Rift Prime Data Points

The dev update notes from Trion this week indicate that Rift Prime is pretty popular.

With Tiger mount his time is spent, lagging in that zone event

The update itself was to address concerns about lag people have been experiencing on the Rift Prime server during zone events.  In explaining the plan they dropped a few interesting facts that speak to the popularity of Rift Prime:

• This may come as a surprise: Some of the zone events on Prime are bigger than even the biggest, record setting events RIFT had during its beta and original launch.
• Since then, souls and abilities have gotten more numerous, more complicated, and more resource intensive, primarily in their use of server CPU.
• Even with the newer hardware that the Prime cluster is running on (it’s a beast – the newest in the company), we’ve all experienced that at times it is not always able to keep up with the mass of data.
• The reason this may affect you even when you’re personally not in a big zone event is because large numbers of people sharing your “player service” are.

So Rift Prime has seen the largest zone events ever during the life of the game.  I think this pretty much sells the idea that such servers are popular.  You can argue about whether the nostalgia factor is the draw or if it is just the idea of starting again on a fresh server where everybody is level one is what brings people to them, but this reaffirms the popularity of such servers overall.

This also corrects my own pet theory, that Trion wasn’t really sold on the idea of Rift Prime and so used whatever hardware they had to hand to stand it up.  Instead we’re apparently playing on the biggest, baddest hardware that Trion has.  Nice to know.

Finally, it is interesting to me at least that abilities that were added or updated after Rift’s early peak have come back to haunt the game with the boost in popularity it has achieved with Rift Prime.   A quote on that:

However, nothing on Live compares to the crazy things that a couple of abilities were doing on Prime. (We’re looking at YOU, Elemental Barrage and Wrathful Exuberance!)

And so it goes.

SuperData says Fortnite Continuing to Climb

The February digital revenue numbers from SuperData Research are out and they show what SuperData has already been going on about; the rise of Fortnite.

SuperData Research Top 10 – February 2018

On the PC side of things Fortnite is still behind PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, but that is PUBG’s strong spot.  On the console side of thing Fortnite is alone in third position with PUBG nowhere to be seen.  And when it comes to live stream viewership, the metric of the hour, Fortnite owns.

On the PC side of things both games kept ahead of World of Warcraft on the revenue front.  World of Tanks, which just saw a big update, tucked in behind WoW, displacing CS:GO, which fell to tenth, while ninth position saw Hearthstone pop up onto the list.  We’ll see next month if World of Tanks benefits from the update.

On the console side list Call of Duty: WWII continued to hold the top spot, while FIFA 18 and Fortnite both pushed ahead of Monster Hunter World.  The long on the list GTA V held on in fifth position.

And on the mobile list Candy Crush Saga stayed in fourth place while Lineage M dropped one position to eighth and Pokemon Go moved up to ninth.  Both PUBG and Fortnite have their own mobile versions on the way so the battle between these titles may eventually expand to all three lists on the chart.

Additional data from their post:

• U.S. digital spending grows 21%. Growth came primarily from an increase in Console spend, from both large premium AAA franchises and the popularity of the Free-to-play Fortnite. Combined with the increase in Premium PC, these segments more than offset continued declines in Pay-to-Play PC and Social.
• Fortnite continues its upward trajectory. Epic’s Battle Royale title showed no signs of losing steam. Fortnite earned more additional content revenue on console than any game other than Call of Duty: WWII and now has more monthly active users than Grand Theft Auto V.
• PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds sells over 2.5 million digital units. PC unit sales declined for a second month in a row but continued purchases on Xbox One made up for some of the lost ground.
• Tencent’s QQ Speed cements itself as a top 10 mobile game. QQ Speed, which launched in December, has shown one of the fastest climbs of any mobile title we’ve seen, and points to just how fast new mobile games can aggregate tens of millions of players.
• Overwatch continues to hold buyers through back-to-back cosmetic releases, despite heavy competition for the consumer’s dollar from popular Battle Royale titles. January introduced Overwatch League themed cosmetics and February saw the release of cosmetics related to Chinese New Year.
• Monster Hunter World continues to see great success in its first 30 days of release, due to overwhelmingly positive reviews and news.