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Banquet Realm Event Wrap Up: What do the numbers say?
DNA3000
Member, Guardian Guardian › Posts: 20,097 Guardian
Just going to start by saying there has been a lot of discussion about the structure and rewards and communication surrounding the banquet. This is not going to touch any of those subjects. There are plenty of threads doing that. This is strictly going to focus on the numbers, and what the numbers say, period. If that's something you're interested, and math doesn't put you to sleep, grab a frosty beverage and pull up your chair. If you're looking for a dissection of what went right and wrong, this is not the thread for you.
I wanted to put this out earlier, but it took some time to gather up all the numbers and perform the analysis, so this is a bit later than I expected. Also, I wanted to take some time to really think about what the numbers were saying, and not just dump a bunch of calculations. So here we go.
First: how many players actually participated in the banquet event? The only requirements were be conqueror or above, and open at least one banquet crystal. It isn't easy to figure out how many players this was, because this would require someone to open the bare minimum (one GBC) and then report their rank, which no one did (nor did I on any alt). And even so, if a lot of people actually did that they would all be tied and have different ranks. However, there's another way to narrow this number down: we can look at reported ranks. Every time someone accurately reported their rank and bracket, they created a data point that served to narrow down all possible values for total number of players. If someone says their rank is 30000 and their rank was 4-5%, then that means their highest possible rank was exactly 4%, and their lowest possible rank was 6% (I'm assuming the 4%-5% bracket means 4% up to the next bracket which starts at 6%). In this case, that would mean the lowest number of participating players is 30000/.06 and the highest number is 30000/0.04. Which narrows the total number of participating players to a range of between 500k and 750k. If I do that for all reported data points I could find (from Line chats, from reddit and forums, and special shout to @RichTheMan who collected data for his banquet video which Istole incorporated into my analysis) and overlap the ranges to find the narrowest possible range, I end up with a final range of between 533k and 602k players. Because of the way the data fell, I am inclined to believe the number is closer to 553k than 602k (the lower number's associated data points fell much closer to a rank bracket cutoff) I'm going to estimate the total number of participating players was 550k players.
That number is interesting, because during Crystal Cleanse I determined there were at least (and probably just about) 785k active players that were Proven and above (the minimum required to participate). The banquet required Conqueror and above. My guess is the vast majority of active players conqueror and above opened at least one crystal, since they were free, so the total number of participants in the banquet is about the number of active players conqueror and above. So between crystal cleanse and banquet, we now have a vague idea of the active player population distribution:
~ One million active players.
~ 215k below Proven
~ 235k Proven
~ 550k Conqueror and above
This strongly suggests the median MCOC player is Uncollected. Of course, these numbers include all active players, including players that might have just downloaded the game, will play for a few days, then quit. But still, I think it is safe to assume that the median active players among those likely to stick around for a while is probably at or near Cavalier.
Now, the big banana. How much revenue did the banquet generate? Well this one is very tricky and requires a significant amount of judgment being applied to the relatively little hard data I have. I'm not going to flood the post with numbers and calculations (its a lot), but I will summarize. First, I needed to find some estimated point distribution across the participants. I did that by taking all data for which I have accurate scoring data and precise rank data (which was not a lot) and created a kind of histographic pigeonhole lower bound estimate for the total amount of points scored by different people. To explain: suppose I have these three data points:
Someone scored 91,160 points and ranked 2066. Someone else scored 90,000 points and ranked 2134. What does this tell me about ranks 2067 through 2133? Well, all of them must have scored between 90,000 and 91,160. I don't know how much, but what I know absolutely for certain is that all of them scored 90,000 points or higher. 90,000 is the lower bound on the total number of points those 68 people scored. Which means they cumulatively scored at least 68 x 90,000 = 6,120,000. The same logic says the 9,530 players between ranks 2134 and 11,664 scored at least 41040 x 9,530 = 391,111,200. Which you can see reflected in that table excerpt. Doing that for all the data I have from rank 1 down to rank 260663 I get a total cumulative point total of 3,971,880,070. That's the minimum amount of points that group of players scored, the real number is somewhat higher, but not *too* much higher. I can say that for a couple reasons. First, I have enough data points that the estimate should be close. And second the distribution follows a roughly exponential decay curve:
I mean, that's actually a log scale, and the curve *still* looks logarithmic. Its a doubly exponential drop off. So scores will tend to be weighted towards the bottom of the bins not the top. So let's go with 3.97 billion for now.
