03-12-2020, 12:23 PM
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?...ers.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.
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?...ers.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.