Blizzard has been pretty quiet about subscription counts from each country, but there was a time when they officially released subscriber figures. These numbers are based on Blizzard's definition of a "subscriber" by the way and are quite interesting to say the least.

In January 2007, when subscription counts totaled 8 million worldwide (Source):

China: 3.5 million
North America: 2.0 million
Europe: 1.5 million
Remaining Territories: 1.0 million

In January 2008, when subscription counts totaled 10 million worldwide (Source):

China: 4.5 million
North America: 2.5 million
Europe: 2.0 million
Remaining Territories: 1.0 million

You can find other posts on Gamasutra with earlier subscription figures too, but it appears that Blizzard stopped revealing extra subscription count information in 2008.

Based on their growth trends, I think it's safe to say that these estimated projections are fairly accurate for Blizzard's latest (October 2010) 12 million subscriber count:

China: 5.5 million
North America: 3.0 million
Europe: 2.5 million
Remaining Territories: 1.0 million

That's pretty interesting. Keep in mind though that "subscriber" counts don't necessarily mean active players. In China, for example, most players have multiple prepaid cards and accounts (since the game itself is free).

Did you want to hear something really spooky?

Six months ago, I worked on estimating the number of subscribers in China versus worldwide figures. I had previously estimated that "At a rate of $15 per month, that means that there are 6.0 million players" outside of China.

So, out of 11.5 million worldwide, it's about 5.5 million Chinese subscriptions and 6.0 million in NA/EU/Other.

And based on official figures provided by Blizzard, it's about 5.5 million Chinese subscriptions and 6.0 million in NA/EU/Other.

Nice.

It appears that my estimated subscription information has been confirmed by Blizzard themselves. =]

What's even more cool is that I can use the information from their 8 and 10 million subscriber figures to calculate even more interesting stuff about Blizzard's financials. More on that to come later though.

The President of Sony Online Entertainment (John Smedley) has just announced that DCUO users will be getting content updates every month.

President of Sony Online Entertainment John Smedley said that if you decide to play DC Universe Online, you won't have to worry about any additional costs besides your regular monthly fee. Smedley told Eurogamer that they will be offering free monthly upgrades of additional content and weekly patches if things need to be fixed right away, instead of big DLC packages you have to purchase additionally. The new content for PC and PS3 will launch within a day or two of each other, even though it takes longer for updates to be approved on the PS3 platform. (They'll hold all the PC upgrades until the equivalent one is ready.)

"But the plans are about a month out you can start expecting major pieces of content and major new features to come in," he said. "We'll be adding all kinds of cool stuff. We're not quite ready to reveal what our after-launch plans are yet. Needless to say we have a lot of content we're in QA on that players haven't seen yet."

This echoes what DCUO Game Director Chris Cao's told Techland about seeing tons more feats and other weapons in the near future. Smedley said that the monthly fee made the company feel obligated to provide free constant upgrades and new features.

There will be "major pieces of content" and "major new features" (in addition to standard patches/fixes) implemented every month apparently.

EVERY MONTH? Where have we heard THAT before? Oh right.. Blizzard Entertainment said the same thing about World of Warcraft (except add "major content updates", "new weapons" and "new quests".)

Sony mentioned that they already have a "lot of content" currently in QA (considering the current state of the game, I fully expect so), which is all well and good.. but do they have enough content to last the next "five, ten years" that they want to run the game? Doubtful.

There's no way they'll be able to keep up with the game's demands. This is just another example of a company getting really excited about something.. but they never properly planned ahead and simply lack the foresight. Well, the management team anyways - I suspect that they didn't consult the development team before making this announcement. =]

Once Blizzard realized their mistake back in 2004-2005, they quietly removed all instances of the "major content updates every month" statement from their webpage and forums. That was actually one of the big selling points for me at the time too. Shortly after though (when they ran out of content), the updates came once every 3 months, then every 6 months, and then they became paid Expansion Packs. How very disappointing.. =[

I can see the same problem happening with DCUO.

The other problem is that once the novelty of the game wears off, Sony will be reducing their support staff which in turn effects development time of said content. They haven't released any sales figures yet (which is interesting in itself), but I'm not really interested in that anyways - what does interest me is retention rate. And based on what I've seen (it's not a very deep MMO), retention rate will probably be around 1-3 months on average.

