latest entry over at Tobold's blog, concerning the success of Age of Conan. He believes the combat system itself is one of the main draws of the game. While appearing somewhat similar to other MMOs, the combat system seems to make more sense in regards to its speed, intensity and overall enjoyment.

Some other points he makes include the content of the game, and the enemies you encounter. LotRO made good use of its license in regards to the mobs, zones and quests, but Tobold feels that in regards to AoC, most of the content could be from any other random fantasy game. In addition to this (hence the interesting title) is how Tobold doesn't believe the mature rating drives sales too much, despite the fact that "Age of Conan nudity" is the top search phrase that leads people to his blog. Hey, that's how we found it!

NCsoft has recently announced the promotion of Lisa Bell-Cabrera to the position of vice president of sales for the publisher's North American business. Previously serving as national sales manager at NCsoft since 2005, this promotion gives Bell-Cabrera the responsibility of overseeing strategic sales initiatives across multiple sales channels both in North and South America.

Previous to her time spent with NCsoft, she served as vice president of sales at Atari, director of sales at GT Interactive and director of market development at Go Daddy. "This is my dream job," she states. "The online gaming industry is moving at an incredible pace these days and keeping up with how our customers make their purchase decisions requires a willingness to try new things. That's what NCsoft is all about. There couldn't be a better opportunity in this business."

We certainly wish her the very best in her new position!

In charts reporting the latest game sales numbers in Europe, Age of Conan landed the #1 spot in both Sweden and Germany, surpassing even Grand Theft Auto IV.

Take that with a grain of salt, though, as the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions of GTA4 were counted separately, and each appeared in high spots in both countries' charts. It seems likely that in Sweden, at least (where GTA4 occupied second and third place), GTA4 still outsold AoC when all platforms are added up. In Spain, AoC placed fourth.

Funcom has already launched additional servers to accommodate an impressive player base. AoC might get even bigger when it goes cross-platform.

As a result of the recent deal with Warner Bros., Eidos has now announced it will close down its North American marketing, sales and PR departments completely. This coming after their parent company SCi's announcement to cut 25% of its worldwide workforce earlier this year. It hasn't been an easy year for the publisher of such successful titles as Hitman, Deus Ex and the Tomb Raider series, but this may just be the restructuring they've needed.

Most importantly for us though, we wonder what this means for Age of Conan, which is handled by Eidos. SCi mentions the fact that they have discontinued development on 14 different game projects in an effort to stem the company's financial losses, including a $161 million deficit in the second half of 2007, and a refocus on high profile games likely to generate a larger return. We can only hope they're talking about Age of Conan.

At GDC, we considered the possibility that Asia is the "Hollywood of MMOs." The Chinese online gaming market is getting bigger and bigger. Case in point: a new report says the market is now valued at around $1.8 billion. That's up 66% since last year -- curiously exactly the same number of points leading publisher Shandra's profits went up in a similar period.

And it's just getting started. The report (from a group called i Research) also predicts that the value will be more than $5 billion by 2011. These numbers are a bit more optimistic than the China View numbers we reported on a few weeks ago, but the consensus seems to be, in layman's terms: online gaming in China equals big bucks.

Recently the Chinese government launched a campaign of sorts to temper the popularity of online games because addiction has become a big problem. Will that slow the growth of the industry? Probably not.

[Via PlayNoEvil]