Free Realms celebrates 12 million registered players

Not only is this lame bandwagon advertising, it's fake lame bandwagon advertising. I have nothing against the game and I didn't mean to troll, but I hate it when companies post stuff like that.

Oh, and I tried the game, played it for a while, didn't really stick with it. So one of those 12 million is me.

The number of REGISTERED users of a F2P game are completely meaningless. Registered users have not made the developer any money. They also do not necessarily to player population. I am sure that most of those 12 million have not played in months.

2 million registered users in 2 months? Very very hard to believe. They must be counting sony station accounts as 'Free Realms Registered Players'. Someone should do some research on this.

Regardless of any numbers games one important fact:

This is a good game.

I beta-tested and enjoyed it enough to subscribe. The target demographic eventually got to me (felt creepy after a while) but it's amazingly polished and fun.

On average about 20% of player support the 80% of players in F2P.
That would be 2.4 million player are paying for micro transaction in Free Realms
If you take Sony's word for it, of course. No to shabby I'd say.

John Smeadly did a conference at GDC 2010 where he explains the
learning curve that the designers went thru to get where they are today.

http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1011912/From-Dragons-and-Daggers-to

Be forewarned, it will get boring for those not inclined for this type of stuff.

Last I saw Community Ambassador Pex mentioned they've stopped working on new areas. Not sure if this was temporary or not, but basically he said they have been put on hold while they work on different "tasks and content", which mainly seems to be seasonal stuff, some minor game tweaks and lots and lots of cash shop items. They did add a few more quests during the May update.

Everyone pretty much thinks most of the devs are working on the Clone Wars game and until someone from FR says otherwise, it looks like the game is no longer being significantly worked on. (SOE/FR staff feel free to step in here and correct me with some actual facts on new stuff if I'm wrong)

As such, I'm still playing and having fun but won't be buying anything else from SOE, no more station cash and will likely let my subscription run out next year when it is up. Yes it was really cheap (using double SC), but if SOE abandons a game after only one year then I pretty much don't need to have anything more to do with them.

As said what would be the number to know is those with a paid membership. However I can see this game is vastly overrated...

Regardless of what anyone thinks of the number, there are two facts:

1) A percentage of those accounts are not only subscribers, but also cash-shop purchasers. Or, one or the other. Even 5% would be a very impressive number, especially compared to other "normal" PTP games. Ask yourself how many PTP mmo's have anywhere near 50k or 100k players, or even 10k.

2) The proof is in the pudding. SOE has talked about the games success, but no one should argue that the game is doing poorly. They make plenty of money from the game.

When it comes to numbers, you have to ask "How can this number be of value?" Even if it was used to "lure" potential new players to the game, that has value. It can also help to tie-in other companies products (like breakfast cereals) and to sell advertising on the homepage.

In other words, this number is by no means useless or pointless.

Beau