Banquet Realm Event: By the Numbers
DNA3000
Member, Guardian Guardian › Posts: 19,893 Guardian
In the last two Realm Events I did weekly updates. This is technically six days into the Realm Event, but as this one is only two weeks long I am going to post updates on a different schedule. I was going to post every couple of days, but that seemed to be less interesting. The event started with a huge burst of points which was obvious to everyone, and I didn't have very much interesting to say about that. We all new it wouldn't last, and it was just a question of where it would settle down to. I was going to post something a few days later but then the Holliday sales landed on the 23rd, and then Christmas itself had a bump. That kept pushing out my analysis of the numbers for context. So let's get the obvious stuff out of the way first.
We are already way ahead of the pace to reach the top non-stretch milestone, which is at 4.24 billion points. It is all Titan shards from there. Although I have heard people say they thought we'd stall out before reaching it, I believe as the event has gone on those voices have seemed increasingly pessimistic. As I write this we are at about 3.9 billion with eight days to go. We're so far ahead the rate we have to sustain to reach that milestone by the end keeps dropping like a rock:
This is our actual rates (in blue) compared to the necessary rate (in orange). The big day one spike makes it difficult to see the gap. Here is what it looks like since that first couple of days:
Once again, the blue is the players, and the orange is the necessary rate to reach 4.24 billion. It keeps dropping because the more points we earn, the lower the rate we have to sustain for the rest of the way. Our rate is slowing down (minus the Holliday sales and the Christmas burst, more on that later), but it doesn't seem to be slowing down fast enough to catch up with the necessary rate. There seems to be a persistent slow trickle of points that keeps coming in, no matter what. I say "trickle" but it is between five and eight million points per hour, the equivalent of about 10k - 20k SBCs opened per hour. If we extrapolate our current rate of points to the end of the event, we get this:
We end up with somewhere around 5.8 billion points by the end of the event. Personally, I don't think we'll get that high, because I think the points will start to drop off much more quickly next week, although there is often a bump at the very end. I suspect there are people holding crystals and waiting until the end of the accolade event to pop them open, for example. But I think there's no way that we fail to reach 4.24 billion. The highest milestone sits at 4.56 billion, but there were hints from the dev team that if we reach it there might be more added. I'd say right now the odd of us crossing that mark are very high.
In every banquet event we learn something new about the playerbase that would otherwise be difficult to figure out without insider data. In the Crystal Cleanse we learned approximately how many active players there are. In the Battleground Blitz we got a much better idea of how many players are willing to interact with Battlegrounds, and it was far higher than I think anyone outside the dev team expected. The banquet event is at its core a spending event. What can it tell us about player spending?
Well, here we have to start making some estimations and assumptions. We're not going to get clear views of anything for a couple of complicating reasons. First, unlike with Crystal Cleanse in which it was virtually impossible to not participate at all, not every player will necessarily participate in the banquet. Most probably did, but even there a lot of casual players might not spend or even have units to spare, and many did not do all the things necessary to max out F2P tickets. So while we can see aggregates, extrapolating that to individual players, even as averages, is going to be fuzzy. We also have the situation where some SBCs and GBCs were acquired with tickets, some with units players grinded for, some with units players basically bought with cash explicitly to buy crystals, and some through the direct cash offers. But all we have are points, which combines them all.
Let's start by setting an upper bound on how many points could have been generated through no spending and no unit grinding. The F2P maximum ticket amount possible was 129, and that translates to 12 SBCs. The accolade event adds an additional five You only get 100 points each for opening them, so that's 1700 points per player. If we assume some super large percentage of all players opened that many, we can set an estimate for the overall average points per player that could possibly have been gained "for free." Additionally there's five GBCs in the accolade event and a few crystals in the solo and alliance milestones. Let's just estimate that as about 2400 points total being scored on average across something like 500k players. That's about 1.2 billion points total. That leaves us with about 2.7 billion points scored with crystals either bought with cash or with units earned within the game (that could have come from F2P players or spenders). How do we decide which came from which source?
As an initial guestimate just to see where the numbers land, let's guess that half of the points came from earned units and have from bought units (or cash offers). That leaves us with 1.35 billion points from spending. It (normally) costs roughly $10 USD for one SBC generating 400 points, so 1.35 billion points translates to $33,750,000 spent on the event so far. Does that number make any sense?
We can gain some context from Netmarble financial reporting. In Q4 of 2023 Netmarble reported approximately $60 million USD in revenue from MCOC. There's some margins for error in that number that aren't relevant to this discussion, but we're dealing with rough estimates anyway. If we assume most of that revenue came from in-app purchases (my guess right now is only a small fraction of purchases are coming from the web store) then if Netmarble earned $60m USD, player spent about $85m USD in Q4. That was about $17m USD higher than the previous quarter, and $20m USD higher than the following quarter. ~$34m USD is a reasonable number relative to those numbers. It "fits" within the constraints of past revenue.
