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Originally Posted by Lyrical Sir Bruce,
I am curious how hard it is to get good data on sub numbers. I imagine it is very hard. If you are talking to someone inside of a company to get data, they have to realize that sub numbers are either good advertising or bad advertising. If sub numbers are falling, its not something you want to get out. And conversely, if you had a vested interest in your company, you'd be foolish to not say you have 100 million subs (or some other crazy number like that). For a game like WoW, the fact it is growing almost seems to create a "buzz" that makes for even more subs. Its kind of a "snowball effect."
I bet that at every company, management has told employees what to say/not say, and its tough to sort through the b.s. to get the real numbers. Care to illuminate me? Thanks. |
It's very tough. And somehow I'm one of the few people who has managed to become a clearinghouse for that sort of information. It was never my goal to finagle such a role for myself in the industry -- I made the first charts on a whim -- but it just snowballed from there. I got the numbers because no one else was collecting them, at least not making them freely available, and even in the many months I've taken off from my reporting, little has changed. I've some good established relationships with many companies now who can trust me to report the data fairly and impartially. Others are finding out that it's better to work with me to get accurate data on the site than to have bad sources giving me bad data that the public regards as factual.
But yeah, many companies want to talk about numbers when they're going up but not when they're going down. I get a lot of numbers from public sources (Blizzard's press releases, NCSoft's quarterly statements, etc.), and some numbers I get direct from the compay CEOs. But there are some games I have to rely on insiders giving me confidential information anonymously. Like any reporter, I have to evaluate the reliability of the sources and decide whether or not I can trust their number. A few times I've been wrong, and I always update the site when that happens. (That's why I don't provide old reports -- the most recent version has all the revised data.) I even created a confidence rating system to help the consumer evaluate the validity of the source -- A for official statements, B for reliable private sources, C for suspect data, etc.
It's far from perfect, but the fact is it's the best system we have now, until the industry gets serious and starts being fully open and transparent with its data. And it's better than the old system where people would post "Which game has more subscribers?" and get a lot of varied and speculative responses.
Bruce