GW2 Population: 2018 vs 2016 [Crosspost from Reddit]

Redditor moriz0 shared their estimates of the currently-playing GW2 community in this reddit post. (See also the discussion on Reddit; people have raised a variety of interesting points, some of which I have tried to highlight in the next post in this thread.)

On September of 2016, i made this post with an estimate of GW2's population. Check out the link to see my methodology. [iWN adds: to save time, see this Ask a Game Dev post about the rationale and the traffic stats available on reddit]

Now plenty has happened in the intervening time, so I thought it is time for an update.

Using the exact methods as in my original post, here are the estimated numbers:

• From /r/GuildWars2 subscriber counts: 165,105 * 20 = 3,302,100
• From GW2Efficiency account numbers: 169,052 * 20 = 3,381,040
• Unfortunately, detailed subscriber info for subreddits is now locked to moderator's only. According to /u/TheRabidCoder, that number is: 3.25 Million

So, I estimate that GW2's current "active" population to be around 3.3 Million.

Keep in mind that it is difficult to nail down an exact number for "active" accounts, since GW2 does not have a subscription service. However, it is reasonable to assume that the minimum activity level of these accounts is "logs in at least a few times a month".

EDIT: to those who say anything about "multiple game accounts": do note that my estimate is based off of /r/GuildWars2 subscribers, unique visitors (provided by /u/TheRabidCoder), and tracked API keys on GW2Efficiency. these numbers basically ignores multiple game accounts owned by the same player.

EDIT2: as many of you have pointed out, people tend to never unsubscribe from subreddits, and that almost nobody would unregister API keys from GW2Efficiency. both of these are true. we're already seeing the effect for GW2Efficiency: when i made my first post over a year ago, GW2Efficiency was giving me a low estimate compared to subreddit subscribers; now, it gives a slightly higher estimate. however, the remainng metric, unique visitors per month, isn't affected by "dead" subscribers, and it currently gives a similar estimate. unique subscribers is vulnerable to temporary spikes around major releases, but that will resolve itself within the next month or so.

Added:Since it keeps coming up, I'll mention it here: think of this estimate as measuring "people who are actively interested in the game enough to logon once a month" rather than "active" in the sense of playing the game to the point we'd see them at a meta or in a fractal etc. It's a very specific sort of measurement that has a lot of limitations. It's useful mostly as a relative number to compare to various points in the game's history.

tl;dr a lot of people are actively interested in the game; that doesn't mean they play a lot.

@"Illconceived Was Na.9781" said:Redditor moriz0 shared their estimates of the currently-playing GW2 community in this reddit post. (See also the discussion on Reddit; people have raised a variety of interesting points, some of which I have tried to highlight in the next post in this thread.)

Additional notes:

What is an Active Player? The original poster uses the term "active player", which is controversial, because we all have different ideas of what it means to be "active." ANet's definition is "logs on at least 1x/month over a period of several months," which is what the 80|20|5 rule measures.

What is the 80|20|5 Rule Used to Estimate Population? The short version: humans are terrible about estimating because we are too influenced by what's in our field-of-view; the 80|20|5 rule was developed by the gaming industry based on using actual metrics, not anyone's guesses. The use of the 80|20|5 rule is going to be counter-intuitive for a lot of people. Please read the link before deciding how you feel about it.

How Meaningful is This Estimate? Regardless of whether you agree with ANet's use of the term "active player," the specific number isn't all that important. It doesn't tell us how enthusiastic people are, how often they play, how much they contribute to the game (in any way/shape/form), or any of a variety of other things of interest to us about the health of the game or the community. Instead, it's useful to know the following:

• The current estimate is 3.3 million, which is up from 2.6m in September 2016 (one year after HoT).
• The number is big, which is good for at least the immediate health of the game and the short term prospects of ANet choosing to continue in its current long-term road map. (Regular expansions with LS episodes 4-6x/year, plus instanced content plus etc.)
• It is almost certainly close (in a ballpark way) to some of the numbers ANet uses, in part because it's using an industry standard tool of estimation.
• It is useful in comparing relative populations. It would be more useful to us, therefore, if we had something like quarterly estimates that we could overlay against major GW2 events (expansion releases, controversies, new stories, etc).

