WoW has definitely sold more than 11.84 million units. There were still 11.5 million subscribers in February 2010.
The reference notes that 70% of WoW trial players quit before level 10. I have not seen what portion of players quit before level 70, but that statistic would weigh heavily on the purchases of WoW: Lich King, which is entirely late game content.
SHANGHAI--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. and NetEase.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: NTES - News) today announced that World of Warcraft®: Wrath of the Lich King™, the second expansion for Blizzard Entertainment’s award-winning subscription-based massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), will launch in mainland China on August 31, 2010.
BEIJING—Chinese Web portal operator Netease.com Inc. said Monday it received regulatory approval to offer the latest expansion pack for the popular "World of Warcraft" online game in China and plans to start letting players download the software next week.
Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704164904575420873859026684.html#ixzz0wK4nIFWn
So in that scenario that subscriber should only ever count as one sale. Canceling and renewing is not another sale, never suggested otherwise.
Understanding the digital/retail split would be interesting, especially in the PC space but I don't think TSE has the bandwidth to add more markets or dramatically reconfigure existing ones right now. For the time being, current GLS stocks should include all sales, retail or otherwise and that's the way it should be.
Given the even greater scarcity of digital download sales information, tracking them might encourage interest in TSE again and be a possible oppourtunity for KoC. Worth thinking about, IMO.
Deft, my concern is not so much accuracy, but the market value of tracking them seperately.
Understanding the distinction between digital and physical sales is valuable sales information. We are only cheating ourselves by combining the two.
How will you even know there is a trend until TSE as it is is obsolete?
RE: Subscribers. A subscriber could cancel and renew a subscription and be counted as two subscribers (one CD-KEY). This happens regularly in the WoW community from what I understand.
The point of TSE as a prediction market is to make up for the fact that hard information on video game sales isn't made available. It isn't a bookmaker which needs to "pay out" at a specified time. TSE is a market.
If a payout based on concrete information is made important to you then stick to just the futures. In terms of the GLS stocks, a video game can potentially sell for an infinite amount of time, especially in the digital age. No data made available will ever have any finality about it.
Sales are sales, the distribution channel is irrelevant.
Subscribers should certainly not be counted as 'sales' but in the case of WoW, at least when it was on The9, a subscriber would first have to acquire a CD-Key to allow them to buy the game. That's as good as a sale in my book.
On the other hand, as games trend towards a free-to-play / microtransaction / virtual goods model then "sales" will become even more irrelevant.
I agree. You touched on the crux of my point is we can only predict figures which are made available.
If there is suddenly reliable retail information for digital downloads (again not to be confused with subscribers) then we should look at whether these are predicted separately or not. Until then, the figures do not exist and are therefore not predictable.
Furthermore I think there actually needs to be a TSE distinction: Retail sales (Disc) Retail sales (Download/Installs) Subscribers (May come from same retail sale or even the same person maintaining several subscriptions!)
This is why Subscribers can never be included in the numbers. They simply do not represent a retail sale, not matter if you combine digital sales with physical sales or not.
Around 18 months ago we discussed this very topic and I posited that subscribers in China would not count as "sales". KoC disagreed. It's somewhere in this thread, I'll see if I can find it.
I'm with Phil in that my understand was that GLS stocks apply to all sales be they physical or otherwise. Again, maybe KoC can clarify for the benefit of those still here.
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WoW has definitely sold more than 11.84 million units. There were still 11.5 million subscribers in February 2010.
The reference notes that 70% of WoW trial players quit before level 10. I have not seen what portion of players quit before level 70, but that statistic would weigh heavily on the purchases of WoW: Lich King, which is entirely late game content.