US Gamers Spend $3.8 Billion On MMOs Yearly 177
eldavojohn writes "A new report from Games Industry indicates that MMO gamers in the United States paid $3.8 billion to play last year, with an analysis of five European countries bringing the total close to $4.5 billion USD. In America, the report estimated that payments for boxed content and client downloads amounted to a measly $400 million, while the subscriptions came to $2.38 billion. Hopefully that will fund some developer budgets for bigger and better MMOs yet to come. The study also found that roughly a quarter of the US population plays some form of MMO. Surely MMOs are shaping up to be a juicy industry, and a market that can satisfy people of all walks of life."
I'd prefer to see lost productivity (Score:4, Insightful)
rather than what people spend on the games. And I mean at the workplace, not at home.
Re:Corporate Shills (Score:4, Insightful)
Why do I suddenly feel old?
Re:I'd prefer to see lost productivity (Score:3, Insightful)
It seems to me that someone that substitutes time working at their job for playing various games at said job isn't going to be doing much productive either way.
Welcome to the world of fast-food computer gaming (Score:5, Insightful)
Why? Because MMOs will be what will eventually remain of games, at least A-Title games, in the forseeable future. Think of it: Recurring revenue, no copying worries, customer loyality even big brand names could only dream of today (aka fanboys that will defend any shit you cram down their throat) and even the "this sucks" lamenters will pay. They might not play (for now, when their favorite class gets nerfed) but they still pay!
Even add-ons are superior to sequels, despite (usually) not going for the same amount of dough. Think about it: A sequel may or may not be to your customer's liking, so he may or may not buy it. He WILL have to buy the add-on just to stay in the loop, like it or not, buy it or the months you "invested" in the game are wasted. And just like the main game, you will sell them not only today but for years to come. And when your next add-on is due, bundle the original and the first add-on and again you can sell them to all those that didn't catch on earlier. Oh, did I forget to mention that you can still sell your same old, dated game five years down the road? Yes, that's right. You can still sell your title five years after its initial release and people will still buy it! Now name a single non-MMO that can boast this (I'm not talking about the 2-bucks-bin here, ok?).
Wait, it gets better. If you craft your game carefully and make it juuuust easy enough that you can play it with half your brain's attention, people will actually go out and buy TWO, read it, TWO copies of your game. Or three! Or four! Watch people buy their own group, their own raid, their own ... well, however large you make your sensible grouping, you just have to dumb it down enough. And people will go and buy not one, but five or ten copies of your game and pay for every single one every month.
And since companies tend to follow exactly that logic, this is what we get: Shallow, repetitive, faceroller MMOs that fulfill only a single letter in MMORPG. And that's only if the servers are not offline.
Re:Oh the math... (Score:5, Insightful)
Multiply that $319M by 12 months and the numbers make a bit more sense.
Re:I'd prefer to see lost productivity (Score:3, Insightful)
A friend of mine was a help desk monkey at a college. You know, the guys most people call when their computer breaks and they don't know what the Hell is going on.
If no one made a call, then he was to sit on his ass. If he played games, well... it's not entirely *allowed*, but he basically has paid free time. Many a Diablo II quest was completed during his work hours because he literally had nothing to do but was on the clock.
No not really (Score:5, Insightful)
While MMOs are attractive, they aren't easy. An MMO requires a substantial investment to start up, far more than a single player game. Also MMOs are the sort of thing that there's more of a limit on how many there can be. Many people will pay for one MMO, far less will pay for two MMOs, and so on. As such to get in to the market you either have to get a new segment of gamers that weren't doing MMOs before, or take gamers away from MMOs already out there. With a single player game, you just have to convince someone they want to play your game, they may well play others.
MMOs will doubtless continue to be very popular, but they are hardly all that is going to be out there. I mean look at Blizzard they are -THE- kings of the MMO world currently, yet they are making Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3, both non-MMO games. Reason is they know they'll make money on those too. Heck some of their WoW players will buy them. Just because people play MMOs doesn't mean they don't also play other games. I've played an MMO of one kind or another for about 6 years now or so. However I still buy single player games all the time. Just because I like MMOs doesn't mean that's all I play.
So sorry, I'm not buying this doom and gloom "Only MMOs are the future!" All evidence seems to say there will continue to be games of many different types. After all, MMOs are not new, yet game studios continue to roll out non-MMO titles as well as MMO ones.
