Interesting Historical Chart of DDO population 2/2018-1/2023. I added the trend lines

[Gordo]

https://mmo-population.com/r/ddo/stats

I tried to add trend line analysis but I can't upload the image.
35k peak population over last five years.
Seems like DDO had a run of success during covid lock downs peaking around 8/2021
It's been a decline ever since people ran out of stimmies and went back to work. Playing while working at home is no longer an option for many.

https://mmo-population.com/r/wow/stats

For comparison, WOW peaked at 7MM and leveled at 3MM or so with classic WOW and new content.

DDO has 1% (yes) of the player base of WOW. How can it survive without massive "PTW" offerings, VIP memberships (without any benefit to being one and I don't care about the daily roll), and content crawl?

There is a D&D movie coming out and it actually looks ok. Pine is always fun to watch. Where is the cross marketing by WotC? It's deplorable how badly they run this business.

[GoldyGopher]

https://mmo-population.com/r/ddo/stats

I tried to add trend line analysis but I can't upload the image.
35k peak population over last five years.
Seems like DDO had a run of success during covid lock downs peaking around 8/2021
It's been a decline ever since people ran out of stimmies and went back to work. Playing while working at home is no longer an option for many.

https://mmo-population.com/r/wow/stats

For comparison, WOW peaked at 7MM and leveled at 3MM or so with classic WOW and new content.

DDO has 1% (yes) of the player base of WOW. How can it survive without massive "PTW" offerings, VIP memberships (without any benefit to being one and I don't care about the daily roll), and content crawl?

There is a D&D movie coming out and it actually looks ok. Pine is always fun to watch. Where is the cross marketing by WotC? It's deplorable how badly they run this business.

DDO survives because the information presented here is inaccurate at best and blatantly wrong at worst.
Per last years ENAD Global 7 presentation DDO has 44,000 Monthly Active Accounts.

The better question is why do investors at Activision / Blizzard think WoW is losing money with 3 million Monthly Active Accounts?

[Gordo]

DDO survives because the information presented here is inaccurate at best and blatantly wrong at worst.
Per last years ENAD Global 7 presentation DDO has 44,000 Monthly Active Accounts.

The better question is why do investors at Activision / Blizzard think WoW is losing money with 3 million Monthly Active Accounts?

Let me get this straight. The best you "got" is to "correct" published data and your correction is from 35k to 45k? That's your defense of DDO? 45k player base. Really?
You think WOW is a losing franchise compared to DDO?


Are you short blizzard stock? Are you an employee of SSG? I think you have to state this when you post information that would impact financial disclosure statements.

[Eantarus]

While I don't think comparing DDO to WoW is exactly fair(WoW is an entirely different animal), I agree the way SSG runs its business is deplorable. There's huge amounts of money just sitting on the table they refuse to even touch. They do nothing to retain players. They do even less to attract new players.

It stinks.

[Zites]

DDO survives because the information presented here is inaccurate at best and blatantly wrong at worst.
Per last years ENAD Global 7 presentation DDO has 44,000 Monthly Active Accounts.

If DDO has 44,000 Monthly Active Accounts that create revenue, thanilon.jpg Release the twitter files.

[GoldyGopher]

Let me get this straight. The best you "got" is to "correct" published data and your correction is from 35k to 45k? That's your defense of DDO? 45k player base. Really?
You think WOW is a losing franchise compared to DDO?


Are you short blizzard stock? Are you an employee of SSG? I think you have to state this when you post information that would impact financial disclosure statements.

No I am correcting the average number you are using which is somewhere between 5K and 35K with a current number of 13K and telling you that EG7 has published the Average Monthly Users for a year is 45K. There is a huge difference between those numbers and the numbers published by EG7 are legally required to be accurate. I am not saying that DDO is a wow killer by any means.

As a follower of DDO on Facebook I got all kinds of these "sponsored messages" in my feed. Before the potential sale to Microsoft analysts were concerned with the spending at Blizzard on WoW and the continual drop in subscribers from its high to its current range of roughly 4.5 Million. The pending sale to Microsoft and lawsuit to block the sale have over shadow these concerns.

[GoldyGopher]

While I don't think comparing DDO to WoW is exactly fair(WoW is an entirely different animal), I agree the way SSG runs its business is deplorable. There's huge amounts of money just sitting on the table they refuse to even touch. They do nothing to retain players. They do even less to attract new players.

