Graalians - View Single Post - Imagine How Good This Game Would Be If Stefan Hired Full Time Devs

Latte · 06-14-2015

Posted by Skill

I'm pretty sure they make a lot more than $50-80K a year. There's over 3000 players online at a time on Graal Classic alone. Combine all the servers and its between 5-10K.

In comparison, Tera's concurrent userbase on Steam ranges from 10-20K(which is likely inflated due to people keeping the launcher open when they aren't playing). Now, Steam doesn't account for all the players, but from my experiences in Tera it seems like the population doubled after the Steam launch(maybe even tripled, servers that were "dead" even have login queues now. I'd assume Steam accounts for over half of the playerbase currently.

There's also Tera in Korean and Japan which are much smaller, so in total we're looking at maybe 50-100K concurrent users at most.

Tera generated over $200 million in revenue in 2013, and this was BEFORE the Steam launch, or the expansion. it's probably much higher now because the population went up immensely. With 10x the population, it generated over 1000 times what you estimated Unixmad makes off of Graal.

Also look at other games like Rise of Immortals, that had a team of dedicated developers to support an online playerbase of 50-100 players at a time before it eventually shut down. You'd be surprised how much money f2p games generate.

Also, if Unixmad hired developers, the population would likely grow and generate more revenue as a result. If they added cool items actually worth buying that actually did things besides look pretty, maybe people would buy gralat packs.

Need more reliable evidence? Team Fortress 2 is a Steam exclusive. In 2013, it generated $139 Million in revenue. Team Fortress 2 currently has 60,000 Online, Graal has ~5000 online between all servers. Also keep in mind tons of people in TF2 are probably idling/botting on multiple accounts for drops.

So at 1/10th the size, Graal would theoretically generate ~$13 million in revenue annually. Obviously it'll vary(maybe people are more likely to spend money on TF2 than Graal), but populationwise Graal is bigger than you think.

The games you're talking about are made by matured and large gaming companies-- an entirely different market than Graal. Yes, Graal has around 7.5-10k active players, and some have probably purchased gralats at some point. But games like TF2 and Tera have a market that extends past the game itself. People talk about those games all the time; there are conventions, there are eSports, there is merchandise and Twitch streamers. If you think that those games make their money solely on in-game purchases like Graal does, you're sorely mistaken.