As for your analogy, well guess what? Fast food hasn't taken over the world. You are right that I can find McDonalds all over my city. However I can find hundreds of non fast food restaurants too. There are sit down chain restaurants like Olive Garden or P.F. Changs, and there are plenty of little ones that are just someone running their own thing. Fast food has not replaced where you can go to eat, it has supplemented it. Also turns out that you can eat fast food for one meal, and then eat at a nice place the next, they don't get mad at you or anything.
I think it'll be the same for MMOs. Sure, a lot of people are going to play them, but it won't be the only thing they'll play.
Re:Not me (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't really see MMOs as a waste of money. The game fee and then the monthly probably give way more hour/$ of entertainment than most $60 console games. What MMOs do waste is tons of time.
Re:I'd prefer to see lost productivity (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, as the previous posters illustrate, sometimes there just isn't anything to do.
Also, a software developer firm's boss once told me one of his best worker liked to play Civilization during work day but he didn't really have a problem with that, as it helped him unwind for a bit and then continue working even better. Relaxing for a bit often gives better results than just trying to push it to the limits.
Re:Corporate Shills (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, I guess we could discuss endlessly what has been tried so far and what has failed. In general, what makes the "holy Trinity" so stable is simply that it's been done and tried and will work. Hands down. But whatever "innovation" you want to bring along will not inherently work. The road to make it "good" is a lot longer than simply tossing healer, tank and a handful of DD into battle because that model has been established and so many hours have already been invested in making it "work". If you dump the same amount of hours behind any other model, it will certainly work out too.
The question is not "what would be better?" but rather "what company would be willing to invest the time it needs?". Take whatever concept you could think of and ponder whether a company would really want to drop the time (and thus money) on it to make it "good", to iron out the wrinkles and to actually take the incredible risk that their customers won't think like them, that they consider it inferior. And, again no matter how good the idea, they WILL think it is inferior because the first incarnation simply cannot be anything but inferior. It has by far fewer test hours than the Trinity. A system that has been optimized by MMOs and their players over more than a decade now.
So if you want to bring along a "new" system, you first of all have to convince your players that this is new and that it will probably look inferior for now, but they have to see that it has potential. And then you have to find a way to keep your investors from wanting to dump your game onto SOE when they don't see their ROI forthcoming within a year or two.
If you cannot do that, don't even ponder touching the Trinity. No matter what idea you might have, you can't implement it without sinking your MMO.
Re:Welcome to the world of fast-food computer gami (Score:3, Insightful)
Why would you pay for any game you don't think isn't fun? However, many gamers find MMO's fun.
I have played WoW and while I still think its too much grinding and too less PVP, I still think it would be quite fun if I just had the time now. But I like crafting and building the world (I coded a similar project as a teen, even spend my school hours thinking how the AI would interact :), so I currently play Haven & Hearth [havenandhearth.com] beta, even if it's a little bit buggy but I like the concept.
I used to think MMOs were a waste of time... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Corporate Shills (Score:3, Insightful)
Ok, allow me to elaborate.
I've been playing various MMOs, from the mainstream ones to the obscure ones that few know of and fewer played. Let's see...
I've seen WoW, played it even for a while. It was a nice game to raid in when there was something good on TV that I wanted to see where a game that needed my attention would really have been distracting. ... everything. It just suffered the fate of every old MMO: Top heavy and deserted. Old players leave, no new players come in and eventually it gets stale. But that game really gives me fond memories... a skill system complex enough to earn a master's degree for, and an equipment planning scheming that makes old Diablo go pale in comparison. Also one of the first games that got third party addons... though mostly due to the lack of traffic encryption. ;) ... well, in a multiplayer game it would be nice to see someone else in a while. ;)
I also played games like Earth and Beyond (which should be taught as the example for cardinal sins as far as MMOs go, how to dump a game with a great storyline by doing about everything wrong).
Anarchy Online was a great game with a great idea, great tools, great
DAoC is the poster child for "how to kill a game with an expansion", some thing that WoW might accomplish with their next. Just in case the groupfinder wasn't enough. But I ramble. Still one of the best games I played. At least 'til the ToA expansion.
Vanguard is something that really makes me weep. It is maybe the game with the most interesting crafting system to date, it has such a great, interesting "additional sphere" with its diplomacy, it just suffered the usual "push the premature child out the door" dagger to the backside. It was pushed out half baked, people dumped it, now it's empty. Pity. Good game. Really is. Just
EQ2 was HARD at release. You needed a group and you needed a group that plays well. A bit like EQ. Just more badass hardcore mode. Tough like a nail and about as comely. Needless to say that was NOT what people wanted. And, to be honest, it was even a bit too far out for my tastes too. So people left in droves and in return it was dumbed down to WoW levels, making the ones leave, too, who liked it difficult... you can imagine the rest.
