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+--- Thread: Will a lack of server software kill M&B? (/thread-198.html)
Will a lack of server software kill M&B? - 1steIvN_boc - 03-12-2020
I am posting this here because most avenues for discussion in the M&B-iverse (Discord, Team Speak and so on) do not really support long-form.
Taleworlds is planning to release its long awaited follow-up to Mount & Blade Warband, Bannerlord, at the end of the month. It is explicitely not going to release "server files", i.e. the files server owners need to set up a Bannerlord gaming server.
Will a lack of server software kill M&B? That certainly appears to be the contention of a number of participants on https://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php?threads/private-servers.392115
What are the numbers?
As measured on 11 March 2020.
According to https://store.steampowered.com/stats/, Mount and Blade Warband is currently the 56th most popular game as measured by the number of people having played the game today.
This includes players both for MP and SP.
At the time of measuring (16:00 CET), 12,064 was the peak number of people playing today, but with most of the players being in Europe, that number should go up as schools and offices go out.
On http://www.mnbcentral.net, the Native and Napoleonic Wars mods are persistently the most popular. This only measures MP.
On 16:20, according to the master server list (of which the above server is a reflection), listed 686 players online. There were no major events going on. At this point in time, the number of players on Chinese servers was dropping and the number of players on European servers was rising. (Rotation of the planet relative to its closest star, yada yada yada.) I think we can estimate that around European event times there should be around 1,000 players on a server, most of which in Napoleonic Wars, because organised battles make the most sense there.
As many as 90 % of the M&B players could be SP players.
Minisiege, one of the most popular Napoleonic Wars public play servers, has had approximately 7,000 unique players since the restart of the leaderboard on 1 March 2020. I estimated this by looking at common names and looking at the ranking of players with the least kills and deaths (0 and 0, i.e. people who had logged on, looked and left) since the epoch.
https://nwp.caesim.id.lv/leaderboard
Note that though I am a Minisiege admin, I do not have perfect information.
The Taleworlds company page says the company employs a little over 90 developers; the company photo shows a little over 90 people (who may not all be developers).
https://www.taleworlds.com
There are no investor or press sections I could find on that website.
The average Turkish software developer makes 18,500 EURO per year.
The company seems to produce a single game, Mount & Blade - the most recent major incarnation of which, Warband, was published in 2010. Bannerlord was announced in 2012 and is scheduled for Early Access release this month.
According to Wikipedia, the game had sold 6 million copies as per July 2015.
"The post emphasizes that Taleworlds, unlike many other studios, isn't beholden to publishers, shareholders, or anyone else who might push it to cut back on features or scale in order to meet a schedule," according to PC Gamer.
Can 100 developers be paid for 10 years straight on the back of the proceeds of 6 million copies? Taleworlds is not "beholden" to stakeholders, i.e. investors, so presumably sales are their only source of income.
Salary to revenue ratio seems to be a bit of black magic, but 100 annual salaries of approximately 20,000 EURO over 10 years equal 20 million EURO. Copies of Mount and Blade have sold for wildly different prices, but even at an average of 10 EURO per copy, those 20 million EURO salary costs still fit comfortably inside 60 million EURO revenue. Note that the cost of doing business is much higher than just salaries; anywhere between 1:5 and 1:3 can be a healthy ratio from what 15-minute heroes on the internet tell me.
I think it is fair to say with the knowledge we have here, that if Bannerlord tanks, Taleworlds tank.
There are all manner of biases to be recognised in the numbers above that I do not want to go in right now. In the following I am simply going to assume that where a number describes players, that is a fairly accurate description of players, and where it says units sold, that too is a fairly accurate number of units sold.
Who does Taleworlds need to sell to?
i. Regular SP players.
ii. Regular MP players.
iii. Regular players of both SP and MP.
iv. Non-players or irregular players (i.e. people who buy the game based on hype or reviews, try it one or two times and then cast it aside).
I do not know what the retention rate is of M&B, but 6 million copies suggest that a lot of players may fall in that last category (iv) of Irregular Players.
