14 DAY TRIAL // For quite some time now, Cryptic has been working on Star Trek Online, and the game is getting ready to be launched. After releasing the pre-order incentives and announcing that lifetime subscribers will be the only ones to have access to the Liberated Borg special race, the game is beginning to draw a line and take a look at some early predictions extracted from the MMO's open beta. And right now, STO developers seem to be more than pleased with the results they're getting. As far as the interest gamers show for the game, Cryptic feels that, "The actual numbers crushed our predictions."
This could either mean that a lot of gamers have logged in to the beta servers or that Cryptic had very low expectations for the title to begin with. Whatever the reason, the outcome is the same. One of the game's developers posted in one of the update logs that, "The first week of Open Beta has been amazing. We have seen more signups and players than we ever imagined we could."
He further added that, "So very many people have shown interest in Star Trek Online and logged in to play that we've actually had to scramble to support everyone. Our core engineers are this very second working like crazed technology wielding madmen to improve performance and stability across the board. We're also adding a lot more hardware to accommodate our players."
And while we're sure this doesn't even come close to the Star Wars: The Old Republic subscription pile-up, where the web servers burst into flames and crashed, so to speak, it's still pretty impressive, as just like Cryptic, no one really expected the game to get this much attention from the skeptic MMO, WoW-brainwashed gamers.
As for those "actual numbers" that crushed the studio's predictions, the same developer revealed that, "We looked at numbers from Closed Beta, numbers from games we've worked on in the past, and some numbers that float around the games industry. Based on those numbers, we predicted that about 65% of the keys we generated would eventually turn into active players (some keys never get delivered, others are lost in spam boxes, some are never redeemed, etc.). And, we predicted about 1/6 of those redeemed keys would turn into players that game at the same time. It's what we call our concurrent users or CCU, for short."