I'd say you're not far off, at all..,I mean just before launch Arena Net was talking about 11 Million players had joined the game, so i'm guessing that would be registered accounts. Allowing for secondary accounts and quits, 3-5 mil would be my guess as well.We'll likely never see a confirmation of this though.

@"ReaverKane.7598" said:I'd say you're not far off, at all..,Just to be clear, the estimates are from Redditor moriz0; I just pasted them here.

We'll likely never see a confirmation of this though.Probably not.

Weird, by looking on lfr during busy hours feels like a ghost town. Someone can elaborate on this?

Interesting post but 3,3 million is very very hard to believe. 300-500k would be a closer estimate and that including hypercasuals.

GW2 is popular, but 3,3 million? Roughly half of WoW's subscriber count? Hard to imagine tbh.

@"witcher.3197" said:Interesting post but 3,3 million is very very hard to believe. 300-500k would be a closer estimate and that including hypercasuals.

GW2 is popular, but 3,3 million? Roughly half of WoW's subscriber count? Hard to imagine tbh.

Actually it sounds about right, considering that how they define "active player." That does not mean they actually play, just maybe log in once every few weeks. If GW2 had subscribers (which are players that play on semi weekly basis) the number will probably drop to about 500K, as you noted.

if 3.3 million is accurate then that's amazing. GW2 is in great health and will be around a long time. However, I'm not confident those numbers are accurate.

Pretty unlikely. That would mean the game now has more active players that it had total accounts within few months after launch. And if i remember right, the estimates around HoT launch that appeared in some of the post-launch MMOzine articles (and supposedly were based on Anet's data) were somewhere in the ballpark of slightly above 1 million "active" accounts (that's when the "active" = "at least 1 login in a month" definition appeared first, i think). Half of whose were f2p.

From that to 2.6 mil actives year later, and 3.3 mil actives 2 years later? Without seeing it ingame, and with GW2 revenue on a constant drop? I don't think so.

The short story is the original poster is measuring a specific sort of activity. Think of it as more "actively interested in the game, to the point of logging in regularly" rather than "actively playing the content". Many of us posting on this forum play several hours a week, which is a much greater threshold than this estimate is attempting to measure.

@Shampanix.3928 said:Weird, by looking on lfr during busy hours feels like a ghost town. Someone can elaborate on this?

LFR has nothing to do with active population for all sorts of reasons. You might be looking off-peak hours or people might be doing other content or folks might be in statics more often than you think

@"witcher.3197" said:Interesting post but 3,3 million is very very hard to believe. 300-500k would be a closer estimate and that including hypercasuals.

GW2 is popular, but 3,3 million? Roughly half of WoW's subscriber count? Hard to imagine tbh.

You're comparing apples at the grocery store to weekly delivery orders scheduled from Amazon. WoW's subscription count includes people that wouldn't be considered "active" under the definition above, e.g. people who forget to cancel. The definition above is "liberal" in the sense that it wouldn't be useful for determining how active your guild is.

@"DarcShriek.5829" said:However, I'm not confident those numbers are accurate.They are 'reasonable' numbers for the purpose of measuring "activity" in the same way ANet does. They aren't measuring "how many people are doing metas" or "who plays every part of every LS episode on at least one toon". This is "who logs on frequently and does some stuff" not "who plays nightly."

