Gamigo themselves did not directly scream out these numbers to the western press or in their recent Q3 financial report. Instead, a Korean Inven article (two weeks after the initial October 15th launch) shed light on these launch numbers; $5 million US in sales and 50,000 player concurrency.
The 50K CCU is far below what I originally extrapolated based on the original 2014 launch numbers (number of servers = 21 and the amount of registered accounts = 2 million which Hartsman crowed about). On a strictly flat basis, that is around 95K supportable players per server. With balancing considerations including soft caps in place for expansion, I guestimated that the average ArcheAge server starts out with a soft cap of around 45-50K players. So for ArcheAge Unchained (where each region originally launched with 3 servers, I was looking at around 100-125K concurrent players during launch).
This lower announced CCU probably means they lowered the soft cap per server based on pre-orders up to launch day (lower than expected) while hoping their “cheaper” infrastructure would still be able to handle this which it could not (and they obviously did not want to try funneling players onto these original 3 servers due to the increased possibility of stability issues as well as increased queues). But it still took them longer than expected to spin up an additional server (while they also decided to bring up a new server for each region specifically to handle the Steam launch). The peak CCU for Steam was 7.2K.
Basically, the additional servers were added to alleviate the login queues and not actual demand based on client seats being sold. Another way to look at this is to take an average of the pack prices and divide the $5 million based on that. If all sales were for the cheapest pack, that would be around 192K clients sold and if all were the $50 pack, that would be 100K (and 67K if they were all $80 packs). Naturally, that isn’t the case so I decided to use $52 as the average to come to around 96K clients sold (which based on the numbers in the Inven article, is probably on the high side of the estimate). And unless the company invested in the best hardware based load balancers (which is not the case with Gamigo), you aren’t going to come close to hitting 100K CCU. So with this extrapolated number, it made sense why there were 5K login queues which lasted hours.
For Gamigo, the $5 million is a great number because most of their pre-Trion acquisition library likely never got even close to this amount of upfront revenue (generally speaking, their executives see this as a success since the ones who will benefit the most are them). The way that I look at it (considering it is like a fresh start with a new business model), it’s good but they are going to have severe challenges including maintaining a steady stream of recurring revenues amidst retaining a percentage of these original player numbers. I’ve already noted that I’m playing this for the long haul, but that my initial purchase is all they are going to get out of me (you don’t handle a buy to play title like this and expect to be rewarded for the poor quality effort).
The biggest decision they will have to make is how soon do they perform a server evolution for the two lowest population servers in each region. Unlike server merges in the past (where everyone who was being merged had to fight for their land again, the server with the lower population is the only one that has to go and grab land again since the higher population server in the evolution, gets to keep what they have). We’re only 2 months in but this is all going to become a reality in the next 4-6 months. If the recurring revenues aren’t meeting expectations, the higher level bean counting executives are going to force the trimming of expenses (this is just a reality of how Gamigo runs everything as low cost and as lean as possible).
Gamigo is going to have to juice up the premium rewards for the vocational, equipment, and combat ArchePass tracks if they want more players to continue sinking 1500 credits into each of those tracks. Had they handled these first two months more professionally and competently, I would’ve been one of those who would’ve gladly spent 4500 credits each season just on the ArchePass (plus whatever seasonal cosmetics were in the credit marketplace). But nope, the short term bang that is part and parcel of the game industry, is what mattered most.
