Yet More Champions: This Time It's Sales Data?
When most headlines in gaming PR begin to count in millions, they're usually talking about sales. Still, even if it doesn't equate to monetary success or units sold, the number thrown out by Champions Online studio Cryptic is pretty impressive regardless: the heroes and heroines behind the keyboards have now created over one million characters in order to beat up baddies and save the world from threats great and small.
It seems fair to point out that, even though player accounts default to only being able to create eight characters (which means that only a couple thousand copies of the game are known to have been sold, to take an extreme view), most players will spend a good long time matching outfits in the character creator, but then bounce off to level up their powers in the game's instanced missions. You don't get the same visceral reward of shouting, "ding!" just from fitting hero parts together.
On the flip side, creating multiple characters is obviously part of the reason Cryptic focused on total heroes to date--else they would've seen fit to produce actual sales data. The strongly comparable City of Heroes went so far as to release a version of their character creation system for free years ago just to get people hooked.
But, easy as it is, let's not read desperation into Cryptic's focus on characters-made rather than accounts-sold. After all, going up against Aion last month and especially World of Warcraft with its five-year head start and 11 million peak accounts, it's easy to imagine why doing PR for any full-price MMO these days is a delicate balance of statistics.
While the game's designer and producer, Bill Roper, muses about doing major content updates every three months and teases a big announcement three months from now, the epic-curious among us who long for tight outfits and superpowers to match can still take advantage of Champions Online's first ever free weekend starting tomorrow.
faePuck
Posted to Video Games on 29 October 2009
· Comments (1)
Other stuff like this: bill roper, champions online, city of heroes, free, pc
Not to defend their choice of using characters made as an indicator, but just to point out: Your math is a bit shoddy. At 8 characters per account, it would require 125,000 accounts. There's the possibility to purchase up to 4 more slots on the game, so that might reduce it some, but even so, it is considerably more than a "couple of thousand" accounts.