My guess, though, is that number is a bit on the high side. It ignores the fact that points came in after the Holiday sales which had bonus units. If we assume that most of the units generated from spending benefitted from bonus units, the actual player spend could drop from $38m USD to $22.5m USD. To me, that seems to be a more reasonable estimate of how much spending has happened so far.
Here's an interesting question: how many points came in on day one, compared to day four - the day the holiday offers appeared? We can make an assumption here, that most players willing to spend cash were likely to hold off spending until that day, when they would see and be able to take advantage of the bonuses in those sales. Not everyone, but let's say most. In that case, we can try to compare the first day which is probably dominated by free crystals and previously built up unit hoards (whether through grinding or spending) and the fourth day which is probably dominated by strategic spending, and compare that to, say, day three when nothing interesting was happening.
On day one we scored a whopping 2.48 billion points. That dropped to about 392m on day two and 232m on day three. On day four, the day the sales appeared, we scored 359m points. That dropped back down to about 240m on day five, and 195m on day six.
Day four, then, scored 123m points more than the average of the preceding and successive days, both of which were very close to each other. We can reasonably guess that those 123m points came from direct spending. With a 50% bonus factored in, that comes out to be about $2m USD spent on that day alone.
As previously mentioned, the most points I can reasonably account for as coming from ticket exchanges and other free sources is about 1.2 billion points. If we assume that all those points were scored on day one, where did the other 1.28b points come from? It must have come from either spending or unit grinding, or the previous built up unit hoard from spenders. Now, whales will spend whenever they want, but I would imagine that a large amount of spending specifically targeting this event would happen during the Holiday sales. If we subtract the 240m "background" activity that has been happening more or less continuously, that leaves about a billion points that happened all at once on day one, that could not have come from tickets and was not due to normal players doing the normal things that players are doing throughout this event in general.
A billion points is the equivalent of 2.5 million SBCs, which would be about 750 million units spent on the event. I don't expect all of the active players to spend units on the banquet, but let's say slightly less than half do to at least some extent. Estimating the unit spending participation ratio at about 40% and an active player population of about one million players (which we learned from Crystal Cleanse), and factoring in the fact that very low players can't participate, we get something on the order of about 350k players actively spending units during the banquet. And that implies the average spend of units, separate from cash and separate from units bought with cash with the direct intent to spend them on the banquet, as being about 2100 units.
That doesn't sound like a lot of units, but considering we're averaging across all participating players that's a significant amount for the average player to *spend* on an event. Most players don't spend all their units on an event. But it is consistent with my analysis of unit availability in the game. Even very casual players who do not spend and do not grind the game can be earning thousands of units per year, and some can be saving those units for events like this. More active players can easily have tens of thousands of units.
I'm sure the devs know this far better than I do. The actual amount of units in the game is probably a lot, for thousands of them to be burned in an event like this from even the average participating player. It should make players wonder if the reason why the maximum possible unit spend on events has gone up over time. The logical reason might be: because players on the whole have a lot more units to spend than they used to.
I'm sure there are people out there picking apart my numbers, and that's fine. Most of this is judgment informed by calculations, not direct calculations. These are educated guesses with large margins for error, taken during the middle of the event. Take all this for whatever it is worth. Although the fact that we have a measurable bump in spending on Christmas day does tell me there's a small but significant contingent of players fueling their MCOC habit through gift cards from Aunt Marge.
One note: I almost always exclusively frame things in terms of SBCs in calculations, but that's not the only source of points in the event. However, for the purposes of spending calculations GBCs generate almost the same ratio of points to spend in terms of units, and the number you can earn overall is relatively small, so neglecting them doesn't significantly change any of the estimations happening here.
We are already way ahead of the pace to reach the top non-stretch milestone, which is at 4.24 billion points. It is all Titan shards from there. Although I have heard people say they thought we'd stall out before reaching it, I believe as the event has gone on those voices have seemed increasingly pessimistic. As I write this we are at about 3.9 billion with eight days to go. We're so far ahead the rate we have to sustain to reach that milestone by the end keeps dropping like a rock:
This is our actual rates (in blue) compared to the necessary rate (in orange). The big day one spike makes it difficult to see the gap. Here is what it looks like since that first couple of days:
Once again, the blue is the players, and the orange is the necessary rate to reach 4.24 billion. It keeps dropping because the more points we earn, the lower the rate we have to sustain for the rest of the way. Our rate is slowing down (minus the Holliday sales and the Christmas burst, more on that later), but it doesn't seem to be slowing down fast enough to catch up with the necessary rate. There seems to be a persistent slow trickle of points that keeps coming in, no matter what. I say "trickle" but it is between five and eight million points per hour, the equivalent of about 10k - 20k SBCs opened per hour. If we extrapolate our current rate of points to the end of the event, we get this:
We end up with somewhere around 5.8 billion points by the end of the event. Personally, I don't think we'll get that high, because I think the points will start to drop off much more quickly next week, although there is often a bump at the very end. I suspect there are people holding crystals and waiting until the end of the accolade event to pop them open, for example. But I think there's no way that we fail to reach 4.24 billion. The highest milestone sits at 4.56 billion, but there were hints from the dev team that if we reach it there might be more added. I'd say right now the odd of us crossing that mark are very high.