Only categories ii and iii will be playing the events that require server software. I cautiously predict that ignoring those groups will mean little to the success of Bannerlord. Categories i, ii and iv (including new players for these categories) are all the intended target audience for Bannerlord and may buy the game regardless of how little love the clans (regiments in NW-speak) get from Taleworlds.
Since statistics are just another word for lies, and since all of the above is tentative or incomplete, I am probably WRONG ABOUT EVERYTHING. Have at it.
RE: Will a lack of server software kill M&B? - Gretel - 03-12-2020
Another primary source of Taleworlds income would be government funding via the Game Developers Association of Turkey, or TOGED We can't know for sure what or how much they recieve from these grants, but we can assume it's high enough for them to continue developing Bannerlord confidently without them having to worry about going bankrupt. Ontop of this, we saw the event, the Battle of Bucharest, give them further limelight in the e-sport scene in Turkey - thus probably recieving more funding from the government so they can produce a game that the Turkish can proudly present as "Their own".
As for Minisiege unique players, this is widely varied. Looking at the leaderboard statistics of position can't be paramount to proof - as these numbers fluctuate randomly as I've noticed in past monitering - even if people do not actually get any extra kills. We can assume, however, unqiue numbers have varied high enough into the 1000s in the last reset. Into the 100k's since our launch I can be confident, as the highest number I've monitered is position 200k+ on the leaderboard
Holdfast lasts without any real server files worth talking about, as most play on their own Public game servers. We can't know for sure if the same will occur for bannerlord, but they don't even have support for custom servers for events for a while... I think this will be an incredibly detriment for a while. However, I do think Taleworlds are going to heed the advice of their players, as they have done so throughout the Beta (somewhat) if the majority voice'd their concerns and this certainly seems like its kicking up a storm on their own forums. Even still, we do not know when these files will actually be released to us - it could be a week, a few weeks, a month, a few months, a year - no one but they know this.
Bannerlord seems to take a slightly different approach than warband does. It seems far more MP, CS:GO like, centric for tournaments. This makes me believe they'll go further in the future into e-sports and hold these events more often for more cash. This is probably more profitable for them as a company too, rather than just their basic SP and MP. For MP longevity, they need custom servers who can distinguish themselves like warband, with maps and scripts. The problem with holdfast custom servers is the lack of these unique factors - all custom servers are and will always be the same as you cant add new maps or scripts. Let's hope Taleworlds deliver this too.
It's much a massive question mark to everyone how the game will go. So far, the Beta is not a massive entertaining feature rich experience, it's 2 game modes on MP that lag pretty heavily. They are fun, but nothing spectacular that I can't get out of Warband or even Holdfast currently.
RE: Will a lack of server software kill M&B? - 1steIvN_boc - 04-09-2020
It has been a week now since Bannerlord was released, so we have more data points.
https://steamdb.info/app/261550/graphs/
According to SteamDB the all-time player peak was 248,216 players last week.
The represents somewhere north of 9.4 million bucks/credits/seserties in revenue.
The site however also quotes SteamSpy who estimate the game has sold somewhere between 2 and 5 million copies.
I do not know what Taleworlds' expectations were. Magazines (and Steam itself, considering the outages on release day) seem to have been caught unawares by its success, but Taleworlds presumably knows its customer base better. Nevertheless, I expect they are happy.
On launch day they Tweeted: "All these numbers make already @Mount_and_Blade II: Bannerlord the biggest launch in Steam in 2020. THANK YOU." That sounds like a satisfied company.
On their own website they go further:
https://www.taleworlds.com/en/News/327
"It is fair to say that the release has exceeded all of our wildest expectations. We are deeply humbled by the overwhelming response to the launch and we are truly grateful for all of the support that you have shown!"
The fact that the developers feel they are doing better than expected isn't necessarily the same metric for success that the player base would use (for one thing, the developers have their money now - for the players, the journey has just begun), but since all of this is peering into a crystal ball anyway, I am presenting it here with the other arguments.