Sir Bruce updated his amazing MMOG stats page sometime in the last month. It now contains a lot of text explaining the data and where it comes from, along with some commentary. Two things pop out at me:

• The 150k+ chart shows that Lineage and Lineage II are enormous, 4.5M users between them, 10x the size of Everquest. These are South Korean games, totally different userbase.
• The 100k-500k chart gives you more detail on the non-Lineage games. I’m surprised how little drop-off these games have. Everquest has had 400k subscribers for 3 years! (That’s about $150M in revenue).

I’m reading Richard Bartle’s Designing Virtual Worlds after seeing it on Castranova’s syllabus. It suggests that 100k in a year is the benchmark for MMOG success.