I would be very suprised if the game has more than 500k active players (not counting alt accounts or people who just log in for an hour per month)

@"Astralporing.1957" said:Pretty unlikely. That would mean the game now has more active players that it had total accounts within few months after launch. And if i remember right, the estimates around HoT launch that appeared in some of the post-launch MMOzine articles (and supposedly were based on Anet's data) were somewhere in the ballpark of slightly above 1 million "active" accounts (that's when the "active" = "at least 1 login in a month" definition appeared first, i think). Half of whose were f2p.Yes, this would probably include F2P, as clearly evidenced from a lot of posts on Reddit.

Remember: there are at least 11 million existing accounts (per ANet's quote a few month's back). All the original poster is saying is that a substantial subset are likely to be logging into the game each month. They are making no claims about how much any of them play.

From that to 2.6 mil actives year later, and 3.3 mil actives 2 years later? I don't think so.Think it through again.September 2016 was a year after HoT; the new estimate is less than 6 months after PoF launched. We should expect a bigger number. (PS it's 15 months later, not 24.)

@"Illconceived Was Na.9781" said:The short story is the original poster is measuring a specific sort of activity. Think of it as more "actively interested in the game, to the point of logging in regularly" rather than "actively playing the content". Many of us posting on this forum play several hours a week, which is a much greater threshold than this estimate is attempting to measure.

---

@Shampanix.3928 said:Weird, by looking on lfr during busy hours feels like a ghost town. Someone can elaborate on this?

@"witcher.3197" said:Interesting post but 3,3 million is very very hard to believe. 300-500k would be a closer estimate and that including hypercasuals.

GW2 is popular, but 3,3 million? Roughly half of WoW's subscriber count? Hard to imagine tbh.

@"DarcShriek.5829" said:However, I'm not confident those numbers are accurate.They are 'reasonable' numbers for the purpose of measuring "activity" in the same way ANet does. They aren't measuring "how many people are doing metas" or "who plays every part of every LS episode on at least one toon". This is "who logs on frequently and does some stuff" not "who plays nightly."

I'm not arguing , I'm simply skeptical of the numbers. GW2 seems to be healthy. I never seem to run into dead maps. Maybe I feel like 3.3 Million should feel different. It could be my definition of active may be somewhat different.

@Malediktus.9250 said:I would be very suprised if the game has more than 500k active players (not counting alt accounts or people who just log in for an hour per month)

The definition ANet uses includes people who logon for an hour per month.What definition do you want to use and how would you go about estimating it, given that we humans are terrible about measuring populations?

@DarcShriek.5829 said:I'm not arguing , I'm simply skeptical of the numbers. GW2 seems to be healthy. I never seem to run into dead maps. Maybe I feel like 3.3 Million should feel different. It could be my definition of active may be somewhat different.

I'm trying to make sure that everyone is really clear on what the original poster was estimating, which includes people who logon for just a little each month. Those short-time folks aren't going to contribute to our feeling of how many people are online when you or I play.

As I said in my follow up post, the specific number isn't all that useful to those of us playing the game. It doesn't tell us if people are having fun or invested heavily in the game; it just tells us that people are interested enough to logon.

@DarcShriek.5829, ur forgeting this game divides population in copies of that map aka shards, reason it is hard to notice the population..

Imagine all this players aoe keybashing, no wonder this game is lagging

J/k asside that still alot of pver's.... compared with the other gamemodes...

@otto.5684 said:

@"witcher.3197" said:Interesting post but 3,3 million is very very hard to believe. 300-500k would be a closer estimate and that including hypercasuals.

GW2 is popular, but 3,3 million? Roughly half of WoW's subscriber count? Hard to imagine tbh.

3,3 million "active" users would mean a huge cultural impact which I just don't see. Youtube numbers and twitch are at a record low, revenue is dropping, and I don't really see GW2 mentioned anywhere other than GW2 forums.

@witcher.3197 said:Interesting post but 3,3 million is very very hard to believe. 300-500k would be a closer estimate and that including hypercasuals.

GW2 is popular, but 3,3 million? Roughly half of WoW's subscriber count? Hard to imagine tbh.

