Calibrating my crystal ball

The physicist Niels Bohr once said "Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.", a quote that is also sometimes attributed to Nostradamus. I went on record saying that Lord of the Rings Online will be the best selling game Turbine ever produced, which means getting more than the 120,000 subscribers that the first Asheron's Call had. I also predicted that it would probably even beat the current subscriber numbers of Everquest, which means over 200,000 players. Said like that, this are just numbers. How did I estimate them?

One source is annecdotal evidence. Like the general chat in the LotRO beta or in the forums, where a majority of beta players say that they will buy the game. Or from the other side, the number of people you meet in World of Warcraft who say that they are bored with it and are looking for a new game. This gives me a general impression about LotRO being popular with people that tried it, and a potential pool of customers willing to try something new. But that isn't talking numbers yet.

To get from there to a number, you need a another number to compare it with. For me that number is a statement from Brad McQuaid that Vanguard : Saga of Heroes has "well over 100,000" subscribers. Why this number? Because Vanguard is comparable to LotRO in a number of aspects. Both are triple-A titles produced by people and companies that have been around since the first big wave of commercial MMORPGs. Both are released in the first half of 2007. Both have the same monthly fee business model (although LotRO adds to that with the founder's club business model). Assuming that Brad isn't lying through his teeth, this gives me a number to calibrate my crystal ball with.

And now it's back to guesswork and extrapolation. Having played both the Vanguard and the LotRO beta, I think everyone here noticed that I like LotRO a lot better. LotRO has the more interesting world, less boring grinds, and a lot less bugs. And that isn't just my opinion. I read a lot of previews and reviews about both Vanguard and LotRO, and the reviews on Vanguard are at best mixed, with "unfinished" and "bugs" getting a lot of mention. The echo that LotRO gets is a whole lot more positive.

Then there is the different target audience to consider. The Escapist just has an interesting article about games targeting a more casual crowd. The best-selling PS2 game for 2005 was a quiz game called Buzz!, which most serious gamers considered to be simplistic and boring. But it sold over 4 million copies. The game's developer David Amor presented at the GDC what he considers to be the factors for success: familiarity, simplicity and approachability. And if WoW has teached us anything, it is that the same formula is true for MMORPGs. LotRO is more familiar, more simple, and more approachable than Vanguard. And while there are people that will scoff at familiar, simple, and approachable, I still think that these are important parameters for the mass market. Hey, even SWG got up to 250,000 subscribers, just based on familiarity.

This isn't necessarily a measure of "value". I'm not saying that LotRO is twice as good as Vanguard. It is just a measure of "success", and I *do* believe that LotRO will sell at least twice as many copies as Vanguard. Because Middle-Earth is so much more familiar than the rather generic Telon. Because LotRO is simpler than Vanguard. And because the intro of LotRO, having first an instanced soloing zone with a story-line, and then a newbie zone you can only leave through another instanced story, is a lot more approachable than the newbie zones of Vanguard. So if Vanguard sold over 100,000 subscribers, LotRO should get at least 200,000 together. Which would make it the number 2 MMORPG in the US and Europe after WoW. (Not world-wide, due to the much higher subscriber numbers of Asian games like Lineage or FFXI) Everything beyond that becomes impossible to estimate, because it will depend also on things like marketing, and how well the retail launch goes.