Gamasutra, among others, reports that:

“Sony Online Entertainment’s free-to-play MMO Free Realms is ‘close to’ 5 million registered users”

as reported by Sony Online president and Arch Deacon of Meaningless Facts, John Smedley.

Do people really look at that and think ‘Wow, look at that revenue stream!’?

If they’d said:

“Sony Online Entertainment’s free-to-play MMO Free Realms is ‘close to’ 5 million baked beans consumed in the staff canteen.”

I’d have at least found it interesting, even if it was just as irrelevant with respect to Free Realms commercial viability.

Post the sales figures for the online store, SOE. Or if, as m’colleague predicts:

“such figures are locked deep in the Sony vaults, guarded by teams of Sony ninjas with orders to shuriken on sight. New Sony recruits are told “remember, MILLIONS of PLAYERS! NEVER talk of sales!”, with said ninjas ready to pounce if one looks like letting anything slip.”

then post figures of registered accounts that have been used in the last month. I hope you’re not including my two registered accounts in your figures, for example, because I didn’t play after the first day with my initial account, and the second account was merely created because I forgot the details of the first and I wanted to do a quick bit of research, many moons ago.

Therefore I suggest that the next time you, dear reader, see a ‘Free Realms registered users’ marketing ejaculation, simply substitute the following KiaSA Approved text in its place:

“Sony Online Entertainment’s free-to-play MMO Free Realms is ‘close to’ publicising an arbitrary figure that is larger than the arbitrary figure that Blizzard publicises in order to wave it around like a giant penis and beat other MMO companies about the head with” reports Big Arbitrary Number Poobah and Chief Irrelevant Statistic-wallah, John Smedley.