There’s been an interesting backchannel discussion between several TN folks about the numbers of people in various online worlds. Or at least, the numbers publicly claimed and what they might mean.

Many of us track these census numbers almost like we track the stock market, especially for “traditional” MMOs. This has made SirBruce’s mmogchart.com very popular in a certain segment of the population (even though the data is currently out of date); it’s common to see graphs from his site appear in business plans and market analysis reports.

There’s a general sense among many MMO/virtual world observers that the size of the market has been woefully underestimated -- almost all of us were surprised by how quickly World of Warcraft leapt to over a million subscribers for example, and I don’t believe anyone would have predicted a year ago that the game would have over five million subscribers by now.

At the same time, there remains a sense of disbelief in some quarters (notably old-school game companies and many VC-types) that the market for MMOs/VWs is as big as its made out to be.

So the question is, how many people really play these games, and what do the various numbers mean?