How Do Neverwinter Player Numbers Compare to Black Desert Online?

Player numbers are always a sensitive topic for publishers and developers. They normally only leak them if they have to or there’s something to brag about. That’s what Neverwinter has been doing in the past as well. While we can only theorize about the exact amount of concurrent players (its Steam chart for many reasons is not a great source), Cryptic has at least dished out total number of registered accounts when they’ve hit certain milestones.

Neverwinter vs. Black Desert Online (BDO)

Now, depending on what you are looking for, these numbers could either be impressive or whatever. In any case they lack context, and other games to compare with. That’s why the recent infographic of Black Desert’s two-year anniversary is interesting. The critically acclaimed Korean title is widely seen as success story in the West. Apparently BDO has accumulated over 3 million players in the West in two years. The infographic only lists “characters”, but the anniversary trailer states the number of players.

Compared to that, Neverwinter doesn’t look too bad. We don’t have the two-year numbers for our MMORPG, but 3.5 years after launch it had 7 million players on PC. Also it hit the 3 million mark roughly 1.5 years into its Xbox journey.

Apples and Oranges?

We’re not trying to say that Neverwinter is the better game or has more players by the way. In fact, it’s a bit of apples and oranges here. BDO runs a partial buy-to-play-model, so registering already comes with a certain obligation to stick with it for a while. That’s why the title most definitely should have better retention rates and more concurrent players. Neverwinter as pure free-2-play game naturally has more accounts, but most of those just stop by and move on. We nonetheless think this comparison is interesting to post. It adds some context to Neverwinter’s own numbers and shows that at least in terms of accounts, it can absolutely compete with bigger titles.


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2 thoughts on “How Do Neverwinter Player Numbers Compare to Black Desert Online?

  • March 6, 2018 at 4:32 am
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    When you compare player bases. Well. NWO have more players.. But when you compare to actual players, who don’t go as like> Log in> invoke>log off.
    Also when you compare to actual players amount is also different thing.. In Nwo I know dozen guilds, with full of players.. But for real, are just ~15 true players, others are just alts. Some players I Knew had 7 accounts fulls of alts.

    While In BDO I have seen more actual players. So even if NWO have higher quantity of created characters. Does not mean it have more players.. I am sure, if NWO would require reactive all accounts. We would see at least 20% population drop. Because they don’t play at a ll. Some may even share account..

  • March 6, 2018 at 7:55 am
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    Using the numbers MS provides through achievements (wich are 100% correct since this game is online only) you can get a sense of how many players there are/were.

    2.61% of all accounts have ONE level 70 character, and given how many of the remaining players have several VIP/Leadership-farm accounts, I doubt there are even 10k active players left on Xbox.

    And that’s going to be even less when BDO drops on Xbox One X in 4k later this year…

    They really need to get some good content out there, and also get Lost City of Omu fast as fuck on consoles unless they want to turn NWO into tumbleweed-city

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