SSG's Annual Revenue: What's wrong with this picture?

[NeebPlayer]

According to dnb.com, the annual revenue of SSG was $20.7mil. (Just Google "SSG revenue".)

Let's say LOTRO and DDO have 20k regular players combined, who spend money on the games. This would mean an average person spent $1000 last year. Obviously, it doesn't work that way, so let's factor in the whales.

Let's say 5% of the players are whales, the definition of which is someone who spends $1000 a month, adding up to $12,000 a year. 5% of 20k is 1000 people, which brings the whales' spending to $12,000,000. This leaves $8 mil for everyone else, which is 19k people. 8,000,000/19k = $421. It means normal players spent that much on average last year. This clearly sounds off, so what am I doing wrong? Are there more players? Are the whales responsible for an even higher portion of the overall revenue?

[thinx]

Are there more players?

I would guess so. If you assume even distribution of your 20k, we would get 10K LOTRO players, which would be 1000 per server.
Given from what I see in game I would guess that this is rather the player number per day than per server.

From there on it is pure guesswork, as we would need to know the distribution of logins per day and player. We can definitely say the averge number is smaller than one (players that log every day), but not how much.
I guess we can assume factors of 0.5 or 0.33 with high confidence, smaller factors are harder to say, but might be possible.
So overall we might as well end up with 2-3K players/server or more.

[LotroVidz]

Lotro has more than 10k "regular" users, don't know about DDO. I would guess lotro peaks around 8-9k concurrent players, that is the amount of players playing at the same time. If you also count active users as well(offline users), that number grows by a lot.. Don't know how by how much, but probably 3-4x. Evernight alone peaks 900-non anon players, its most likely well about 1k players counting the non anonymous.

But I see your point, I think Lotro have many boomer-whales.

[Valakircka]

According to dnb.com, the annual revenue of SSG was $20.7mil. (Just Google "SSG revenue".)

Let's say LOTRO and DDO have 20k regular players combined, who spend money on the games. This would mean an average person spent $1000 last year. Obviously, it doesn't work that way, so let's factor in the whales.

Let's say 5% of the players are whales, the definition of which is someone who spends $1000 a month, adding up to $12,000 a year. 5% of 20k is 1000 people, which brings the whales' spending to $12,000,000. This leaves $8 mil for everyone else, which is 19k people. 8,000,000/19k = $421. It means normal players spent that much on average last year. This clearly sounds off, so what am I doing wrong? Are there more players? Are the whales responsible for an even higher portion of the overall revenue?

where did you found that there are only 20k of players in both games?
and ofc its not only the game, you have to count merchantise sales too,
i bet they sell well in US!
on the other hand, if 20.7m is the income, how much are the cost of running those games?
and if its 50%, why they dont improve the game, why they want to charge for this "mini expansion",
which is nothing more than a quest pack and it was promised as part of Mordor expansion in 2018 and as free to all in 2020.......
are we near to the end? is this the last "expansion"?

[Gondoron]

https://mmo-population.com/r/lotro/ claims 1.87M players on LOTRO and 272k on DDO. So call the grand total user base 2M. That works out to about $20 average revenue per user. Sounds about right to me.

Also interesting is that D&B claims they have 40 employees. That's a pretty lean and mean operation. TBH I'm impressed with what they can do with so little.

[NeebPlayer]

are we near to the end? is this the last "expansion"?

If it's true that they have 57k regulars like that site claims, then it's probably the other thing. They are just milking it as hard as possible with minimal expenditure. I kinda thought they had less players and that would explain the state of the game, but the numbers suggest otherwise. If anything, this brings my opinion of SSG even lower. Sadly.

[thinx]

https://mmo-population.com/r/lotro/ claims 1.87M players on LOTRO and 272k on DDO.

I have my doubts on that number. I would be ~200K per server.
Let's say we can see 1000 players/day/server, this means that players log in very rarely (once every 200 days on average) OR there are many anonymous players (like >95%) OR the 2M are wrong/outdated/include dormant accounts/whatever.
Probably the 1K are a little low, but we will never get to 200K even with 2-5K.

I would go for around one order of magnitude lower.

[OghranNasty]

What is wrong with that picture is that it has no basis in fact.

SSG is privately owned, not obliged to publish revenue information, and extremely unlikely to volunteer such info.

[Echoweaver]

SSG is either lying about their revenue or milking their player base? Haha. That's sort of like, "Have you stopped beating your dog?"

I think the larger estimates of player base in the millions are probably accurate. In a f2p game, more than half of your players won't be paying anything and won't log in often. More than half of what remains will make one-off purchases occasionally. Then you have a comparatively small percentage of subscribers, frequent one-off purchasers, and your so-called whales, who are the most active players. Less active players don't log in all that often, but a decent number contribute a small amount of revenue.

So, yeah, most of your server stats at any given time will be driven by a small fraction of the playerbase, but a lot of those super-casual players contribute a small amount of revenue each.

[Gondoron]

You have to mind the math with daily/weekly/monthly players. You could 50k daily but 200k+ weekly because if someone only plays once a week they'll only show up in the weekly number.

[Belnavar]

are we near to the end? is this the last "expansion"?

Considering the Gundabad expansion has already been announced, and we've gotten leaks about a major component of that expansion (a new class), the answer is very clearly no. A handful of folk have been predicting the game's demise every year for a decade plus now. While the game must end at some point, there's clearly plenty of content still to come, plenty of interest from players, and plenty of revenue. Likewise for DDO.

-Bel

[Freanix]

Considering the Gundabad expansion has already been announced, and we've gotten leaks about a major component of that expansion (a new class), the answer is very clearly no. A handful of folk have been predicting the game's demise every year for a decade plus now. While the game must end at some point, there's clearly plenty of content still to come, plenty of interest from players, and plenty of revenue. Likewise for DDO.

-Bel

Exactly! when the game finally does finish hopefully many years from now, those folks will come on and say "see i was right all along!" and we will be like "dude you said that for 20 years, of course at some point it will end, its like predicting one day you will die"

[NeebPlayer]

Exactly! when the game finally does finish hopefully many years from now, those folks will come on and say "see i was right all along!" and we will be like "dude you said that for 20 years, of course at some point it will end, its like predicting one day you will die"

Hahahahahahaha...

[SerowLOTRO]

Exactly! when the game finally does finish hopefully many years from now, those folks will come on and say "see i was right all along!" and we will be like "dude you said that for 20 years, of course at some point it will end, its like predicting one day you will die"

Exactly this.