Metrics for Success

You can tell from this screenshot that RIFT has successfully alienated the treant demographic.

Syp recently asked a pretty reasonable question – namely, can we call RIFT a success yet?  It stirred up no shortage of discussion, since for some reason discussing RIFT always brings out a lot of ranting.  But the question is interesting to me largely because it highlights how ridiculously bad our whole system is for determing success or failure.  Our models are based on launch figures, and not to put too fine a point on it, those numbers don’t matter.

We have no idea if RIFT is a success yet; all we know is that it launched with around a million boxes.  How many of those will turn into long-term subscriptions?  Half?  All?  A tenth?  People love drawing a comparison to Warhammer Online, does anyone want to look at its launch and tell me if it’s a success or not?

Launch sales are our first place to look for success or failure largely because they do make good shorthand metrics for normal video games.  Like most disposable entertainment, a video game does the majority of its business on the week of launch, with a month being the usual cut-off for any major sales spikes.  This in and of itself isn’t unusual – even as games get longer and more involved, the odds are good that a game you sort of wanted a month ago is off the radar already.  Movies make something like 60% of their total revenue on opening weekend.  Once the novelty wears off, a lot of things just aren’t sticking around.

MMOs, however, are a very different beast.  For starters, they’ve got a much higher budget than single-player games, as a rule.  Assuming that RIFT did indeed move a million boxes (which is by no means certain at the moment – they’ve announced a million accounts, not a million sold) that money could very well be gone pretty quick in paying off investors, salaries, packaging costs, et cetera.  The real moneymakers come in the form of subscriptions, a stream of revenue that is essentially free money to venture capitalists and the company itself.

For another thing, most successful MMOs have continued to garner new box sales for a much longer period than other games.  Exact figures are hard to come by, but if nothing else you can be sure that World of Warcraft didn’t sell twelve million launch boxes.  (I vaguely recall numbers between one and two million on launch, but I don’t have any sources beyond distant memory.  It was certainly a far cry from current numbers.)  Word of mouth keep MMOs moving off the shelves at a slow pace for a long while if the game is successful.

The real determination doesn’t come at launch, but six months later.  By that point, it should be obvious how much launch falloff has occurred (and there will always be people who buy the box and cancel within the first three months) and how many players are still going strong.  You can see if box sales are slowing a little or a lot in response to word of mouth.  You can take a look at the post-launch server environment and see if those servers added just after launch are being quietly removed.

Does this mean I think RIFT will fail?  Absolutely not.  It means it’s too early to call it either way at the moment.  We’ve seen the game launch strong, but MMOs are a marathon, not a sprint.  The game might wind up rocking so hard that it kills a man, or it might wind up following the same trajectory as Warhammer Online (a prediction I’ve seen elsewhere.)  Until a few months have gone by, all we can do is speculate.

Obligatory conclusion disclaimers: I don’t have a horse in this race.  I’m not playing RIFT at the moment, simply because I don’t have a place to fit another game into my rotation.  I’m hoping that the game does succeed, simply because several people whom I like are playing it and enjoying it, but that’s the extent of my concern.