Chinny reckon.

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Nicholas Lovell Reply:
November 23rd, 2011 at 12:05 pm

I don’t understand the idiom. Do you mean that you don’t believe these numbers?

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Nicholas Lovell Reply:
November 23rd, 2011 at 1:16 pm

So you just don’t believe it? Because you can’t believe that anyone would pay EUR1,000 for a virtual good, or because you don’t believe that 2,000 people will.

I find it easy to believe, based on clients I’ve worked with, but would like to know your reasoning.

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Simbo Reply:
November 23rd, 2011 at 2:56 pm

I find it incredibly hard to believe. I mean, we are talking about adults here with A LOT of disposable income. Imagine trying to explain that to your wife! “No darling, it’s not an ‘actual’ spaceship…” And there are 2,000 such people playing the same game? I’m sure you are right, it is just difficult for most sane gamers to get their heads around (hence the chin stroking). I would like to know the number of active users though. Numbers like 65 million “registered” players are worthless. 

Nicholas Lovell Reply:
November 23rd, 2011 at 3:09 pm

I totally agree that active users are a useless benchmark. I’ve been trying to persuade the company to release active user data, although they haven’t done so yet.

Plus, there’s no guarantee that that’s 2,000 separate people. I heard (this is not verified) that a Premiership footballer was spending $1,000 a day on a Bigpoint game, so maybe he just bought them all

Simbo Reply:
November 23rd, 2011 at 3:17 pm

Has to be Balotelli. Please let it be Balotelli.

Anjin Anhut Reply:
November 23rd, 2011 at 8:02 pm

There are action figures, paintings, comicbooks, shoes and drinks sold allover the world for WAAAAYYYY more money than that. It’s just a simple luxury item. What is there so hard to understand?

I was pointed to a Dark Orbit-related article by a friend:
http://www.mydarkorbitexperience.com/index2.html
While some of the points made are obviously made from a perspective of a person that does not tolerate authority, as well as that some points might apply only to Slovak/Czech administrators, sheer number of customer complaints is interesting. Most interesting part of the article are posts in italic titled “18 May 2010 (ongoing updates)”

And the claim of 65 million registered users for a game I personally have not heard of is somewhat unbelievable to me. And 2 million Euros spent within four days on a single game… From my calculation, WoW earns about $5million daily: ($15/playermonth * 10million players) / 30 days. This game earned 500000 EUR, or $679000, per day. Meaning this game is over 1/10 the earning-size of WoW? I find that hard to believe. Heck, EVE Online has 360000 active users; with each paying EUR15/month (approx $20/month), does this mean this game managed to beat EVE’s $240000/day? (Even if each player paid with in-game PLEX, extending their gameplay for a month for EUR19/month, it wouldn’t still come close.)

65 million registered users is also a fishy stat: I have launched the game today using my Google Account and I will be counted, despite not being interested in the game at all. I’m also pretty sure that many players have multiple accounts, due to apparent simplicity of the game.

While this is a very optimistic article, and a very optimistic argument in favor of freemium, I don’t think freemium needs exaggerations like this and already stands as a business model.

For Bigpoint’s sake, I hope the sale numbers are true and I wish them good luck. But I’ll stay realistic, thinking of… smaller numbers.

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Nicholas Lovell Reply:
November 23rd, 2011 at 9:14 pm

I totally agree with you that the registered user figure is meaningless. I suspect that the active user base is 1/10 of that. It could even be 1/100 of that.

But I don’t agree with your comparison/maths. WoW is making $5m *every* day. That’s why it’s a billion dollar business. Bigpoint is going to make $200m this year from all of its games. Since DarkOrbit is 1/3 of its registered users, we could speculate that its revenue is 1/3 of that.

But the 10th Drone is a special case. It has not been available to buy in the past. It has only been offered on 4 occasions: who knows how often it will be available in the future. That scarcity principle is very powerful.

For me, we DO need these large scale examples. The freemium model does not work, as many suggest, by having lots of people spending a little; it works by having a few people spending a lot. I think that the 10th Drone is an outlier, but if it persuades a few F2P devs to experiment with high-price, high-value items, that will be a good thing.

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Hello Nicholas,

thanks for your feedback on my article on Meedia.de. I can’t know whether someone lied to you or not, and I don’t think that someone would have done it maliciously. But I know what I was told in a phone call with a German spokesperson of Bigpoint. He said that the calculation was wrong, because there were only a few people who bought all ten drones. Most users had already gotten drones through playing. So they didn’t have to buy all drones for 1.000 €.

So, for me, your article reads too positive and seems to be – at least in some parts – a hoax.

Best regards,

Henning

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Nicholas Lovell Reply:
November 25th, 2011 at 2:18 pm

Thanks for responding, Henning. Just to be clear, do you believe that the issue is whether the company has sold some 10th Drones for €1,000? Or is it with whether they have made €2 million from 10th Drones? Or both?

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whole DO is a big hoax!

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where could I find any annual report with audited accounting figures of those cheaters?

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