So Homefront launched today, I forgot all about it actually. =]

It will be a couple days before THQ releases sales figures information (if it's not doing so well, though, they won't release many details or even make an announcement at all.) The revelation of the Single Player mission being only 5 hours long couldn't have helped matters.

I'm always interested in future predictions made by industry experts, but that sort of information is very difficult to come by. No one wants to make educated guesses any more (for fear of being incorrect), and most analysts wait until the last minute (eg 24 hours after launch to make a "prediction of first week's sales") or wait until they can see Pre-Order numbers before making any predictions.

Here are the most prominent sales predictions for Homefront, for example:

1. Lazard Capital analyst Colin Sebastian predicts 1.5 million sales by the end of this month.

2. Michael Pachter doesn't expect Homefront sales to do very well, but he never provided any figures and kept his comments as vague as possible (he's been doing this more often unfortunately).

3. And then there's "HULIQ", they forecasted that sales figures for Homefront will hit 1.25 million in the first 6 months and 2 million by 12 months. Provided, of course, that they release one high-quality DLC, and offer a stable multiplayer experience, etc. I've never heard of HULIQ before, but the webpage looks a little sketchy and needs some major updates.

Most recent reviews of Homefront have made one thing very certain: the multiplayer experience isn't anything like Black Ops. In BO, an inexperienced camper can just stand in one place and get a 20-kill streak. Homefront is different, leaving brainless gamers very frustrated with the game since they won't survive as long as they could in BO (or earn achievements as quickly). Experienced players are finding the multiplayer experience quite refreshing and fun however. It's like Cataclysm Heroics for FPS players.

So, although initial sales won't be as high during the first week - I think the game can have some real staying power thanks to it's multiplayer experience (the "perk" system looks very cool too).

I wish that there were more industry experts out there predicting this kind of stuff though, even if they're wrong at least they can give a reason as to WHY they made their prediction. The best articles I've read are the ones with figures, past comparisons, trends, and logical reasoning as to why they picked that number.

For example, consider LA Noire.

I make a lot of decisions based on what people are saying about the game, and the general consensus is that LA Noire is going to be an awesome game. But, I'm getting a very bad feeling about what people are really saying about it.

Most are saying it awesome, but they're not saying the gameplay or story is awesome, they're praising the setting and new facial capture technology. It's not, "You gotta play this game, it's brilliant and so fun!", instead it's "OMG. Check out that facial capture technology! Look at their faces, they're so real! The faces! The faces!".

For those fortunate enough to have played the LA Noire demo, they played the best parts: the clue gathering and interrogation mini-games. However, 20 minutes isn't enough time to make a decision about the game.. did they consider that they would be playing the same mini-games over and over and over throughout the entire length of the game?

The game has been described as Rockstar's most adult oriented or "serious game". It's a slower paced game than their other lineups, and a lot of time has been spent on facial capture and voice acting. So, you can anticipate a LOT of cut scenes and player conversations.

From what I've seen, it appears to be a very linear (and slow paced) interactive detective novel, with conversational mini-games, and a lot of cut scenes that could potentially interfere with gameplay. Once the novelty of their faces and voice acting wear off, that's what you're left with.

Word is that it's impossible to fail a case too (all of the cases are pre-determined too, it's not like Clue where there are random killings, random scenarios, and random evidence.)

I know that I'm going to enjoy the game myself, but I'm getting a bad feeling that many players are going to be disappointed after playing the game "for real". Re-playability is also a big concern in it's present state, but it can be solved through DLC.

Bethesda's games for example (Fallout 3, Oblivion, Morrowind, etc.) I absolutely loved, but I _hated_ the same old NPC interactions and vendor menus (which they replicated across all of their games). It's the one thing I never really like about the game, but fortunately they weren't a significant part of the game. In LA Noire, player interactions ARE a big part of the game. When questioning suspects, I suspect that players will start seeing the exact same facial cues and "looks" over-and-over, which kills a lot of the fun in try to determine guilt, innocence, or deception (of course, they need to dumb it down though so as not to frustrate inexperience players.)

Pachter said that he would never underestimate Rockstar again, so whimsically predicted that LA Noire would sell as many games as Red Dead Redemption had. Problem is, Rockstar is publishing the game this time around.. Team Bondi is developer. The reason he underestimated RDR the first time is because he thought the genre/setting was too limited. I think this is true for LA Noire though, a western shooter has a tremendous market size compared to a detective game.

Is it mostly an interactive detective novel though? Do most people realize that it's not like GTA/RDR in terms of gameplay? I don't know.

What I do know is that I'm getting the same old SPORE-like vibe from this upcoming game release. Screenshots and demos are showing off the best parts (to control perception of the game), there's a huge amount of hype, gameplay videos are limited, players are expecting one thing (but they're going to get something different), and gamers are forgetting about re-playability and repetition (e.g. mini-games) within the game.

Anyways.. I think there's going to be a big explosion of sales during the first month, as people will be expecting the currently promoted game (the perception is RDR in the 1940's), but they'll be getting something completely different out of the box. Once the initial novelty wears off though, sales will decline and I don't think they'll reach the same heights as RDR. Either way, though, first day sales are definitely going to be highly successful for Rockstar.

