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Nicholas Lovell
Home   >   Self-Publishing   >   Sales   >   CORRECTION: Ankama are making €40 million in revenue

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CORRECTION: Ankama are making €40 million in revenue

By on April 22, 2010

I posted yesterday that Ankama was making €210 million a year in revenue from Dofus.

Boy, was I wrong. By a factor of 5.

Dofus logo

In my defence, I said it was 4x higher than any previous estimate that I had heard.

I promised to do some further research. Here’s the result of the digging:

  • Dofus has 30 million registered players, meaning the number of people who have registered for the game. (In my opinion, this is a meaningless number for any games company: it simply shows how old you are)
  • 3.5 million people have *ever* paid for a subscription. So of the 30 million registered players, 11.6% have ever spent €5 on a subscription.
  • Back in October 2009, Dofus confirmed that 3 million players were *active* in a given month. (This is my preferred metric which shows how active a game is currently – after all, an active user who one you can sell to or show an ad to, unlike a registered user)
  • In the same GamaSutra interview, Dofus said it had about 500,000 paying subscribers each month. That’s a conversion rate from active to paying of 16.7%, which is a great achievement.
  • In the comments on my original post, Cyberwiz of mmodata.net estimated that the company has 570,000 monthly subscribers.
  • Based on those figures, I would estimate Dofus’s subscription revenues as 570,000 x €5 x 12 = €35 million.

According to Eurogamer (which can’t be fully trusted on these figures, as they originally reported Dofus’s 3.5 million subs figure), the company also has additional revenue sources:

“That’s in addition to making PVP spin-off Dofus Arena (due to launch on June 21st), co-operative dungeon crawler Slage, sequel Wakfu, and XBLA action-adventure Islands of Wakfu. Oh, and an animated TV series, created by Ankama itself, now in its second season in France and watched by 1 million people per episode. And a browser game spin-off from the TV series called Wakfu: The Guardians. And Dofus manga (800,000 copies sold). And and and.”

So we can perhaps throw in another €5 million in revenues from advertising, manga sales and other sources, leading to my estimate of €40 million.

* * *

That’ll teach me to publish a post in a hurry. My feeling is that GAMESbrief readers value accurate data over speed, so in the future I’ll aim to be more thorough in my research.

But let me know: do you want it fast or do you want it right?

About Nicholas Lovell

Nicholas is the founder of Gamesbrief, a blog dedicated to the business of games. It aims to be informative, authoritative and above all helpful to developers grappling with business strategy. He is the author of a growing list of books about making money in the games industry and other digital media, including How to Publish a Game and Design Rules for Free-to-Play Games, and Penguin-published title The Curve: thecurveonline.com