Tabula Rasa. Another one that went too early for my tastes. Another one killed by a release too early (ok, after seven years of development, investors could be excused for getting uneasy). But it was really ready for release - The moment it was shut down it really was. But at least it was something else for a change. The formula could have worked with a bit more tweaking... anyway, it's over.
And EvE, yes, a good game. Unforgiving, tough, but it takes too much of my time away to make me "enjoy" it. I didn't want a second job, and the way I play it it's what a friend of mine described very aptly: Excel with nicer graphics. I am more metagaming than gaming. Or rather, I'm not playing the game, I'm gaming the play.
Perpetuum Online seems to go the same road (hell, it seems they got more than "a few ideas" from EvE... not going into detail here, apply for the beta if you want to take a look. Imagine EvE on a planet).
So you might notice that I have played a few MMOs in my time. I also tried Fallen Earth, I've been waiting for it since, well, '07 I think. To say I'm not really impressed is maybe an understatement. Well, maybe I should go back again and take a look at it once more, but at release the world was quite ... bland. Don't get me wrong, something happy-go-lucky would certainly be out of place in an end time MMO, but seriously, it was just ... empty. Nothing to, well, do.
Still, nothing on the horizon that could get me interested. What would I want? I don't really know, maybe a blend of AO, DAoC with a hint of EvE mixed in, creative and meaningful crafting and a smidge of Vanguard's diplomacy. But I guess I won't find something custom made in a cookie-cutter world.
MMO's are like the sitcom of the gaming world... (Score:4, Insightful)
Whenever I watch people playing MMOs and have tried them myself, I've noticed that the graphical and story quality is far inferior to a game with a fixed beginning and ending.
It's the difference between episodic television and a film. A feature film has very high quality standard packed into every minute, because the entire story arc is contained within that time frame, and they can afford the best actors, director, vfx etc. for that hour and a half which will play to large captive audiences paying a one time fee to see it. Episodic television spans a much larger time frame, and the average episode is budgeted accordingly, with many sets and situations being re-used.
The top end of standalone games are extremely high quality and offer an excellence in storytelling that is unmatched in the MMO universe. They also keep your interest until the logical conclusion. With an MMO, you eventually lose interest and it just sort of fades away. A few MMOs have gone bankrupt and crafted actual 'endings' to their worlds, but that's as far as it goes. The whole point is to get people to keep paying that monthly fee, ad infinitum.
Playing MMOs is the equivalent to watching television. It's just scratching an itch of compulsive behavior.
My most recent game experience was BioShock II. What a great game in general, especially towards the end when it gets weird. Machinarium is a $5 puzzle RPG game on Steam that is very engaging and well crafted. I've played all the Half Life games as well, and most of the big FPS games going back to the original Doom. The industry has come a long way. Great interactive stories. I think the turning point was the original Unreal single player game, which dropped this huge and colorful world in your lap after the Voodoo cards made it technically possible. Since then we've experienced progressively more detailed and sophisticated storytelling as technology and budgets allow.
While MMOs have a higher dollar figure overall, I hope that highly produced downloaded content will always have a place. The multiplayer games I enjoy the most are the Starcraft type, where you can play a short campaign and be done. (no, that's not the same as going for a 'raid' in an MMO...)
I realize that there are two very distinct camps, and that the MMO players tend to be the younger ones with a lot of spare time on their hands. In any given Blizzard Q&A thread on Slashdot, the MMO related questions always far outnumber the Starcraft II / Diablo III questions, so the disparity in numbers is even evident there.
Why are MMOs considered a waste of time? (Score:3, Insightful)
One thing I've never really understood is why there is such a strong belief among many people that MMOs are a huge waste of time and suck the life out of people. I play WoW an average of two hours a day, judging from my /played time. Most of my co-workers seem to think I have no life because of this. (I have no life, but it's not because of WoW.) Most information I've seen shows the average American watching five or so hours of TV a day. I really fail to see why MMOs are considered so terrible by many people, but watching that much TV isn't...
On that note, WHAT THE HELL DO PEOPLE WATCH FOR FIVE HOURS A DAY, EVERY DAY? Do they just get home from work, turn on the TV, and watch it until they go to sleep? I'd be hard pressed to find five hour long shows to watch every day. Even with DVDs of my favorite shows, I can recall very, very few times where I've watch five hours of television in a single day, let alone every day for life...