In my earlier post about Subscription Counts ("Revisited"), one reader had asked if I included discounts for 3 month and 6 month subscription plans. I mentioned that on average, most players pay on a month-to-month basis (and those were the figures I used). It was a good question though, and I really wanted to find out what percentage of players pay month-to-month versus other payment plans.

I also was curious if there was a link between a user's subscription plan and what the player did in-game. For example, gold farmers buy accounts on a month-to-month basis because they are banned so often. I assumed that regular players (who bot or cheat) also pay month-to-month due to fear of being banned (e.g. they plan ahead).

So, I created a survey.

Unfortunately, I had to obtain the information under false pretenses (e.g. I'm a noob, this is for a school project, etc.). I did this because I wanted to obtain as many honest results as possible and like most research studies I didn't want the subjects to know what my true motives were.

I ended up getting 1,022 unique respondents - and the number is still growing.

That number is pretty good actually, especially considering that the Daedalus Project surveyed 1,019 players for their WoW demographics study.

Anyways, here were the results:

- 89% of the users were actively playing WoW, the other 11% were no longer playing.
- 85% of the players were from US-based Realms, 14% from EU-based Realms, and the remaining were from China / Multiple Realms.
- 63% of those surveyed had 1 month plans, 15% had 3 month plans, 10% had 6 month plans, 10% used Game Cards, and the other 2% were Free (e.g. Blizzard employees / billing bugs).
- 65% of those surveyed have never cheated in WoW, but 35% HAVE cheated. This was interesting, I thought it might be 25% maximum.
- 71% have never engaged in gold selling, 29% have sold/bought gold.
- 17% have been temporarily banned for some reason. 5% have been perma-banned for some reason (you really have to do something bad to get perma-banned.) =]
- Of all those surveyed, 20% are (were) afraid of being caught, 19% are fearless, and the remaining have never cheated.
- 19% of the total users have cheated in other MMORPG's.
- 91% of the respondents have cheated in single-player games. (No surprises there. I think that most users would probably cheat in WoW though, if they were completely free from repercussions.)
- 78% have witnessed another player cheating (this would have to be pretty obvious - so speed hacking or botting most likely was witnessed.)

And here's some of the more interesting data I pulled from the survey:

Average Game Time

NA/EU users averaged 3.48 hours per day, which is 24.36 hours per week. (8.6% of the total users played less than 1 hour per day which I rounded up to 1 hour per day, and 3.1% of total users played for more than 9 hours per day which I rounded down to 9 hours per day to obtain this total estimate.)

Back in 2005, the Daedalus Project estimated that on average, WoW players put in 22.7 hours per week. I suspect the number has gone up though, especially with the launch of Cataclysm still being recent.

Various studies have put the average Chinese player game time at 4 hours per day (28-35 hours per week in some cases.)

What NA/EU Users Pay Per Month

Excluding players who get their subscription for free,

74% pay $15 per month
16% pay $14 per month
10% pay $13 per month

Subscription Models

69% of the players who have cheated in World of Warcraft had 1 month subscriptions.

59% of the players who have NEVER cheated in World of Warcraft also had 1 month subscriptions.

For those who were afraid of getting caught, 73% had 1 month plans, 11.5% had 3 month plans, and 7% had 6 month plans.

Very interesting.. that's what I was looking for. =]

Players Who Have Cheated

Of all the users who cheated, 32.3% were not afraid of being caught and 67.7% WERE afraid of being caught.

59% have cheated in another MMORPG, and the remaining 41% have never cheated in another MMORPG (or don't play any others).

Summary

So, these NA/EU WoW users on average play 24 hours per week (versus China's 28 per week on average.) 74% of these players are paying the $15 per month rate, and there's a higher percentage of players who cheat that end up selecting the month-to-month payment plan.

There's a ton of other stuff that I could have asked, but I was really only interested in subscription numbers and if there was a correlation with "cheating" accounts. I wanted the survey is to be as short and quick as possible too. One day though, I might make a HUGE WoW survey that's very precise (e.g. how many people stopped playing when Cataclysm came out, what kind of cheating they engage in, how often, how much gold they make from cheating, how much they sell, precise time per week, etc.) Guess we'll see..

Keep in mind that this is just a survey from active /r/wow Redditors, some questions can be open to interpretation or confusion, and there's a margin of error.. but it's all still interesting nonetheless.

As discussed earlier, there's a big difference between announced "Subscribers" and real players.

But what a lot of people want to know is how many real players are there playing RIFT right now?

According to Trion (Source) they had a grand total of 58 North American and 41 European servers prepared for launch.

Trion also pleasantly provides Shard Status information. It's very limited (just like Blizzard's - you don't want to reveal too much information), but it does let you know how many people are waiting in queue.

Right now, the Dayblind shard is FULL with 112 people waiting.

