Spoffy

Thanks for the courteous response! You're right, that overall adoption rate does seem quite low, compared to the overall player count. And your point regarding opportunity cost is an excellent one. However, I'd actually suggest that rather than looking at overall player count, it would be better to approximate the current regular player count, rather than total sales. I.e - How many people who bought Arma, actively play Arma? Unfortunately, that number is really, really hard to figure out - at least, I couldn't find any stats on it. So let's come up with an upper bound instead. What's the most players that could realistically be playing Arma in 2019? According to steam charts, Arma peaked at around 24,000 players this month in 2019. Based on that, let's produce an upper bound. Let's assume that every player of Arma plays exactly once a month - in other words, that's 24,000 different people every day. Somewhat ridiculous, but that's the whole point of an upper bound - it shouldn't be reached. Under that logic, we get around 720,000 unique Arma 3 players a year, from a core of "regulars" that play once a month, for an entire year. Now, let's consider the 720,000 copies of Arma 3 sold in 2019. (Note: I'm pretty sure those numbers being the same is just a coincidence, try not to read too much into it!). That gives us a theoretical upper bound of 1,440,000 (1.44 million) players in 2019, by adding these two numbers together (which itself is nuts - it assumes that of all the people that bought Arma, none of them played!) Based on this bound, we can see 100,000 / 1,440,000 sees GM purchased by at least 7% of active Arma players. But wait - GM was only released in April! That's only 8 months of sales. Now, let's scale the total Arma copies solid down by 33%, since 8 months is only 66% of the year (again, this maths is very, very rough, I doubt sales are equally distributed over the year. They'll most likely be clustered around sales). That brings the copies sold in those 8 months down to 475,000 copies, for a total active player count of 1,195,000 (1.19 million). That sees GM sell to around 8% of the active Arma playerbase. It also sees total DLC sales in 2019 go to 160% of the active playerbase (1.9m DLC sales in 2019). But wait, that's over 100%! At a guess, because most people aren't buying just 1 DLC, particularly if they're purchasing bundles or in sales. Given the Apex edition includes 5 DLCs, and went down to $9 last year... it seems very plausible we could see over 100% DLC sales. Now, I'm not sure how accurate my maths is likely to be overall here. The total active player count could be much, much more volatile than I suggested, making the upper bound higher. Take it all with a pinch of salt. The key point is: I don't think the target market size is likely to 5.5 million, I *suspect* it's less than 1/3rd of that. But hey, I could well be very wrong! 🙂 Overall though, I do agree with the sentiment that CDLC conversation rate in 2019 does seem relatively low. Though we'd need to see something like Contact's sales numbers to actually get a comparison.

I'm not sure this maths is entirely fair, not representative of the article linked! The relevant quote from the article is: That suggests a lifetime total of 9.7 million DLC copies alone, with an additional 5.5million from the base game - something reinforced by the infographic on that page. At a minimum, this suggests that 9,700,000 / 12 = 800,000 sales per DLC, assuming an equal distribution (which would be very, very surprising, I'd love to see a per-DLC breakdown). Not only this, we saw 1.9 millions DLCs sold in 2019 alone - suggesting that the DLC market is still continuing to thrive for Arma 3. Now, some of this will inevitably be due to all of the sales, and that the number of DLCs sold has increased over time. However, this means roughly 1/5th of all DLC sales by quantity occurred last year. Not bad, for a 7 year old game! Now, let's suppose 100,000 copies of GM sold (which doesn't include ANY of 2020, only 2019, so it's only around half a year of sales numbers). At their lowest ever price ($10 USD), so GM has made at least $1,000,000 in gross revenue. Steam takes a 30% cut, and BI's cut is 50/50 according to their own page, ,meaning BI made $350,000 and the GM team made $350,000 - at a *minimum*. Now, Vertexmacht, the team behind GM, is reportedly a team of two developers (https://arma3.com/news/report-in-vertexmacht-global-mobilization), although I'd prefer a better source for that, as I don't know who else was involved behind the scenes. However, that suggests a comfortable $175,000 per team member, at a minimum. Plus, $350,000 isn't a bad cut for Bohemia, all things considered. Now, let's consider sales of normal DLCs - of which there were 1.9 million confirmed sales. Now, let's assume each DLC costs just $3 - that they've all been bought on sale, or as part of a bundle. Which seems like a reasonable to low estimate. Now, let's say there were 1.8 million normal DLC sales, minus GM's cut. That's $5.4 million, minus steam's cut, $3.78 million in 2019 alone. I'd argue that's not a bad year, personally! Though CDLC sales are definitely low compared to copies of the game sold, the overall money made by both developers and Bohemia really isn't bad! Especially considering 100,000 sales was only in 8 months, and it's now been 17 months. Apologies for the length of this, but I felt the conclusions drawn by the quoted post were somewhat misleading, and wanted to provide an alternative view of the stats.

I've been looking to update a few out-of-date or wrong parts of the community wiki, particularly with regards to scripting. However, signup is disabled. Does anyone have any idea when (or if) it'll be renabled, or if anyone has made a fork of the wiki that is open to updates? Thanks!