It's almost like someone posted a link to an article that spoke of just how hard it is to imagine.... imagine that....

The count in the OP could as easily be an under estimate as an over-estimate. For a start I wouldn't show up in either of those as I never visit Reddit and have never signed up to GW2Efficency. (I've occasionally look at pages there, but that's all.) And yet I would certainly count as an active player, in that I'm in-game almost every day. It's quite common for me to come across people in-game who have never heard of GW2Efficency at all, either because they're more casual players or simply because they're not interested enough in digging into stats like that to seek out a website for it.

But aside from data on the actual number of people logging into the game (which only Anet has access to) it's probably the best we're going to get.

Even with that data trying to nail down the number of active players would be tricky. I imagine they can easily pull data like the number of accounts logged in at any one time, or the total number of accounts that logged in over the past month (or another period of time). But as people are fond of pointing out that's not the same as the number of players. They might be able to look at the number of unique IP addresses that logged in, but that's not necessarily telling you anything useful - it could count me and my husband as 1 player because we're on the same IP address. It could also count us as 10 players if we're having trouble with the router and keep having to reset it (which changes the IP address).

You could combine and filter data to try and compensate for issues like that, but then you're into the old problem of 'lies, damned lies and statistics' - meaning once you start tweaking the data you can quite easily (and even unintentionally) make it say almost anything you want.

I suspect Anet themselves don't worry too much about the exact number of actual people playing the game, they probably look at things like the number of accounts active over a period of time instead (if only because it's much easier to pull that data so you get quicker, more accurate reports and less grumbling from the people doing it when you want updates every quarter). And apparently they also use far more in-depth stuff too, like 'heat maps' which show exactly where people are spending their time when they're in-game.

@witcher.3197, What are they gona twitch??? 11111111 dodge 11111 ?flashy spams everywhere... and this game does not have that much depth to talk or stream about.

@Illconceived Was Na.9781 said:

@"Astralporing.1957" said:Pretty unlikely. That would mean the game now has more

active

players that it had

total

accounts within few months after launch. And if i remember right, the estimates around HoT launch that appeared in some of the post-launch MMOzine articles (and supposedly were based on Anet's data) were somewhere in the ballpark of slightly above 1 million "active" accounts (that's when the "active" = "at least 1 login in a month" definition appeared first, i think). Half of whose were f2p.Yes, this would probably include F2P, as clearly evidenced from a lot of posts on Reddit.

From that to 2.6 mil actives year later, and 3.3 mil actives 2 years later? I don't think so.Think it through again.September 2016 was a year after HoT; the new estimate is less than 6 months after PoF launched. We should expect a bigger number. (PS it's 15 months later, not 24.)a jump 2.6 mil year after HoT to 3.3 mil shortly after PoF is potentially possible. It's that first number that is not so believable however - especially since 1 mil at hot launch to 2.6 a year later is, for me, straight in the realm of (not so good) fiction. All the more since everything points to the number of players actually

dropping

in that timeframe.

@Astralporing.1957 said:

@Illconceived Was Na.9781 said:

@Astralporing.1957 said:Pretty unlikely. That would mean the game now has more

active

players that it had

total

accounts within few months after launch. And if i remember right, the estimates around HoT launch that appeared in some of the post-launch MMOzine articles (and supposedly were based on Anet's data) were somewhere in the ballpark of slightly above 1 million "active" accounts (that's when the "active" = "at least 1 login in a month" definition appeared first, i think). Half of whose were f2p.Yes, this would probably include F2P, as clearly evidenced from a lot of posts on Reddit.

From that to 2.6 mil actives year later, and 3.3 mil actives 2 years later? I don't think so.Think it through again.September 2016 was a year after HoT; the new estimate is less than 6 months after PoF launched. We should expect a bigger number. (PS it's 15 months later, not 24.)a jump 2.6 mil year after HoT to 3.3 mil shortly after PoF is potentially possible. It's that first number that is not so believable however - especially since 1 mil at hot launch to 2.6 a year later is, for me, straight in the realm of (not so good) fiction. All the more since everything points to the number of players actually

dropping

in that timeframe.