I counted the total number of players on Dayblind (very tedious and time consuming by the way), and it came out to around 1900 players (Defiant and Guardian combined). Let's say for argument's sake that their servers are maxed at 2,000 total players (a very reasonable estimate).

Since there are 99 total servers, that means that they can support AT MOST 198,000 real players.

Keep in mind that these are peak concurrent logins and it was the busiest period (9PM-11PM showed about the same numbers, then tapered off) for NA. Many servers are still showing Low and Medium (probably 1200-1500) populations too.

(Note: If you play RIFT, pull some numbers from other servers during peak hours and leave a comment here - e.g. total players on both sides. I suspect all of the servers have the same max. number though. Remember that these are peak concurrent logins at a certain time of day. Other players login during different schedules.)

There are also other factors at play, some players haven't started playing yet, and they might increase the player capacity on each shard at a later date.

Take this information for what you will, but I wouldn't be surprised if real players were somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000 total right now (based on average player activity cycle and that over 50% of the shards were at half capacity.) If there were "1 million subscriptions" as promoted by gaming news sites, there should have been at least 600,000 simultaneous users logged in during peak hours.

Even if all of the shards were completely full, that would probably amount to 250,000 to 275,000 total players max during peak hours. That would mean less than 425,000 total players who would be logging in throughout the entire day. A far cry from the "1 million subscriptions" that gaming news sites are mistakenly reporting anyways. =]

Did you know that there's a fun way in-game whereby Blizzard could stop, prevent or at least mitigate the effect of account hacking in World of Warcraft? Not only that, but it can be easily implemented and they already have the system in place to do it.

Now, Blizzard has already done a bunch of neat features that reduce the impact of account hacking. I'm not talking about region based account locking or Warden updates - but rather smaller things, like making gear Bind on Pickup and setting their vendor price really low and/or making them immune to disenchanting.

You see, when your account is hacked, they want to clean out your account as quickly as possible. The cleaner will disenchant or sell all of your gear/items and transfer that gold to a laundering account. The most gold they get from you is your on-hand gold and what they can get for vendoring/disenchanting.

Vendoring, for the most part, has been taken care of - you can hardly get anything for vendoring gear, so it's not really worth it.

The big one is protecting your own gold (or your guild's gold).

What if you had the optional ability to deposit your gold into your bank account, and then purchase an in-game Goblin "combination lock" for your bank account?

The Goblin "Gold iLock™" would be a device sitting next to your personal bank (or guild bank if you're the GM) that you interact with it and enter a code to access your personal belongings and gold.

Say that you only have to unlock it once when you login, and it stays unlocked until you log off (e.g. to avoid having to enter the combination every time you try to access your bank.)

The combination lock could be programmed by yourself by using a total of 5 simple movements. For example, UP, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT, and JUMP. Or it could be made more complicated (eg, spell casts, numbers, etc. to increase the number of permutations.)

The beauty of using standard player movement as a code is that even if you had a keylogger installed on your PC - your account gold and belongings would still be protected. To the keylog file, it would just appear as normal character movements with no special identifying keystrokes. The hacker would not be able to differentiate between normal game play and combination unlocks. So, if your account was hacked, they still couldn't access your gold or valuables. =]

Imagine the Vashj'ir Seahorse training quest where you need to move in different directions. For example, you interact with the Goblin "Gold iLock" system, it asks for you to enter your code, then just press UP UP DOWN DOWN LEFT RIGHT or whatever. Bingo, your personal bank unlocks and you can access your expensive items and gold. (Your player doesn't have to actually move or have character animations during your sequence presses either for additional security.)

This is purely optional too. Some users might find it fun to have it in-game, plus the added security measures are simply invaluable. This could also be applied to Guild Banks.

Now that covers a big part of the issue - your gold, mats, expensive items, etc.

Even though that would make a big difference on it's own, let's take it to the next level. What about gear on your person?

Gear that can't be disenchanted works really well, however that defeats the purpose of enchanting doesn't it? I suppose you could put a timer on it so that it has to be disenchanted on pickup or within a certain time frame. For example, 24 hours to D/E before it's permanent - that would surely revitalize the disenchanting industry for many.

But what if you could have special "enchants" for your gear (for free) that makes the item IMMUNE to disenchanting? =]

This might be very useful for a character that didn't have the enchanting profession, for example, since they probably intend on keeping the equipment for a really long time.

I suppose you could remove this special "enchant" at a later date by using the same lock/unlock code that's shared with your bank account. But even then, this is gear that would typically stay with them for a long time.. and this method would start prioritizing dungeon raids between gear-grinding for profit or for use. (From a Blizzard business perspective, this makes sense since this would actually encourage players to play longer.. which is what they want.)

You put all of these strategies together and you get something simple, fun in-game, and significantly useful. It would essentially kill the account-hacking industry too. What's the point in hacking an account if you can't access their gold and can't D/E their items?

After all, you can't rely on players (who are mostly technically illiterate) to secure and protect their own PCs themselves.. part of their $15 per month bill is paying for insurance, and if Blizzard has the tools and ability, they should be taking these extra steps to protect their customers.