Version 3.6 thoughts and comments

For v3.6 most important is of course Star Wars The Old Republic, which had a strong start with 1,7m subs at the beginning of February 2012. However there are some indications that numbers are going down a bit, I will keep a close eye on it, especially now between 20/02/2012 and 23/02/2012, when the bulk of the players have to resubscribe for the second time since release.

Then on to EVE Online, they went back to their roots, and despite the launch of SWTOR, the only serious competition in sci-fi mmorpg's since the launch of EVE, it's holding ground.
It looks like EVE is on route to full recovery, and SWTOR seems to be just a bump in the road. I can even imagine that SWTOR may become the boost that EVE needs to get back to their previous 370k and then over the 400k subs.

How is that you may ask, well, another interesting trend is that the Sci-Fi subgenre has grown substantially because of SWTOR, and once the novelty wears off, people may choose Sci-Fi again and pick EVE, and leave all the fantasy mmorpg's for what they are.

Now then, where did all these SWTOR subs come from? Well there is definitely a good chunk of WoW players that switched sides. If we look at the Western market, then SWTOR is close to half the numbers of WoW now. However after the initial bleed WoW seems to be stabilized. And I believe SWTOR also introduced a good chunk of new mmorpg'ers, expanding the market.

Meanwhile I am already planning v3.7
I am trying to get some numbers for Star Trek, now that they went F2P. They got a serious boost in Active Accounts, no doubt about it. I may be able to make an estimate for v3.7
I also got some weird numbers on Runescape, so I will investigate that.
And I will take another look at the Asian market and see if I can digg up some more PCU's from there.

Update :

Looks like I made a mistake on the WoW East / WoW West distribution.
Expect a new version soon rectifying this mistake and also new numbers for EVE, showing a nice growth.
Besides that, I will rate WoW East and WoW West separately from now on, it will receive a B-rating.
This on top of the already mentioned additions for v3.7
V3.7 is expected to be released on March 5.

Update2 :

I have retracted some of the WoW East / WoW West datapoints, this change is online right now on a temporary version of the 1m+ chart.
But now I found a misalignment issue on the 1m+ chart. This places the datapoints 6 months before their correct date. Keep this in mind when looking at this chart. This will be fixed in v3.7.