I blogged about why I didn’t subscribe to WAR a couple days ago. Now that the latest subscription numbers are out, as reported by Scott, I figured I had to do a small continuation piece.

Now, when people find something new, the excitement curve goes something like this:

where we have the Honeymoon, Negotiation and Adjustment phases as defined in the theory for culture shock. How long these phases take for people online depends on the service and their level of experience that type of services, but the phasing is pretty much the same.

How is this applicable to WAR? Well, when launching a new service that depends on subscriptions, you want the user to enter his credit card number during the initial excitement phase and hope the user doesn’t cancel during the hangover before the commitment picks up again. What you really, really, should not do is what GOA seemed to with WAR in Europe:

Obviously I can’t prove anything, but I think this is the single biggest reason the subs crashed in Europe. Simple operational mistake – the players couldn’t enter their credit card number when activating the license. Which is very sad since the game is was fun.