In a Red Herring article, Daniel James gives some pretty hard numbers about Three Rings, which are interesting, especially in light of the recent Second Life hysteria.

As silly as it may sound, Puzzle Pirates has been a surprise hit with 2 million registered users, 30,000 of whom have signed up as subscribers—worth a tidy $3.3 million in revenue last year for Three Rings. “There’s a huge audience and they are keen to devour content,” says Mr. James.

These numbers are fuzzier than they look – PP uses a Gold Doubloon system which is similar to SL’s Linden Bucks, and it’s difficult to tell how that’s factored into the numbers. Also, it’s not clear if the 30,000 subscribers are current subscribers or over the long lifetime of the product.

Still, we can use those numbers for some back-of-the-napkin calculations. Of the 2 million people who have downloaded Puzzle Pirates, 1.5% of them have opted to pay for it – this seems in line with the numbers that Second Life opts to report. Of those that do, Three Rings gets about $110 bucks a year, or a little more than nine bucks a month – less than that of a standard MMO.

The picture is incomplete, of course. The real interesting data for observers is how many freeloaders the paying customers are subsidizing – how many free trials, and how many non-payers are on the Doubloon servers? What is their concurrency? Still, this data is useful in acting as something we can compare to the numbers that Second Life releases for the non-hardcore gamer market.

Original comments thread is here.