(Note: Back in 2008 before DC Universe Online was announced, John Smedley believed that this PS3 MMO game would be the WoW killer.)

* UPDATE (01/21/11):

Worldwide sales figures estimates have been released courtesy of vgchartz.com.

During the first week: PS3 sold 150,764 copies and the PC version sold 45,267 copies.

No wonder Sony didn't release their sales figures! SOE President John Smedley stated that "The game is sold out in a lot of stores." Well, yeah.. the stores that only carried 3 copies.

They did, however, take a good piece of advice from the Blizzard Bible: "We're adding more servers to keep up with the growth." Even though there was no growth or need for extra servers.

By comparison, first week sales of Age of Conan were more than 500,000 units, AION sold somewhere between 400,000 and 700,000 copies during their first week, and Warhammer Online sold more than 500,000 units. It seems that 500k is the magic number for newly hyped MMORPG's.

* UPDATE (01/25/11):

Another confirmation that significant content will be released every month. Sony is also defending their high subscription fee.

Apparently, this "monthly content paid service" is really being pushed hard. The rest of the article didn't sound very good though.. it's only been a week, and Sony is already trying to defend the game.

We understand we're asking a lot and the equation I always give to people is that it's similar to DLC - if you were getting DLC from Red Dead Redemption every month, I'd probably sign up for that because I buy every piece of DLC they throw at me.

We haven't had an opportunity to prove ourselves to the players on that content delivery.

There was also mention that F2P is very unlikely.

* UPDATE (02/03/11):

FYI - if you're interested in latest maintenance announcements, server restarts and patch notes, they can all be found HERE.

No word on when the next content patch will hit, so far it's just been maintenance and bug fixes. But Sony promised once a month, so there _should_ be new stuff (dungeons, quests, gear) by the end of February. "Should" being the operative word.

* UPDATE (02/19/11):

Sony has set the first benchmark for their promised monthly content updates. Here's what they've implemented, and you should be expecting the same level of content each and every month:

New Batcave Raid – 8 players will have the opportunity to infiltrate and retake Batman's Inner Sanctum, which has been overrun by OMAC and the Dark Knight's own corrupted technology. Fight along side Batman against Brother Eye!
New Appearance Items – Earn a Harlequin Clown suit or a Cherub disguise through a variety of holiday activities.
Goddess of Love Alert – Join up with three others to decide the epic battle between Devotion and Scorn once and for all.
New Races – Can you catch Catwoman as she leaps across buildings in Gotham City?
New Collections - All new collection sets will allow players to continue finding these hidden items.
New Themed Missions – Enjoy various missions that will challenge the player in combat, jumping, and much more.
A New Bane Duo – Another Duo has been added for your enjoyment! Pair up with another player and take on Bane for a chance at great loot.
New PvP Ring Event – Available on both PvP and PvE servers, Heroes and villains race to either save or steal valuable bags of diamonds from armored vans.
An Auction House - Players may now buy and sell tradeable items on a Broker in The Watchtower and Hall of Doom.
New Armor – Make your way to the Gotham Museum and help Catwoman to receive pieces of brand new Mayan armor!

So basically: new raids, new races, new collections, new missions, new events, and new items/gear/appearances... every month. We'll see.

In an older post, I stressed that Blizzard was not required by any law to notify users of internal data breaches. Many misinformed players, Blizzard employees and fans used this false information as the logical reasoning and proof as to why Blizzard's internal databases "have never been broken into" or account information stolen.

To be clear: Blizzard (nor any other gaming company) is not required by law to notify anyone of anything.

Here's a little excerpt I wrote at the time:

Now, if something very bad were to happen, then yes - a large announcement would be made.

Well, it just happened with Runes of Magic. =]

Here's a link to the news article.

Basically, a hacker obtained login/personal data from their account database and is now holding the information "hostage" until Frogster/RoM Team changes the "forum communication practices and technical aspects of Runes of Magic operation".

The only reason that the company is releasing this information NOW is because it's been made public and they're being "held hostage." The data breach actually occurred back in 2007 by the way. They sat on this data breach information for 4 years before telling anyone and probably would have continued to do so until the hostage situation was made public.

Still think this hasn't happened anywhere else? It's actually more common then you think, and I'm not just talking video games.

