Is it so wrong to want to judge an MMORPG purely by its subscriber numbers? Craig Morrison makes the argument for... maybe.

Over the past week or so, Craig Morrison, the enthusiastic producer and developer of Funcom's Age of Conan, has been discussing what he likes to call "the numbers game," which was basically a personal blog post about MMORPG subscription numbers and why they might not be as important as we think they are.

In his first post, Morrison argues that we shouldn't judge an MMORPG's success by its population numbers because that leads us down some very slippery paths. First, there is the issue of being able to count 'players' in an MMORPG in the first place: do you count free trials? What about ones who are still subscribing, but do not play? What about players who play for an hour a month? Morrison then moves on to discuss units sold and how it's a big problem for MMORPGs. He notes that while other mediums, like books, movies and offline video games can be judged by their overall lifespan of sales, the number of units sold "only marks the beginning" of an MMORPGs life. In other words, if we were to judge MMO success based on initial sales, Age of Conan should be considered a powerhouse, with its 1,000,000+ copies shifted. On the other hand, if we just go by player population, AoC may be near the bottom of the pile.

Keep reading after the jump for details on his second post.

In his second post, Morrison goes on to discuss MMORPG ambitions, and why we should base our judgements upon a game's projected budget, ambition and infrastructure, rather than by its ability to compete with World of Warcraft. In other words, because investors and gamers alike are demanding that an MMORPG compete with, and beat, World of Warcraft, we are now in a dangerous period where more daring MMORPGs just can't flourish because they've been forced to compete against a game that they didn't want to compete with in the first place. Morrison notes that we shouldn't be alarmed if an MMO goes through high initial sales, followed by a significant drop. This is standard in an MMORPG industry, and we should applaud companies who plan for this accordingly. If an MMO is aiming for 100,000 subscribers, and it gets 400,000 copies sold, but then stabilizes at 100,000 subscribers, is it a failure? Morrison doesn't think so.

All in all, a great read to get into the mind of an MMO developer and producer. There are some things you could argue back with, but we'll leave that to you to think of. You can read part one here, and part two here.