With a few hours left to midnight here in Sweden, I’m thinking about you guys toiling away in the mines, tending your fields, building your houses or scouting a settlement in enemy territory.

I want to thank you all for staying with us this year, and hope that you enjoy the steps Wurm has taken towards becoming what it is destined to. The release of 1.0 has been a huge success, and the future looks really bright:

We still have lots of untested creature models and improvements to release that didn’t make it to 1.0.

In general, sandbox (MMO) games are on the rise (as they should be), with new projects on kickstarter every month as it seems.

With the increase in premium players we’ll be able to maintain a steady increase in quality. We’ll also be able to look at various marketing options and distribution models such as Steam or other partnerships.

I want to share with you a few graphs I think you may find interesting. The first one is the number of premium players graph:

http://jenn001.game.wurmonline.com/mrtg/paying

Normally any increase happens during weekends, and there’s a slow decline the first days of a week. As you can see it has a very nice growth since the release.

The next is the number of players on the login server:

http://jenn001.game.wurmonline.com/mrtg/wurm

The most interesting view is the yearly graph at the bottom. It shows a huge increase since Notch’s blog post, then a rise during release and a general increase from 4 players taking the tutorial on average any given time up to 12.

The last graph is the retention rate. It’s a very new graph I’ve created. I have no idea how this compares to other games but I think it’s pretty common for MMO’s to have high numbers here. In our case it shows the number of players who still pay premium out of those who ever paid premium:

http://jenn001.game.wurmonline.com/mrtg/retentionp

Basically, as of today, 24% of the players who ever paid premium for Wurm Online still pays premium. After 6 and a half years. I don’t know of any comparisons but it feels pretty out of the ordinary. You can find the underlying figures here:

http://jenn001.game.wurmonline.com/mrtg/retention

That said, we did/do lose a lot of players on the way (we have a conversion rate of approx 5-10% from f2p to premium). The main reason may be that we have spent virtually no time explaining the game to the public and we’ll put a lot of effort into doing that in 2013.

From reading various assorted feedback I think it’s due to a few factors such as:

Before the release, the game lacked important graphical elements

People don’t see goals for themselves which is common in sandboxes. We’ll improve on that by offering a few goals early on.

People don’t see the scope of the game and think it’s only a building/creation game and not the adventure that the Epic servers offer with a strong endgame (which btw will be further improved).

Non-premium players don’t understand that they can earn premium membership by offering to work for eachother.

There is a misconception that it is a pay-to-win game which we really do our best to avoid. You’re always supposed to be able to earn money in Wurm somehow and if someone pays the traders for something, a large portion of the money goes back to the other players since he purchases stuff for it.

By the way, I have a final graph to show you regarding the economy of Wurm. This one shows the economy of the old Chaos server. When I paste this, it shows that the traders on that server has something like 4 gold coins spare on the lowly populated server. So if you can find and access one of the remotely located ones there’s a high probability that it has up towards 10-20 silver coins you can extract by selling items:

http://wild001.game.wurmonline.com/mrtg/economy

It’s a benefit of settling on old servers in Wurm that the economy often is stable and there are old deeds paying upkeep which ends up in the hands of the traders that you eventually can extract. Circulation!

Good luck with your Wurming, and Happy New Year!

Rolf