It's sad to see the constant scrambling to fight crackers and improve copy protection measures. The battle has been going on for decades and yet businesses have yet to learn that you can't stop illegal copying. With next-generation copy protection measures come next-generation cracking tools. It's a useless cycle and they're just wasting money trying to find "the next big thing." *cough* StarForce *cough*

Copy protection methods have always used the some old approaches: memory checksums, data/hardware checks, decrypting data after activation, dongles, obfuscated code, activation codes (serial/registration), etc.

But the problem with those approaches is that they're too obvious and right out in the open. Simply put, it's like hitting a brick wall - it's right in front of you, crackers know where it is, and they can start to work away at it. When debugging code, programmers need to know when a process occurs so that they can trace it. They're not going to trace the entire gaming code, it would simply take too much time.

But what if they (or the user) didn't know that there was any copy protection in place? Or when copy protection algorithms were "activated"?

I've always been interested in the more entertaining and creative forms of copy protection out there.

One of my favorites was MOTHER 2 / EarthBound. It had some standard stuff (e.g. data checksums, piracy warnings) of course, but the "pirated ROM" would allow players to play for several hours without the user ever knowing that copy protection schemes were actually still in place. =]

There were so many ROMs out there too, it was hard to tell if you had the "real" cracked version or not. The only way to tell is to play through the game and look for certain signs (if you knew what to look for) or wait for special events to occur during the game (at critical points, generic crash/freezes are caused and all saved games are deleted.)

That's just awesome. =]

This approach is a good example of what you want to take advantage of, but without the piracy warnings (as they stick out) and other obvious "signs" that exist during the beginning of the game. You don't want the cracker or player to know that there's copy protection in place, or what version they're even using.

Recently, Ubisoft incorporated an "amazing new copy protection approach" into the NDS version of "Michael Jackson: The Experience". Illegal copies would show no notes played, the game would freeze when paused, and vuvuzela's would be blasting over the music.

This is actually an old copy protection method, in fact, and it's just another "brick wall" that prevents you from playing right away, and thus making it easier for crackers to detect, trace and disable the copy protection measures.

In that same Wired article about Ubisoft's novel approach, there's a quote by Nintendo President Satoru Iwata: Battling pirates “has been like a game of cat-and-mouse"

If you want to seriously fix this problem, stop being the predictable mouse and stop trying to be the cat.

What you should be is a fucking ninja/pirate hybrid and engage in subtlety, confusion, obscurity, dirty tricks, and deception. Is this really a battle, or just a game?

So, here's my recommendation for developers/publishers (using a RPG as an example):

Part 1

- Announce that the game will not have an annoying DRM, no activation will be required, that it doesn't need to be online all the time to play, etc. There's no need to make a big deal about this either.
- Alteratively, you could put standard copy protection in place, announce that there's copy protection but ensure that you don't pay too much for it as it's really just a red herring so that crackers bypass it and release their pirated version. Going the copy protection route will come in handy later actually however, but this will make more sense in Part 3.
- You want players to be on your side, not supporting pirates.
- Realize that there's no point in DRM - it will just be broken on the first day. Instead, focus on making a great game since that's where the majority of your revenue will come from.
- Keep the retail cost of the game low.
- Talk to people who do pirate your game, work with them to make your game better, get them involved in your game and future games. If they're involved in the project, they'll support you and probably buy all of your future games. Especially if they know you personally.

Part 2

- Over half the battle is controlling information and perception.
- Release several different versions of the "pirated version" on torrent websites (and P2P/FTP/etc) under various real, independent or anonymous group names. Use a private VPN, get randomized source IPs going.
- Those pirated versions should be crippled out right, or simply stop functioning early in the game (freezing/crashes). These would be special pre-fabricated versions of the game (ie, not the full game.)
- Spread false information on forums/websites that you've heard reports of these pirated versions containing a new type of virus, can damage your PC, have keyloggers that target MMORPG's, etc. (Game publishers already send out these types of warnings for pirated games in general already anyways.)
- Keep in mind that most players who pirate aren't technically savvy, and they'll just download the first game/MP3 they see (or download multiple copies if they're not sure.) Help them waste their bandwidth, would be nice too if they're capped on a monthly basis.
- Fill up torrents and forum posts with so much misinformation (even good old "it's being tracked by the FBI"), that you'll discourage users from downloading the game or they'll want to wait.
- If the game is amazing and highly sought after, many will just go out and buy the game rather than taking the risk of downloading the "dangerous pirated copy" or wasting more bandwidth.
- Since you'll have a lot of time to prepare, your outsourced employees (ie, plants) can build up a trusted name for themselves on various forums or release websites.

