Hi all!
The October update is going to focus on the Early Access Launch.
We’ve got a lot that we want to show off, especially as work progresses towards Module 2, but I’ll keep this focused on the EA stats and launch in an effort to get it out in a somewhat timely manner.
First off, we’d like to thank everyone that’s tried the game out since launch!
It’s been an exciting month! We hit just over 36,000 subscribers in the period since we opened billing in September. We’d planned on 10-15,000 subscribers, but had some contingencies in place for anywhere between 5,000 and 30,000.
We did our best to try and guide people to distribute themselves between the servers, but Trem was clearly the winner of the ‘hottest new restaurant’ award. So, we dealt with that the best we could and had a number of hotfixes rolling out throughout the initial weeks.
We’re a pretty specific type of game, and despite the positive response, we went into this launch being the bootstrapped operation we’ve been for the entirety of development. Most of our financial forecasts assumed a minimum of 30-40% churn in the first month.
This didn’t factor in WoW: Forever prior to September, so once that was announced we figured there was no telling. Especially since we’ve seen a big increase in interest from Classic WoW folks leading up to launch.
Overall, we’re very proud of the launch. It felt like a really big version of our earlier stress tests for the most part.
We focused on monitoring the economy, progression rates, major bugs revealed by being live, the new starting areas (Ail’vorith and Underdocks), and keeping the servers as stable as possible under the load.
It’s November now and we’re keeping an eye on churn. As of this moment, we’re sitting just at 30,000 subscriptions, and we expect that number to go down as the month rolls on. This isn’t a shock to us, and we’re very happy with this as a starting point. It was always going to be an uphill battle.
The work towards 1.0 is well underway!
Hiring
We’ll hit the stats for the month next, but before that I wanted to mention a quick note on hiring.
Because you guys showed up, we’re able to immediately hit the first goal of going into Early Access: getting some cash in place to help take care of the team.
We’ve had several people hanging in through the previous launch delays, and we’re happy to say that we’ve been able to kick off the process of getting them covered. The first crew of people are being onboarded with the HR service we’re using and we’re working through the logistics of bringing on the next group.
We know the cash may not always be there, but it’s nice to know that we can begin taking care of some folks. Many of us will remain volunteers for the foreseeable future, but it feels good to get this going. We plan to keep publishing our revenue, expenditures, and other information in an effort to remain transparent.
We’ll have a quick update from our accountant later in this update and get the ‘costs’ page updated soon.
October’s Stats
A note from AtomicFrog (our accountant):
We've made it through the first month of EA. Here's a revenue and cost breakdown for NWC in October 2026:
The revenues for subscriptions and merch are combined for this chart. Expect more detail here in the future as we work on our internal reporting functionality.
The largest portion of our monthly costs comes from the fees associated with our payment providers, which are reflected in the Software and Cloud Services category. Software costs will tick up as well, as we anticipate increased Unity platform costs going forward. This includes everything from payment provider fees to the various software & services we use each day.
We also had one-time legal expenses to cover related to going live.
Overall, these numbers are encouraging as we are looking at a gross margin % of 82.1% - this is a great metric because it shows we don't have to spend a lot to generate revenue.
Next month, you'll start to see the first costs associated with hiring some of the team members on!
Our goal with the revenues as we've been ramping up the business is to start getting the team paid - this will always continue to be the focus as we move through EA toward 1.0 release. To this extent, we've been working all month getting all the necessary paperwork signed and people onboarded so we can start taking care of the team. We're nearly there, and starting in November we will be officially supporting the first cohort of people that are in the most dire situations on the team, and then looking to see who else we can support afterwards. This is always something we're going to be acting on as soon as we can, but a lot will depend on what revenues look like 3 months, 5 months, 10 months down the road.
This is a great start to EA and we’re looking forward to many more of these updates!
Live Updates
We’ve hit a series of roughly 20 updates in the week leading up to EA launch and in the weeks since.
You can read the specifics (of which there are many) in Patch Notes posted on the Community Hub.
These have been a mix of everything from client & server optimizations to art fixes and tuning changes.
On that note, we’ll cover more details in the next update - but we’ve taken a lot of feedback on some of our more immediate changes and have already started work on adjustments and feature implementation.
We onboarded a new UX/UI Designer during the launch and he’s been actively working with the guys and moving at a decent clip.
We’ve worked through the UX and support for more group-focused looting controls/options, and will provide more details on that soon. Other UI work is very much under way. We’re excited to show some of it off soon!
Roadmap
Speaking of UI and other features - our roadmap was pretty well out of date by the time we hit Early Access.
We’ve updated it to follow a new format that better reflects what’s actually going on in a more real-time manner. Roadmaps that make big proclamations for the year (or years) to come look great as marketing materials, but often end up being outdated a couple months in.
We’ve tried our best to provide very high-level goals and then hit those dates, but that didn’t give you a ton of insight into more immediate priorities or some of the specifics.
Our plan with this format is to give you a better view into immediate and nearer-term priorities (which I’m sure we’ll then hear feedback on). It’ll be regularly updated, so we’ll remind you to check from time to time, but do expect it to change as we move things around.
It’s not complete at the moment, as we’re still balancing our new work against things that are popping up from EA and people are still getting back into the groove after a hard press to launch.
We’ll continue to update it with expected milestone/patch numbers, so you can keep track as we get close to those dates or reference those patch numbers.
It’s also an easy place for us to post notes about commonly asked questions related to a feature or fix.
In Closing
Speaking of feedback, here are the places we go to gather it:
We’re currently working to better organize and grow our moderation in these places, so please continue to be super well-behaved and civil to each other in the meantime.
Expanding on that theme, our next priority in staffing is in getting our GMs paid and formalizing their coverage. They’ve done an outstanding job so far, and despite what you might read in certain places, the community has been pretty amazing (especially given the number of people playing)!
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If you’re new to MnM, please check these out:
→ Total newbies click here: New Player Guide.
→ And just a reminder: this is a social game without instancing, so please read our Play Nice Policies. They will be enforced.
Additional questions should be covered by our FAQs.
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The pretty pictures will return in the next update. The guys are exploring the lands to the east at a pretty amazing pace!
Thanks again for your support! See you in game!