These points encompass more than half of all the estimated participating players (550k). The bottom half all scored 5655 points or less. How much I can't say precisely, because I have no data below that score. But I can still make some interesting statements about those players. If we use our participation estimates and divide, we get an average point score of 4284 points for the bottom half of the players. In other words, the scoring doesn't keep dropping like a stone down there. And that makes intuitive sense: participation is hard at the top, because you have to spend money and units. But scoring at the bottom is easy because most of the crystals are free. So we wouldn't expect scoring to drop to zero, we would expect a scoring floor below which most players would not descend below. 4.3k points is just about double the maximum points we'd expect a player to be able to score just from free crystals from ticket exchanges and milestone rewards (solo, banquet, and accolade). 2k more points is like five crystals.
Now, most of those crystals were likely bought with units earned in-game, and few of them were purchased with cash, so none of that scoring is likely to have generated actual revenue. In fact, we can go further. Almost *none* of these points generated revenue. Why? Because most players don't spend on mobile games. The industry average is between 3% and 5%, and if MCOC was converting several times more players, that's something they would probably be bragging about, as it would be a huge industry outlier. So actually, only about 5% of all the participants are likely generating revenue for MCOC, because only that many ever spend.
Now, there's some complexities to that industry average. It encompasses all players who play all mobile games, even for a single day. It counts very ephemeral players. And it averages together games of a wide range of longevity. Presumably, the longer a game has been around, the more veteran players it has, the more time it has had to convert them into spenders. MCOC's spender ratio for its most active players might be significantly higher than that vanilla 5%, and remember the participants to banquet must be conqueror or higher, which means they are among the top 75% of active players.
Let's say that maybe among all active players, including players that have only been here for a day, MCOC is typical for mobile games and only 5% or so spend, but among all conquerors and higher, that number is higher. Say 10%. Well, then that means only about 100,000 players spend in a game with one million total players. We can use that figure as a guestimate for how many points the spenders scored in the banquet. We will assume they are the top 100k of all scores. This isn't strictly true, but it is likely to be a very close estimate of the overall situation. When I calculate an estimate for total points only counting the top 100k players or so, I get about 2.9 billion points (specifically, this is the histographic estimate for all scoring down to rank 118413 which is a bin-boundary). The average number of points scored by this group of players is about 24.5k.
So now we have an average score for the most casual free players of about 4.3k, and the average score from spenders of about 24.5k. We can assume the spenders are doing the same things as the free players, and spending on top. To account for that point differential requires opening approximately an additional 48 SBCs.
What do 48 SBCs cost? Well, it depends. There was a way to buy ten for ~$50 USD, which means those cost $5 USD a piece. But those opportunities were limited. You could buy them with units at an exchange rate of about $10 USD per crystal at normal unit bundle prices, but there were ways to do that more efficiently buying unit bundles with more units. Those other opportunities priced crystals anywhere from $6 to $8 USD. This means the amount of revenue those crystals could have generated was anywhere between $28.2m USD and $56.3m USD.
Given the uncertainties involved, I can't say much more than that. The average figure is $47m USD and my guess is that's not too far from the truth. I suspect the majority of spending is still via in-app purchase, which means after the app store tax from Apple and Google Kabam ne Netmarble makes about $33m USD from that. Call it $35m USD with some spending coming from the webstore (which has a much lower margin). That would represent a bit more than half of all the revenue reported by Netmarble as coming from MCOC during the fourth quarter of last year, which seems to land in the general ballpark of what might be reasonable as the banquet cannot represent all of the Q4 spending (most Cyber Weekend spending would not directly go towards banquet points alone, for example).
What do all these numbers tell us about overall participation in the banquet event? Well, it tells me a few things. First of all, it tells me that there was a lot of casual activity, and very little evidence of players completely checking out of the event. A lot of free to play players got in, got their free crystals, spent a small amount of their unit stash, and were fine with that. Those players probably got a very good return on their investment, and I can't imagine most of them being terribly unhappy with their results, both because they didn't spend any cash and did not deplete their units much, and were probably mostly of lower progression and thus the relative value of the rewards were much higher for them on average.