Part 3

Okay, this is where things get interesting.

- The real game will be investigated/cracked by various groups, they will test play it (not a FULL play through mind you), and then release it quickly (they might be in competition with other cracking groups, sometimes the programmers are lazy, they believe that it was cracked successfully, etc.)
- You don't want your hidden DRM measures to take effect early in the game. Instead, wait until the player is nice and comfortable first before you hit them with it. When it happens, it won't be obvious either. (Much like EarthBound, players didn't even know that they were using the "bait" pirated ROM until it was too late.)
- After an hour or two of playing (or longer/keep it random), reward the player with an epic item drop for example, and then "crash" the game shortly afterwords. Save games should get corrupted in the process too.
- You don't want the player to be angry at your game or the developer, you want to instead redirect their rage to someone else. The game should be rewarding the player, but when things go wrong - blame the pirated copy.
- When the game crashes, it should be a standard Windows error page casting blame on "RZR1911.DLL" or "CRACK.DLL". That's an excellent way to convince players that the crack was responsible for the crash and their loss of time.. it wasn't poor coding in the game.
- Also incorporate other random crashes with unique error codes, so that when they (Google) search the message they're brought to a forum that explains that only pirated versions cause those crashes and that they don't occur with retail versions. Also explain the dangers to their PC from using this specific pirated game.
- You want to start causing doubt in the user's mind and these pirated copies should be scaring players.. "is this really safe to run on my PC?" Random exception faults, fake freezes, BSOD's, driver failures, corrupted save files, reinstalls required - this is all because by the cracking groups.. it can't possibly be something that's built into the software as a form of copy protection. =]
- Of course, cracking groups will start releasing "updates" to fix the issue. But you should be doing the same. Also, since they don't know where the copy protection begins and ends, they will be releasing crack-fix upon crack-fix upon crack-fix once they are discovered.
- There's going to be so much misinformation out there, players won't be able to tell whether they have the real version or not. The anticipation alone of having to play for 3 hours, then having a random crash (and lost saved games) is not worth the amount of stress. You want players to mistrust the pirate community, not the game developer. (Yes - I understand the irony of it all. But this is war, irony be damned.)
- These groups might also start making news announcements about this type of copy protection - but the damage will have been already done. Most of the downloaders rarely read these news items on their official pages anyways. As the game developer you can simply state that their "band aid solutions" and "poor skills" are responsible for the current state of the game and that it's ruining the experience for players (and hence should buy the real game and avoid the inferior or possible infected pirated versions). =]
- At later stages of the game (ie, points where it's been patched by cracking groups), you could start taking different approaches - like checks, changes to difficulty, invisible changes to player stats, random boss cheats (e.g sudden smack down), etc.

Basically, stop making it easy for crackers - make them seriously work for it using means that they're not used to. They've been spoiled for far too long.

While they're hard at work creating countermeasures, you'll be gathering more "converts".

And instead of trying to find the next "best" form of DRM, just start using a little conditioned response, some psychology, control of information, red herrings and confusion (keep the crackers busy), and putting your DRM out in the open. No one should even know if there's any copy protection in place. Let players get into the game after a couple hours first (consider it a demo) as that's where it will hurt them the most. But, make sure they blame someone else and not the game.

Just a thought.

* UPDATE (02/15/2011):

So, someone on Reddit just discovered those clever copy protection methods in EarthBound, which brought up a little conversation on other games doing the same.

I didn't even know about these, but they were pretty cool to read and confirmed just how effective this kind of DRM is.

Here's an interesting article on Spyro the Dragon 3. Get this: it took 2 months to crack fully. =]

The Spyro copy protection methods took place after playing for long periods of time, and the crackers kept assuming that they removed the DRM each time. However, the glitches and piracy warnings were made obvious to the user - so the crackers knew WHEN (well.. where) to remove the DRM. Imagine if they never knew when/where to remove the DRM though? (Like what I've been talking about.) =]

The trick is to make random and undetectable copy protection, and play with their heads a little bit.

Another cool (more recent) one is Batman: Arkham Asylum. When the main copy protection was removed, there was still a small tweak made - pirated copies would not allow Batman to fly/glide, making the game impossible to progress.

I'm surprised developers don't do this more often.