So, Raph Koster just posted some intriguing stats about Kingdom of Loathing. In speaking with them, he discovered that they’re pretty much entirely funded by donations, but they didn’t make clear what percentage of their user base has donated. However, we do have some data that enable us to make some educated guesses.
They say that there are 194,000 active accounts: accounts are considered inactive if they haven’t been played in over 60 days, unless that account belongs to someone who donated. They also say that roughly 38k played on Saturday, 73k played last week, and 118k played last month. So let’s extrapolate from those numbers to see how many people have played in the last 60 days.
About 2.0 times as many people played in the last week as they did on Saturday alone. About 1.5 times as many people played in the last month as they did in the last. This is about the standard rate I’ve seen from my experience in MMOs. Anyway, I would estimate that probably about 168k accounts played in the last two months, or 60 days. Don’t ask me exactly how I came up with that number, it’s just a guess from experience. It does, however, equal about another 50% jump from one month to two months.
So that means that, by my rough estimate, KoL has had at least 194k-168k=26k people who have donated. That is not including the current active players who have donated. I will arbitrarily double that amount to account for those folks, to come up with about 50k people who have donated to KoL. Assuming an average donation of $5 to $10 (at $10 you get a Mr. Accessory), that comes out to about $250k to $500k in revenue. Over the course of a few years (KoL started in 2003) and considering that they do actually pay people to work for them, that figure more or less makes sense from where I’m standing.
Of course, I could be completely and utterly wrong. But hey, it was a fun mental exercise.
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I think you may be low. A good number of the very active players (myself included) donate numerous times. I have donated 15 times myself (i.e. $150) to get Mr.A’s. Also, with meat farming, there creates a certain demand for the Mr.A product, and people will buy Mr.As to sell to these meat farmers for a quick meat/cash infusion to buy other things. I would say that the average active player has donated more like 5-10 times or more, which puts the number significantly higher for total revenue.
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