The guessing game
Tobold challenges people to guess how many copies Warhammer will sell by the end of 2008. Cool, I’ll play. And please take into consideration that this is merely a guess with absolutely no hard facts to support it. Call it, a feeling.
I’ll start with Age of Conan. We were told they shipped 1,000,000 units for the release. I think it was roughly determined that at the top end they may have sold 700,000 copies of the game, and certainly 500,000. What relevance does AoC have with WAR you ask? I shall extrapolate.
Warhammer, in my opinion, has always been a more popular and anticipated game than Age of Conan. If we consider that 700,000 people wanted to play AoC then that would lead me to believe that more than that want to play WAR. So let’s say 1,000,000.
I think it’s pretty safe to say that 700,000 people aren’t playing AoC today, and a guess might be closer to 150 – 200k. So that leaves 500,000 gamers who either are not playing an MMOG right now or have gone back to the one they were playing before. So I’m going to add another 500,000 to my original figure of 1,000,000.
Tobold mentions the expense EA Mythic are laying out for additional EU servers, and he estimates they will need to sell 250,000 copies just to justify the expense. I think these 250k are the fleeing AoC players and EA Mythic expect to snap them up.
How well the game will do after its initial launch will depend on a number of things, primarily its stability and polish, and the release of Wrath of the Lich King. For me to guess how many more copies they’ll sell in the months after release would truly be a wild shot in the dark, so I’ll settle with a figure at launch and the month of.
1,500,000. That’s my guess.
Comments
Comment from Keiri
Time: August 15, 2008, 9:00 am
Cal, this has nothing to do with subscription numbers, but where do you come up with the anti-spam word? Is that automatic or something? I feel kinda weird typing in “Cal is a gaming god.”
Comment from 
caliga
Time: August 15, 2008, 9:17 am
Interesting comments Openedge. If we hark back to the earlier days of MMO’s, DAoC was one of the big 5. I think there is definately a desire to play PvP, but in this day and age we ask sooo much more from our games. There is no doubt in my mind that WAR will be big and over the years maybe even topple WoW, but at the same time, there is a lot of tough competition on the horizon. And thanks for concurring with my WAR guess.
@keiri … Cal IS a gaming god, you know it, I know it, the rest of the world will learn it. *grins*
Comment from Openedge1
Time: August 15, 2008, 8:10 am
Of course, today was Funcom’s financials report, and as of August they report 415k players…lol
Of course, this counts all accounts “created” and subbed.
I would like to wager how many of those bought 6 month subs based on Tortage, and how many actually still play when they left Tortage. I would wager your guesstimate to be better.
I also like your WAR guess. And then we need to take into account word of mouth. I can guarantee that based on the feedback, a lot of guilds may finally leave WoW when WAR launches.
I am waiting with bated breath as I think a sales point needs to be made on how popular PvP based games really are. AoC proved that this is what people do want in a game, and if WAR meets or exceeds your number, I wager a lot of other games that are PvE based (LOTRO?) may make inroads to add more PvP.