In every banquet event we learn something new about the playerbase that would otherwise be difficult to figure out without insider data. In the Crystal Cleanse we learned approximately how many active players there are. In the Battleground Blitz we got a much better idea of how many players are willing to interact with Battlegrounds, and it was far higher than I think anyone outside the dev team expected. The banquet event is at its core a spending event. What can it tell us about player spending?
Well, here we have to start making some estimations and assumptions. We're not going to get clear views of anything for a couple of complicating reasons. First, unlike with Crystal Cleanse in which it was virtually impossible to not participate at all, not every player will necessarily participate in the banquet. Most probably did, but even there a lot of casual players might not spend or even have units to spare, and many did not do all the things necessary to max out F2P tickets. So while we can see aggregates, extrapolating that to individual players, even as averages, is going to be fuzzy. We also have the situation where some SBCs and GBCs were acquired with tickets, some with units players grinded for, some with units players basically bought with cash explicitly to buy crystals, and some through the direct cash offers. But all we have are points, which combines them all.
Let's start by setting an upper bound on how many points could have been generated through no spending and no unit grinding. The F2P maximum ticket amount possible was 129, and that translates to 12 SBCs. The accolade event adds an additional five You only get 100 points each for opening them, so that's 1700 points per player. If we assume some super large percentage of all players opened that many, we can set an estimate for the overall average points per player that could possibly have been gained "for free." Additionally there's five GBCs in the accolade event and a few crystals in the solo and alliance milestones. Let's just estimate that as about 2400 points total being scored on average across something like 500k players. That's about 1.2 billion points total. That leaves us with about 2.7 billion points scored with crystals either bought with cash or with units earned within the game (that could have come from F2P players or spenders). How do we decide which came from which source?
As an initial guestimate just to see where the numbers land, let's guess that half of the points came from earned units and have from bought units (or cash offers). That leaves us with 1.35 billion points from spending. It (normally) costs roughly $10 USD for one SBC generating 400 points, so 1.35 billion points translates to $33,750,000 spent on the event so far. Does that number make any sense?
We can gain some context from Netmarble financial reporting. In Q4 of 2023 Netmarble reported approximately $60 million USD in revenue from MCOC. There's some margins for error in that number that aren't relevant to this discussion, but we're dealing with rough estimates anyway. If we assume most of that revenue came from in-app purchases (my guess right now is only a small fraction of purchases are coming from the web store) then if Netmarble earned $60m USD, player spent about $85m USD in Q4. That was about $17m USD higher than the previous quarter, and $20m USD higher than the following quarter. ~$34m USD is a reasonable number relative to those numbers. It "fits" within the constraints of past revenue.
My guess, though, is that number is a bit on the high side. It ignores the fact that points came in after the Holiday sales which had bonus units. If we assume that most of the units generated from spending benefitted from bonus units, the actual player spend could drop from $38m USD to $22.5m USD. To me, that seems to be a more reasonable estimate of how much spending has happened so far.
Here's an interesting question: how many points came in on day one, compared to day four - the day the holiday offers appeared? We can make an assumption here, that most players willing to spend cash were likely to hold off spending until that day, when they would see and be able to take advantage of the bonuses in those sales. Not everyone, but let's say most. In that case, we can try to compare the first day which is probably dominated by free crystals and previously built up unit hoards (whether through grinding or spending) and the fourth day which is probably dominated by strategic spending, and compare that to, say, day three when nothing interesting was happening.
On day one we scored a whopping 2.48 billion points. That dropped to about 392m on day two and 232m on day three. On day four, the day the sales appeared, we scored 359m points. That dropped back down to about 240m on day five, and 195m on day six.
Day four, then, scored 123m points more than the average of the preceding and successive days, both of which were very close to each other. We can reasonably guess that those 123m points came from direct spending. With a 50% bonus factored in, that comes out to be about $2m USD spent on that day alone.
