Free Realms reaches 9 million registered players

But, I am curious: why do we need to know the numbers? After all, wouldn't we have to know the operating costs, all that, in order to see if the game was a success or not?

Even then, we still would not know what the company sees as successful. Don't get me wrong, I am as curious as the next player, but would exact numbers still explain the whole picture?

Beau

Beau, same reason Cryptic decided to announce "OH MAH GAWD! We gots millionz of players!".

PR spin, pure and simple. They want people who haven't seen or heard anything about the game to go "Oh hey, wow, thats a lot, it must be great".

But the difference is, WoW releases 11.5m, its active, bragging rights.
Cryptic and this? These are total accounts, not just active, its a PR grab to try and get people to play their games.

Personally, they really need to drop the "free" off their name. At least in its older version you could hit the level cap with a few characters, now its limited to 5 of each class, and at least one class REQUIRES item shop purchases to do anything.

I'm in an incredibly tired state right now but hopefully can try to respond somewhat rationally (I've got one eye closed, the other half open, literally).

I have played both FreeRealms and Wizard 101 since each of their Closed Betas. I've been a subscriber of FreeRealms since the day it opened, but I went with purchasing areas and other things one by one in Wizard 101 (which ends up costing a lot more than a few dollars, if you play often you're better off subscribing because if you go through the content fast you really have to spend too much money).

As someone who has tried out all the schools in Wizard 101, I still very much feel that they mostly play out the same. You do get extra skill points to spend in other schools, but the main damage schools are all the same. Fire, Ice, Myth, and Storm are played the exact same way with Death being only slightly different from them. Fire will do a little more damage, but have more of a chance to miss, so pretty much every damage school equals out to do the same exact amount of damage because of hit/miss ratio scaling with damage. There are bigger differences in Life, but you normally have Life spells as extras added on - everybody ends up with some healing. You really end up with healing, damage, and buff spells all together no matter what class you start out as, and because of that you end up the same as everybody else and sooner than you think.

You don't get a full class for free like you stated either. You can start the class, but you can't go to the areas to train the higher or even mid level skills unless you either are a subscriber or buy the areas. So you don't even get a single full class for free, you are cut off at a pretty early part of the game no matter what class you pick unless you pay. You have to be in pay areas to get your full class, at least FreeRealms lets you go all the way through the life of your class and basically most of the game too.

Wizard 101 also didn't start having voice over on all these characters, that was something that was added later. There are just far too many NPCs in FreeRealms to make it that viable, the amount of NPCs in it can't even really be comapred to the amount in Wizard 101, but who knows what they will do in the future since they haven't benefited from being out as long as Wizard 101 yet.

The scope of FreeRealms is just very huge compared to Wizard 101. A huge amount of land to cover, feeling like you're running around in a real big world. Wizard 101 instead has you on limited rails for most of the areas and they aren't very big. Sure there are more areas later, all mostly that same way (small on rails) but you can't get to them unless you're paying. Free access is extremely limited in Wizard 101, which you'll find out very soon if you keep playing it.

I do like the pay options in Wizard 101 more, the way you can buy areas to own forever. If you're like me and get to a point where you only start to play a few hours every few weeks, it works out better to own the areas forever rather than get billed monthly. If I cancel my FreeRealms account, I am going to lose access to a lot of stuff, but I like that I own things forever in Wizard 101.

I may not see replies to this. I don't mind hearing them, it's just that I probably won't be coming back into this article to check for them. They are both great games in their own ways anyway. They play different enough so there is room for both of them, or so that someone may like one and not the other.

You run out of free areas in Wizard 101 WAY before level 20.

Yep!