There was also quite a bit of activity among the likely spenders. The average number of crystals spenders likely bought across all spenders was on the order of 50 SBCs. That's not bad, although I have no idea where that number lands in terms of good or bad participation. It seems like a lot to me, but I only have one banquet event to compare to (in terms of solid data).
$35m USD is a lot of money to get out of a spending population of between 50k and 100k players. A lot of games would kill for that, although that number isn't necessarily better than previous years. MCOC spending has declined over the years as the game has gotten older, and whether the 2024 banquet will reverse the trend or not will have to wait for February's Netmarble reporting to determine.
And that's about all I can squeeze out of the banquet data. See you all when the next Realm event comes around.
I wanted to put this out earlier, but it took some time to gather up all the numbers and perform the analysis, so this is a bit later than I expected. Also, I wanted to take some time to really think about what the numbers were saying, and not just dump a bunch of calculations. So here we go.
First: how many players actually participated in the banquet event? The only requirements were be conqueror or above, and open at least one banquet crystal. It isn't easy to figure out how many players this was, because this would require someone to open the bare minimum (one GBC) and then report their rank, which no one did (nor did I on any alt). And even so, if a lot of people actually did that they would all be tied and have different ranks. However, there's another way to narrow this number down: we can look at reported ranks. Every time someone accurately reported their rank and bracket, they created a data point that served to narrow down all possible values for total number of players. If someone says their rank is 30000 and their rank was 4-5%, then that means their highest possible rank was exactly 4%, and their lowest possible rank was 6% (I'm assuming the 4%-5% bracket means 4% up to the next bracket which starts at 6%). In this case, that would mean the lowest number of participating players is 30000/.06 and the highest number is 30000/0.04. Which narrows the total number of participating players to a range of between 500k and 750k. If I do that for all reported data points I could find (from Line chats, from reddit and forums, and special shout to @RichTheMan who collected data for his banquet video which I
That number is interesting, because during Crystal Cleanse I determined there were at least (and probably just about) 785k active players that were Proven and above (the minimum required to participate). The banquet required Conqueror and above. My guess is the vast majority of active players conqueror and above opened at least one crystal, since they were free, so the total number of participants in the banquet is about the number of active players conqueror and above. So between crystal cleanse and banquet, we now have a vague idea of the active player population distribution:
~ One million active players.
~ 215k below Proven
~ 235k Proven
~ 550k Conqueror and above
This strongly suggests the median MCOC player is Uncollected. Of course, these numbers include all active players, including players that might have just downloaded the game, will play for a few days, then quit. But still, I think it is safe to assume that the median active players among those likely to stick around for a while is probably at or near Cavalier.
Now, the big banana. How much revenue did the banquet generate? Well this one is very tricky and requires a significant amount of judgment being applied to the relatively little hard data I have. I'm not going to flood the post with numbers and calculations (its a lot), but I will summarize. First, I needed to find some estimated point distribution across the participants. I did that by taking all data for which I have accurate scoring data and precise rank data (which was not a lot) and created a kind of histographic pigeonhole lower bound estimate for the total amount of points scored by different people. To explain: suppose I have these three data points:
Someone scored 91,160 points and ranked 2066. Someone else scored 90,000 points and ranked 2134. What does this tell me about ranks 2067 through 2133? Well, all of them must have scored between 90,000 and 91,160. I don't know how much, but what I know absolutely for certain is that all of them scored 90,000 points or higher. 90,000 is the lower bound on the total number of points those 68 people scored. Which means they cumulatively scored at least 68 x 90,000 = 6,120,000. The same logic says the 9,530 players between ranks 2134 and 11,664 scored at least 41040 x 9,530 = 391,111,200. Which you can see reflected in that table excerpt. Doing that for all the data I have from rank 1 down to rank 260663 I get a total cumulative point total of 3,971,880,070. That's the minimum amount of points that group of players scored, the real number is somewhat higher, but not *too* much higher. I can say that for a couple reasons. First, I have enough data points that the estimate should be close. And second the distribution follows a roughly exponential decay curve:
I mean, that's actually a log scale, and the curve *still* looks logarithmic. Its a doubly exponential drop off. So scores will tend to be weighted towards the bottom of the bins not the top. So let's go with 3.97 billion for now.