It stinks.

I agree completely.

[thegreatcthulhu]

Let me get this straight. The best you "got" is to "correct" published data and your correction is from 35k to 45k? That's your defense of DDO? 45k player base. Really?

Gordo, I am not sure if you realize this, but MMO-Population, by its own admission, does NOT use official sources for its numbers. It uses Reddit activity:

About Server Population & Player Count - MMO Populations (mmo-population.com)

They themselves warn that their numbers are in many cases, not accurate:

Of course the data is not extremely accurate, or in many cases, accurate at all. There is no way of really getting MMO subscriber numbers today. If you need accurate numbers you will have to look for publicly released data, use steam users, or whatever method is available.

I want to point this out to you since I noticed the numbers on mmo-population were off compared to what ddo audit shows (DDO Audit | Population Tracking and LFM Viewer).

[Maldorin]

DDO survives because the information presented here is inaccurate at best and blatantly wrong at worst.
Per last years ENAD Global 7 presentation DDO has 44,000 Monthly Active Accounts.

There's no way there's that many people actively playing DDO currently. If those numbers were presented last year and represented the prior year that was still during the covid-19 player spike. Also, how were those numbers obtained? Did SSG/daybreak provide them? What determined if an account was "active"? I mean a lot of players have more than one account. How many of those were created as a result of the free content coupons and represent duplicate accounts?

Anyway, Cannith is currently a ghost town compared to previous years. I follow the population now and then on DDO player audit. Seems a decent gauge. It's trending downward.

Partly, in my opinion, because the game has been developed the past several years as if the lights could go out at any time, more focused on immediate profit than long term health.

[TitusOvid]

It is a moot point really. Have a look at https://mmo-population.com/about/ and their accuracy of data and their measuring method.

The purpose of the site is comparison, which is something I believe it does deliver. It helps to gauge the number of users vs another MMO, and it helps to gauge how active or involved that community is.
And no, it doesn't. And I mean totally, totally not.
Basing this on two primary metrics: Reddit Subscribers and Reddit Active Users. Say what?!
I don't have the words for that level of absurdity.

Sorry OP, you are basing your observations on fantasy numbers.


Cheers,
Titus.

PS: I saw thegreatcthulhu post too late or I would just quoted him. Sorry mate.

[KoobTheProud]

HCL makes the other servers feel like ghost towns at times, particularly in the first month of an HCL and in the last two weeks of it. This HCL we are in basically covers the high volume period almost perfectly.

And yes it does feel like development over the last year or two has been very focused on quarterly results. This is likely due to the acquisition by EG7. Nothing like new corporate overlords to make everybody look very hard at the bottom line.

[archest]

as of this min there are 2,228 players on DDO servers according to https://www.ddoaudit.com/.
even if you double that to 5000 players on the weekends.
if all of there were $15 a month would be a monthly revenue of around $65,000 = an annual gross income of $780,000.00
12 dev making 60k a year = 720,000.00
I dont think they are all VIP accounts ( but premium accounts spend cash too but not on a monthly basis.)
so how many people work for SSG and are paid to work on DDO ?
If they keep running the game into the ground and disenfranchising people from playing thinking they will make more money by starving the people of the ability to play the game.
the only way this game survives is with new players revenue inflow.
people are attracted to DDO because of D&D, they stay because they are loyal to D&D even though they are told its not D&D.
it is most like D&D in character creation. more than any other game as I know of.
so you can tear people apart in the forums for complaining about zerging and tr xp pots and stuff but new players dont understand your desire to chain xp to tr power grab.
they come to see if its about D&D the RPG they played in a past life living with mom and dad or in collage.
They need to populate the servers and stop fighting the players .
Nickle and dime them into solo D&D < that's not D&D is it?
because they dont ant to server merge and want to charge $50 to transfer each toon from another server.
I'm sure wow does the same thing .
there are now 175 players on the hardcore server less then some of the other servers because it is winding down.
but when its hot its usually double or triple that in number of players active on the server.
if they dont populate the server people will go someplace where the servers are populated and spend there money there.
so free to transfer to Orion and Salona doesn't populate argosin any more .in fact it may just reduce its population

[cmecu]

as of this min there are 2,228 players on DDO servers according to https://www.ddoaudit.com/.
even if you double that to 5000 players on the weekends.
if all of there were $15 a month would be a monthly revenue of around $65,000 = an annual gross income of $780,000.00
12 dev making 60k a year = 720,000.00
I dont think they are all VIP accounts ( but premium accounts spend cash too but not on a monthly basis.)
so how many people work for SSG and are paid to work on DDO ?

