Tibia: why is the game still successful after 27 years?

Turning 27 years old this January, contrary to what it might indicate, the PC game Tibia continues to be successful around the world. And in addition to the thousands of players, the game has also yielded a lot of material for content producers.

According to the Twitch Tracker website, which unofficially records some statistics from the streaming platform, last Wednesday (10) the game Tibia appeared in 65th place among the 100 games with the highest audience.

Excluding the retrogaming category (which features older Atari games, for example), Tibia is the oldest game in the top 100 on Twitch. Launched there in 1997, it is closely accompanied by also old titles such as Heroes of Might and Magic III (released in 1999) and Counter-Strike (2000).

To give you an idea, Tibia currently has more viewers on Twitch than recent and popular titles like Cyberpunk 2077, Hogwarts Legacy, League of Legends: Wild Rift, Free Fire e God of War Ragnarok.

If the numbers aren’t enough to convince you that the MMORPG is more alive than ever, we can give you one more interesting piece of information. Also according to Twitch Tracker, Tibia had a 5% increase in the number of hours watched between 2022 and 2023.

While two years ago players watched around 34 million hours of the game, last year 36.2 million hours were watched.

Because Tibia continues to be successful?

At the time this article is being written, CipSoft – the German developer responsible for Tibia – counts 13.5 thousand simultaneous players in the official worlds (servers).

And a (relevant) part of the MMORPG’s persistent success comes precisely from Brazil, which has its own worlds. To differentiate themselves from servers in the United States and United Kingdom, those in Brazil end in “bra”. These are the cases of Collabra, Venebra, Discover, Etebra and Guerribra, for example.

The truth, however, is that the universe of Brazilian players is even larger on parallel servers. “Currently there are more than 400 parallel servers that bring together more than 20 thousand people depending on the time of day”, says Giovanni Menezes, founder of TibiaBR, the largest unofficial website for the game in the world.

Even in the early 2000s, the Tibia game was already being teased about its “bad graphics” (Image: Disclosure/Cipsoft)

In love with Tibia since mid-2003, LokiRJ (nickname Giovanni) came across the title when he owned a lan house in Rio de Janeiro in the early 2000s. He confesses that at first he didn’t understand why people played “that rubbish”, but eventually being caught by the interest of the LAN house regulars.

He says he managed to forget about the bad graphics and when he realized he was already more of an addict.

“In the past, many people played it because it ran on any computer. Furthermore, Tibia there are many possibilities to trap you. You can play to be top level, just decorate your house, chat with friends and so on. And those who played there always end up coming back because of nostalgia, so it’s because of these and others that it continues to be successful”, argues Menezes.

United community

Another issue highlighted by the player is that the CipSoft game has a very united community that continues to feed the conversation and produce content, as the lives on Twitch show.

And he was one of those responsible for bringing together the Brazilian community over these 27 years. Menezes remembers that he has already held player meetings in more than 40 cities and that he has already brought together more than a thousand football fans Tibia all at once.

Another point that brings people together around these worlds filled with Brachiodemon, Destroyer, Dragolisk, Naga Archer, Werefox, Behemoth and other creatures, is the fact that It is possible to make gambling your source of income.

LokiRJ also owns TibiaWiki, the largest repository of information about the game in the world, according to him. Nowadays he lives off the money raised by his websites, and more recently he even opened the TibiaBR Store, a virtual store that sells items such as decks, runes, keychains and statues.

“Tibia It’s a really cool game and I think you only need to play it to understand why it makes you stick to it. Just like me, there are many other people who work and make a living creating characters and reselling coins. I even know stories of Venezuelans who managed to support their families because of the game”, he concludes.