These points encompass more than half of all the estimated participating players (550k). The bottom half all scored 5655 points or less. How much I can't say precisely, because I have no data below that score. But I can still make some interesting statements about those players. If we use our participation estimates and divide, we get an average point score of 4284 points for the bottom half of the players. In other words, the scoring doesn't keep dropping like a stone down there. And that makes intuitive sense: participation is hard at the top, because you have to spend money and units. But scoring at the bottom is easy because most of the crystals are free. So we wouldn't expect scoring to drop to zero, we would expect a scoring floor below which most players would not descend below. 4.3k points is just about double the maximum points we'd expect a player to be able to score just from free crystals from ticket exchanges and milestone rewards (solo, banquet, and accolade). 2k more points is like five crystals.
Now, most of those crystals were likely bought with units earned in-game, and few of them were purchased with cash, so none of that scoring is likely to have generated actual revenue. In fact, we can go further. Almost *none* of these points generated revenue. Why? Because most players don't spend on mobile games. The industry average is between 3% and 5%, and if MCOC was converting several times more players, that's something they would probably be bragging about, as it would be a huge industry outlier. So actually, only about 5% of all the participants are likely generating revenue for MCOC, because only that many ever spend.
Now, there's some complexities to that industry average. It encompasses all players who play all mobile games, even for a single day. It counts very ephemeral players. And it averages together games of a wide range of longevity. Presumably, the longer a game has been around, the more veteran players it has, the more time it has had to convert them into spenders. MCOC's spender ratio for its most active players might be significantly higher than that vanilla 5%, and remember the participants to banquet must be conqueror or higher, which means they are among the top 75% of active players.
Let's say that maybe among all active players, including players that have only been here for a day, MCOC is typical for mobile games and only 5% or so spend, but among all conquerors and higher, that number is higher. Say 10%. Well, then that means only about 100,000 players spend in a game with one million total players. We can use that figure as a guestimate for how many points the spenders scored in the banquet. We will assume they are the top 100k of all scores. This isn't strictly true, but it is likely to be a very close estimate of the overall situation. When I calculate an estimate for total points only counting the top 100k players or so, I get about 2.9 billion points (specifically, this is the histographic estimate for all scoring down to rank 118413 which is a bin-boundary). The average number of points scored by this group of players is about 24.5k.
So now we have an average score for the most casual free players of about 4.3k, and the average score from spenders of about 24.5k. We can assume the spenders are doing the same things as the free players, and spending on top. To account for that point differential requires opening approximately an additional 48 SBCs.
What do 48 SBCs cost? Well, it depends. There was a way to buy ten for ~$50 USD, which means those cost $5 USD a piece. But those opportunities were limited. You could buy them with units at an exchange rate of about $10 USD per crystal at normal unit bundle prices, but there were ways to do that more efficiently buying unit bundles with more units. Those other opportunities priced crystals anywhere from $6 to $8 USD. This means the amount of revenue those crystals could have generated was anywhere between $28.2m USD and $56.3m USD.
Given the uncertainties involved, I can't say much more than that. The average figure is $47m USD and my guess is that's not too far from the truth. I suspect the majority of spending is still via in-app purchase, which means after the app store tax from Apple and Google Kabam ne Netmarble makes about $33m USD from that. Call it $35m USD with some spending coming from the webstore (which has a much lower margin). That would represent a bit more than half of all the revenue reported by Netmarble as coming from MCOC during the fourth quarter of last year, which seems to land in the general ballpark of what might be reasonable as the banquet cannot represent all of the Q4 spending (most Cyber Weekend spending would not directly go towards banquet points alone, for example).
What do all these numbers tell us about overall participation in the banquet event? Well, it tells me a few things. First of all, it tells me that there was a lot of casual activity, and very little evidence of players completely checking out of the event. A lot of free to play players got in, got their free crystals, spent a small amount of their unit stash, and were fine with that. Those players probably got a very good return on their investment, and I can't imagine most of them being terribly unhappy with their results, both because they didn't spend any cash and did not deplete their units much, and were probably mostly of lower progression and thus the relative value of the rewards were much higher for them on average.