As previously mentioned, the most points I can reasonably account for as coming from ticket exchanges and other free sources is about 1.2 billion points. If we assume that all those points were scored on day one, where did the other 1.28b points come from? It must have come from either spending or unit grinding, or the previous built up unit hoard from spenders. Now, whales will spend whenever they want, but I would imagine that a large amount of spending specifically targeting this event would happen during the Holiday sales. If we subtract the 240m "background" activity that has been happening more or less continuously, that leaves about a billion points that happened all at once on day one, that could not have come from tickets and was not due to normal players doing the normal things that players are doing throughout this event in general.
A billion points is the equivalent of 2.5 million SBCs, which would be about 750 million units spent on the event. I don't expect all of the active players to spend units on the banquet, but let's say slightly less than half do to at least some extent. Estimating the unit spending participation ratio at about 40% and an active player population of about one million players (which we learned from Crystal Cleanse), and factoring in the fact that very low players can't participate, we get something on the order of about 350k players actively spending units during the banquet. And that implies the average spend of units, separate from cash and separate from units bought with cash with the direct intent to spend them on the banquet, as being about 2100 units.
That doesn't sound like a lot of units, but considering we're averaging across all participating players that's a significant amount for the average player to *spend* on an event. Most players don't spend all their units on an event. But it is consistent with my analysis of unit availability in the game. Even very casual players who do not spend and do not grind the game can be earning thousands of units per year, and some can be saving those units for events like this. More active players can easily have tens of thousands of units.
I'm sure the devs know this far better than I do. The actual amount of units in the game is probably a lot, for thousands of them to be burned in an event like this from even the average participating player. It should make players wonder if the reason why the maximum possible unit spend on events has gone up over time. The logical reason might be: because players on the whole have a lot more units to spend than they used to.
I'm sure there are people out there picking apart my numbers, and that's fine. Most of this is judgment informed by calculations, not direct calculations. These are educated guesses with large margins for error, taken during the middle of the event. Take all this for whatever it is worth. Although the fact that we have a measurable bump in spending on Christmas day does tell me there's a small but significant contingent of players fueling their MCOC habit through gift cards from Aunt Marge.
One note: I almost always exclusively frame things in terms of SBCs in calculations, but that's not the only source of points in the event. However, for the purposes of spending calculations GBCs generate almost the same ratio of points to spend in terms of units, and the number you can earn overall is relatively small, so neglecting them doesn't significantly change any of the estimations happening here.
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Comments
Aslong as we get that dupe im good z
I spent my 12k units and im done.
If they do add keys to more bundles then I’ll prob get more.
Because 3k units for 10 crystals is bad.
$50 for 10 isn’t bad, if they wanna sell more they should repeat the deals that includes the key for champions.
That's a good news! Cheers! 🎉
If we take this number and make it exclusively sbc purchases for the sake of simplicity, that means the community has purchased 10,094,052 Superior Banquet Crystals @ 300 units each for a staggering 3,028,215,708 units spent.
Take that number and divide it by 3410 which is roughly 3410 units at 99.99 USD and then making the conversion from units to money, KABAM has made approximately 8,880,397,972 give or take minus banquet tickets, minus hoarded units, etc etc
So I make a dryass funny comment, uhhh 😲
Your calculations are wayy off.
Not taking into account free crystals everyone earned from tickets.
Not taking into account free crystals from milestones.
Not taking into account the 50% unit bonus currently in webstore.
Not taking into account the webstore event that gives bonus banquet points for purchases.
I’m sure there’s more but yeah, it’s bound to be off by a large degree. The sake of simplicity leads to a very large number.
As mentioned, the orange line is our necessary sustained rate to reach milestone 33, and it is rapidly dropping towards zero as we approach that milestone. We seem to be stubbornly holding a sustained opening/scoring rate of between 5 million per hour and 10 million per hour, usually around 6-8 million during the day.
My best projected estimate is that we will reach Isophene at milestone 33 around this time tomorrow. Although as has happened with previous Realm events, players might decide to jump in as we get very close, and there might be a burst of scoring that carries us over the finish line a little earlier.
If we hold about this rate to the end, we're projected to hit somewhere around five billion points. Which implies the event was somewhat more successful than Kabam originally expected, at least in terms of participation and spending, even accounting for trying to keep the milestones in reach. I doubt Kabam would place Isophene a billion points lower than their projections.
It does bring up the reminder that all good quants sanity check their calculations. I did so in a number of ways. I sanity checked by unit calculations by comparing how much units I calculated might be spent on the game against what unit availability is in the game. I compared my estimates for spending against historical MCOC revenue estimates for the entire quarter.
Estimation and sanity checking are two sides of the same coin: one gives you guidance on where your calculations should probably land, and the other verifies that your calculations don't violate some obvious constraint. Richtheman recently posted a video covering event calculations, and while his are different than mine, I still checked his against mine because while his are less detailed, sometimes other people can account for things you forgot or can make assumptions that seem more reasonable than mine. Its good to see other people's versions of the same estimations.