You're forgetting that there are still people that only play core, that have not purchased either HoT or PoF, those people would always be there, the HoT numbers were basically only for people that had purchased HoT...it excluded those that remained Core only.

@Zaklex.6308 said:You're forgetting that there are still people that only play core, that have not purchased either HoT or PoF, those people would always be there, the HoT numbers were basically only for people that had purchased HoT...it excluded those that remained Core only.It included f2p, so no, you're wrong about it.

@Illconceived Was Na.9781 said:

@Malediktus.9250 said:I would be very suprised if the game has more than 500k active players (not counting alt accounts or people who just log in for an hour per month)

@witcher.3197 said:

@otto.5684 said:

@witcher.3197 said:Interesting post but 3,3 million is very very hard to believe. 300-500k would be a closer estimate and that including hypercasuals.

GW2 is popular, but 3,3 million? Roughly half of WoW's subscriber count? Hard to imagine tbh.

I see it being mentioned in the FF14 forums often, together with ESO (and surprisingly less WoW).Youtube and Twitch does not really matter, I never watched a Youtube video for a game I could play myself - that includes guides; I am here to play, not to watch others play and the play it myself. What a waste of time. Twitch? The same. Streaming is pointless and Let's Play'ing as well. Maybe GW2 users rather play because it's fun then watching others do it because their other games suck :D (not be taken that serious). But I mean, I was watching several overwatch videos but I do not play that game, I do not even own it, but after that, I went to play GW2 in which I've invested 10€ this month for the Noble Count outfit and some gold.

The revenue is dropping, well, that is normal as well: Free stuff is enough for many, or they have stuff they want. I can just repeat my story: I wait for a supressed pistol with right sound. I'd buy that. Until then, I am fine with what I got. There is no constant consuming environment going on. Guess why smartphones wear so fast, or washing machines, or cars? Because the industry makes less revenue when the fridges are working for 25 years like in the 80s. NEXON used to have (and probably still do) items that expire after 90 days. So you had to re-buy your cash shop items. Imagine aNet would do that. The revenue would go up, but the outrage, oh no.

Also, I think the income is fine, it's rather a managers and stockholders lament on getting less money. Look, when we buy the game, the expansion, I am sure we cover a lot of the cost. That's what a real price calculation would do. The break even point is reached pretty fast, for e.g. the voice lines have to recorded ONCE, but 50,000 people buy it, nice. Or the code. If I imagine I paid 60€ for Borderlands, a game from scratch, and it seems these games did fine, why not a game that just builds upon existing bases for 30€ or 40€? Yes, there are the living story updates, but in the end, I think it carries itself until the next expansion and in-between, there are the Gemstore revenues.

FF14 has a cash shop, mediocre content updates (quality-wise as well as quantitive), overpriced cash shop (worse then the Gem Store escapades!) and even overpriced merchandise and you gotta pay full-price title amount of money for an expansion, based upon a playerbase that is massive after two decades of the Final Fantasy franchise. And this is not happening because the game is dying, it is funding the XII remake and big parts of FFXV. Means: If the game can stay afloat and fund other projects like crazy, I am sure aNet can fund it with Expansion sales and Gem store, too.

So all your metrics you mentioned are basically saying nothing.I just want to bring a real-life example: Right now I have roughly 10% less revenue in my department at work. Why? Last year, due to international shortages, the prices had seen a massive increase. This year, nothing special happened that affects the prices, they went down. Of course I do have -10%, in fat letters when I check my numbers. But the net revenue is the same, because of the less buying price of my goods. Just to give you a hint that just seeing "OH NO, -10%" does not mean my company will get bankrupt soon. :-)

Excelsior.