There was also quite a bit of activity among the likely spenders. The average number of crystals spenders likely bought across all spenders was on the order of 50 SBCs. That's not bad, although I have no idea where that number lands in terms of good or bad participation. It seems like a lot to me, but I only have one banquet event to compare to (in terms of solid data).
$35m USD is a lot of money to get out of a spending population of between 50k and 100k players. A lot of games would kill for that, although that number isn't necessarily better than previous years. MCOC spending has declined over the years as the game has gotten older, and whether the 2024 banquet will reverse the trend or not will have to wait for February's Netmarble reporting to determine.
And that's about all I can squeeze out of the banquet data. See you all when the next Realm event comes around.
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Comments
But I can say this:
I do know if they pulled $35 million or so from a two-week event, that ain't bad. It might not be perfect or even projected. But for two weeks or so? That almost can't be "bad"
2025 is real crazy
- about half the players who could participate at all scored about 5k or lower
- Probably very few players scored lower than a few thousand points
- The banquet probably netted MCOC about $35 million USD (although that figure has large error bars) on player spending of around $45-$50m USD.
These analyzed estimates, some directly calculable, some requiring judgment to guesstimate from the data.
@DNA3000 any guesstimate on number of valiant players?
If feels like mcoc has had 1 million active players for 5-6 years which means the rate of top progression players leaving the game is the same as brand newbies joining. Would never have believed this to be true.
We know once upon a time MCOC had about 1.3 million active accounts. That was due to the numbers Kabam released for the Rocket button back in 2017. So my best guess is over the last seven years or so, MCOCs active player population has dropped by maybe 25%. 2017 was probably close to the peak.
It is probably not the case that the rate of new players joining is the same as veteran players leaving. More likely, most new players don’t stay, as is true for most mobile games. So there’s a revolving door of new players coming and going, and then of the fraction who leave the revolving door and actually commit to the game, approximately the same number of those choose to stay as veterans decide to hang it up, more or less. Kabam did indicate in a live stream a while back that overall player count is higher now than in the recent past implying this isn’t a consistent downward trajectory but to what degree specifically I don’t know.
Also, as a side note, another alt account spent about 2k units, got just above 6300 event points and received enough rank up materials (plus a few mats from DSE) to go from Uncollected to Thronebreaker without even touching act 6. Anyone that put up enough points to unlock all the T4A milestones would've had enough resources to complete the Valiant rank up requirements. If this event isn't the best catch up mechanic, I don't know what is.
I still stand by my words, that the personal points required were overinflated. Take my example: I have spent 9k units as f2p, and that got me just under a half of the possible rewards. I didn't even reach the boosted milestones! (Still a bit salty about that tbh - does that mean that if I opened "just" 30 SBCs, that I am not worthy of getting more shards bcs the droprates suck? Why does that come only at 35+ SBCs, what's the difference?) Yet, I landed in 11-25% bracket. It just blows my mind that a player who got to the top 1/4 of players can't get more than half of the milestones because of points requirement.
I understand that the Banquet presents a large source of whale income (as this post clearly shows), and whales MUST get glorious ingame rewards for their money, but they got a lot of them from Solo ranks, Alliance ranks and Realm ranks. Was it necessary to add Realm milestones to that? I mean the amount of $$ an individual would have to spend to earn even the PREDICTED milestone ceiling (Isophyne) could buy you a fairly solid laptop...
I had been hanging out at 8.1.6 for a few months while just grinding arena and saving resources. I wasn't sure when I'd get around to pushing for valiant, but getting a bunch of T4A (8x) plus the 2-3 gem kinda forced my hand.
I started playing in November 2023 and, honestly, I'm objectively bad at the game. A lot of the time I feel like I'm just strumbling through content without fully understanding wtf is going on, try as I might. If not for some serious hand-holding from guides on YT (shout-out MCOC Encyclopedia) I'd have probably given up at the collector.
So is it good news or bad news for kabam. That's what I wanna know. Don't want this game to retire in next 2-3 years
That’s interesting, because there’s almost too many players scoring over 20k points for all of them to be spenders. And certainly, the number of players who scored more than 15k can’t be all spenders, because now you’re talking about 100k players. So where are all these points coming from if not from spending?