Also one thing to note is when a new Expansion comes out.. Just about every year expansion comes out.. well kind of maybe 2 years.. who know but anyway.. just say if people bought standard at 40 and half the population bought .. if there are 5k active players, half buy standard... Thats 100k dollars right there.. but no way to know how many people actually buy the expansions and then which tier..

You could get financials maybe. Unless a company if publicly traded, then they are private and financials can be kept secret in the USA , however, if this game is owned by EG7, then EG7 is located in Sweden and their law is from what I read that limited businesses have to report their financials. But the next question would be how would one go about getting it.. then whats the point of doing it. Some people may want to know how much money games rake in yearly.

[archest]

there are 68 players on wayfair and not a single LFM. change the server name to "soloonly "

[Hogdog5]

"mmo-population.com" is a horrible estimate of true game population. Maybe it could be used as an indicator of historical, relative trends, but even that's a stretch. As another posted here pointed out, even the owner of the website recognizes this [1]:

Of course the data is not extremely accurate, or in many cases, accurate at all.

Not sure what conclusions you can draw from such horribly inaccurate data. DDO Audit has been publishing real-time population data for the last few years. Their numbers lined up very well with ENAD Global 7's investor report. DDO isn't exactly flourishing, but it's certainly not dead.

[Cadveen]

Let me get this straight. The best you "got" is to "correct" published data and your correction is from 35k to 45k? That's your defense of DDO? 45k player base. Really?
You think WOW is a losing franchise compared to DDO?


Are you short blizzard stock? Are you an employee of SSG? I think you have to state this when you post information that would impact financial disclosure statements.

If VIP was a must have due to awesome benefits etc, with 45,000 at 15dollars a month x 12 months = 8.1 million dollars. They could make a good chunk of money if they just charged everyone 15 dollars and made the game something everyone wanted to play. I personally am on a hiatus until wizard trees are revamped. I would pay 40 dollars a month or more, price doesn't much matter to me, just the class I want to play does. Once they figure out to listen to the player base, the game will continue on.

[GeneralDiomedes]

there are 68 players on wayfair and not a single LFM. change the server name to "soloonly "

they should really just offer everyone there a free server transfer ..

[LightBear]

I'm not sure how people come up with numbers. Even server logins can be problematic.

The label says unique players btw, not active and paying consumers.
Could be the total sum of players that ever logged into a server and did something there.

What I see is for most servers about 200 to 600 logins per hour.
Lets say 400 on average, and multiply that by 24 for the hours in a day.
To that's about 9k players per day per server?
Even if I go to the low end, that's still about 5k players per server per day.
So yeah, I do think that number of 45k that GoldyGopher quoted from Enad G7's presentation is correct.

[Strider1963]

Im sorry, but I dont believe that DDO has over 13k daily players. Maybe 13k different toons log in but not 13k different accounts. The average daily players online is between 300-400 players per server. It would be nice to find out how many actual active accounts there are here, but Im sure the devs will never reveal that to us.

[Smurgels]

Im sorry, but I dont believe that DDO has over 13k daily players. Maybe 13k different toons log in but not 13k different accounts. The average daily players online is between 300-400 players per server. It would be nice to find out how many actual active accounts there are here, but Im sure the devs will never reveal that to us.

Fun Fact. the game is on it's last leg and will continue to crawl out a death unless the devs decide to give vip worth while or actually give a little. for most of us who joined in 2006 we've moved on. it's just not worth the VALUE. why is it in DDO an expansion is 13 quests and 2 raids for the same value of another mmo that gives you an entire zone, it just doesnt make sense and its why new players say the hell with this. lets not even mention how bad korthos island is to begin with as a new player. DDO isnt even advertised as far as i can tell so maybe they want it to die. theres no twitch drops that im aware of no free marketing nothing. its as if they don't care, and its most likely why duping and leveling exploits are still in the game. and have been since MOTU... it's just a sad state of gaming.