Data & Research

Rumour: We Rule accounts for over half of ngmoco's daily gaming activity

Kingdom builder levelling up fast with 400k daily users

Rumour: We Rule accounts for over half of ngmoco's daily gaming activity
Following my recent musings about how ngmoco will need to keep free-to-play online game We Rule refreshed over the coming months, Inside Social Games has also been nosing around the game's performance.

Talking to ngmoco's Jason Oberfest, it reports the game is getting "well over two million user sessions per day".

Oberfest also revealed that all of ngmoco's games combined generate a total of 20 million minutes of gameplay per day.

As I like analysis and numbers, I've combined this information with what CEO Neil Young told me at GDC 2010 that We Rule's Canadian beta revealed an average daily play time of around 30 minutes spread across five daily sessions.

It's QED

Obviously, this is a speculative calculation - and relies on the accuracy of three pieces of potentially unrelated information - but it's a fairly simple task to play around with these figures and make a connection between ngmoco's total gameplay figure and We Rule's daily sessions to get an idea of what proportion of overall traffic is being driven by the game.

If we assume We Rule players are playing for 30 minutes spread over five sessions per day, that's an average playtime of around six minutes per session.

So if We Rule is generating "well over two million sessions per day", that's well over 12 million minutes of play per day.

In turn, that means We Rule accounts for at least 60 percent of ngmoco's daily activity.

If the total daily playtime for We Rule is higher, so is its percentage of the ngmoco total, and vice versa.

How big's your base?

In addition, two million user sessions per day and an average of five user sessions per day gives us a simple calculation to work out an active daily user base for We Rule of 400,000 players.

Assuming a rule of thumb range that less than 40 percent but more 10 percent of players are actively daily, that gives us rough range of install base of between one to 4 million.

For some reason, Inside Social Games gives an estimate of 10 million downloads, but I think that's too high, especially to have been generated over a two week period, when it's thought that you need between 100,000 to 300,00 downloads to be #1 in the US free chart.

[source: Inside Social Games]

Contributing Editor

A Pocket Gamer co-founder, Jon is Contributing Editor at PG.biz which means he acts like a slightly confused uncle who's forgotten where he's left his glasses. As well as letters and cameras, he likes imaginary numbers and legumes.