The obvious answer is: players are earning and stockpiling a lot of units. People have been assuming that large amounts of points must translate into large amounts of spending, but the numbers suggest the large amounts of points implies large amounts of unit hoarding instead.
It suggests an alternate explanation for why Kabam sells more stuff for more units now than in the past. They’ve datamined that the players have more units to spend now than in the past, or are strategically saving more units for big sale days now than in the past. There’s more stuff to spend units on, because collectively the players have a lot more units to spend.
What I can say is the demise of the game appears to be nowhere in the immediate future. To the extent that some players claimed the controversies surrounding the event would significantly cripple spending, I think that the data rules out that worst case scenario. Spending might be up some, or down some, but it’s highly unlikely to be catastrophically lower than targeted.
The fact that MCOC created arenas for players to earn units is actually quite absurd when viewed through the lens of other game companies
So given the opportunity to earn free units in game and failing to save up sufficient units for big events is actually your own responsibility, not the bad design of the banquet event
Asking for less units to be spent while you are able to earn units for free in game is like asking the game company to become a charity, that's not sustainable in the long run
FREE FAST FANTASTIC
If you want something FANTASTIC and FAST in MCOC, it won't be FREE
If you want something FREE and FAST in MCOC, it won't be FANTASTIC
If you want something FANTASTIC and FREE in MCOC, it won't be FAST
I haven't blamed Kabam for me personally not having enough units. With DSE, Arenas and other events there is more than enough to earn, with very high ceiling. I earnt what I could while not losing all my real-life struggles.
I basically critisized 2 things:
1) The extra 7* crystals were added too high. I think that even 20 SBCs are a sufficient amount to feel bad about the low shards droprates. In other words, a player who opened 20 SBCs has seen enough to come to the conclusion, that droprates of shards are too low. And Kabam even acknowledged this. It is why they added the extra crystals to milestones in the first place.
2) Majority of the Realm Event was only for paying players, which is a move I disagree with. If an event with global participation is released, why then make it the way, that 75% players don't reach even half of the milestones? In my opinion (and take is as my personal POV only), there was enough space for paying customers to earn their bought rewards. I would prefer the Realm event milestones to have worse rewards, but be doable for larger fraction of the players. As for rank rewards, these are the main POI for paying customers, so they should be kept unchanged.
It would be pointless to quote your own arena analyses to you, because you know very well that units are obtainable. And with Daily Super Event, they became even easier to get with minimal time investment, and while also getting t2 revives. Which is a thing where I slightly disagree with you: yes, units are easier to obtain, but they are also harder to spend. Permanent content (9.1) is trivial, especially with 7* r3s (who were also made widely available). There was no new Everest content released and EQs don't eat units anymore. The only unit drain could be the bi-weekly bosses or challenges, but the rewards for that aren't gamebreaking and with the revives' availability, players are more likely to use these instead of units.
The main point of my critique was, that as the Realm event was designed, vast majority of players (75%) weren't able to reach majority of the rewards (>50%). For some reason, Kabam designed it this way. And as you've already said: Kabam datamined, that players obtain more units. But then either Kabam decided to release the rewards valve only this little, or players decided not to spend their resources.
That is part of the design to get more players to spend more units
Is that design good or bad? That is for Kabam crashed to address and we are still waiting for that report
Majority did not get the higher up rewards bcos they did not want to spend units or had insufficient units. That isn't surprising at all.
MCOC isn't the only game players play, majority of the players aren't that invested in MCOC, some are just casual players, that is very normal in every game out there
Majority of gamers worldwide are actually casual players, in fact there are games that are designed for casual players who only have limited amount of time to play games
Casual games also have lower barrier to entry (FPS games) how difficult is it to start shooting, you die you respawn
MCOC suffers from being a deep game, more than 200+ champions to learn, the amount of resources needed to build a deck of 30 champions for battlegrounds
The number of players who are invested in this game is therefore not in the millions, less than 100 thousand, how many exactly is how you want to define being invested in this game.
My main account got 4-5% rewards with 30k ish points.
5% of 1 mill is 50k, 10% is 100k. So 50k was invested in this, another 50k did a bit, but 90% did little and nothing.