The second largest MMORPG on Steam has banned more accounts than Austria has residents – Why?

Play2Earn game MIR4 (PC, iOS, Android) is the second largest MMORPG on Steam as of June 2022 – only Lost Ark is bigger. But the online role-playing game sets an absurd negative record: In the meantime, over 13 million accounts have been banned worldwide. That is more than live in many countries in the world.

How many people has MIR4 banned now? According to the new report from Wemade, it reached 13,004,185 accounts as of May 27, 2022 (via FB).

If the banned people of MIR4 were residents of a country, it would be the 75th most populous country in the world, ahead of countries like Tunisia (11.8 million), Belgium (11.6 million) and Cuba (11.3 million) and well ahead of Austria (9 million) or Switzerland (8.7 million). All data are from Worldometers.

How many players does MIR4 have on Steam? MIR4 currently has almost 54,000 concurrent players (via steamcharts.com), which is well above MMORPGs like Final Fantasy XIV (14,750) or Black Desert (12,200).

However, it’s a long way from Lost Ark’s player numbers (605,000) – ironically assuming that Lost Ark should actually ban many of its players, since Smilegate’s MMORPG also suffers from a significant bot problem.

MIR4: Many botters vs. high interest in banning botters

Why are so many people getting banned from MIR4? Two factors come together:

• It is “lucrative” to bot at MIR4 because you can actually make money in-game through farming and grinding. MIR4 is a “Pay2Earn” game: things that you earn in the game can be sold directly. However, the MMORPG is not that much fun, as can be seen from the reviews of MIR4 on Steam.
• The developers have a great interest in preventing this botting, because botting creates an oversupply. This reduces the value of the items that can be earned in the game. So, if possible, only “real players” should be able to earn money with MIR4, ideally they also buy items or heroes in MIR and thus ensure demand.
• When you bid, the financial value of every hour in the game goes down – and it’s already low. Therefore, Wemade has a “0-tolerance” policy in the MMORPG.

Play2Earn game MIR4 is mostly popular in the Philippines

Who makes money with that? In so-called Play2Earn games, players from countries with a weak economy and currency are particularly active.

Globally, MIR4 is especially popular in the Philippines. There is also relatively high interest in MIR4 in Thailand and Laos.

It’s safe to assume that most of the banned players are people from the Philippines who wanted to earn some extra money with bots in MIR4.

We see a similar phenomenon in the game Axie Infinity:

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