It's virtually impossible to work out accurate subscriber counts for MMOs today, and this site cannot do that. However, there does exist a need for people to be able to gauge the activity, growth, decline, and popularity of MMOs.
So, we do it based on reddit subscriber information. We track the current subscribers, active users and history of both. This helps you to choose an MMO that has the required "activity" you'd like to see, or perhaps you are just interested.
Of course the data is not extremely accurate, or in many cases, accurate at all. There is no way of really getting MMO subscriber numbers today. If you need accurate numbers you will have to look for publicly released data, use steam users, or whatever method is available.
The purpose of the site is comparison, which is something I believe it does deliver. It helps to gauge the number of users vs another MMO, and it helps to gauge how active or involved that community is.
Let's look at a few examples. At WoW's expansion release we reported a huge increase in activity and growth for WoW - that makes sense. We also showed it staying very strong for 30 days, and starting to taper off at we got to 4 months post release. Look at the top 10 MMO's, it seems fairly reasonably. The top 5 says WoW is about 6x bigger than FFXIV, about 10x bigger than ESO. In that example I think WoW is probably 7-8x bigger than ESO - but what we are showing is a guess at the relative difference in population between the two, as best as possible.
We measure two primary metrics: Reddit Subscribers and Reddit Active Users.
Magic number: This is the number taken from averaging out the biggest and most recently known public subscriber and daily player numbers vs reddit subscribers.
| Metric | Formula |
|---|---|
| Current magic number | 54.0614 |
| Total players | (Subscribers*54.0614) |
| Activity rating | (Active users/Subscribers)*500 |
| Daily players | (Total players*0.095*(Activity rating/10) |
This is more a fun project than anything else. It should be obvious to anyone the reasons why this is not an accurate subscriber count for MMOs. What it is though, is an interesting (to me and maybe others) tracker of popularity based on reddit users.
It also allows you to see quite nicely if an MMO is growing or shrinking, regardless of what the actual user count may be.
The site has been heavily influenced and contributed to by /r/mmorpg on reddit, a great community for MMO players. Join in.