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Although a little outdated, mmogchart had the total number of active MMO subscriptions at less than 20 million in 2008. Makes you wonder 1) what % of those 44 million are inactive accounts, and 2) what do they do when they find an inactive account - scrap it, save it, or purchase an untraceable game-time card to reactivate?

If their methods for stealing logins are that advanced, do you think they have some sort of organization of those inactive accounts by likelihood of them containing enough loot to be worth it?

Eve is tiny, on any chart it rides the bottom. Oh, it gets a LOT of attention but that is in no relation to its financial success.

(Bias alert: EVE player here) It might "ride the bottom" of the chart (although this chart ('til 2008) seems to indicate otherwise). But there aren't many commercial MMOs out there that a) are around since 2003 and b) have a continuously rising subscriber base. A lot MMOs seem to have a subscription peak shortly after their release and from that point on the subscriber base slowly declines, finally hitting its floor of players who really like that MMO and keep on playing it.

Oh, and I'm the archetype of a carebear. What still keeps me playing EVE after all these years is not it's PvP part, but the sandbox and "one server" approach. That's something unique I still have to find somewhere else in a non-fantasy setting.

Chart 2 is the "also ran" chart. Try chart 1: http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart1.html

There is good news. CCP is seeing steady growth.
http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart2.html

But it's hard to not be tempted by the lime green line.
http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart1.html

Sadly, the industry has changed. It's evident in the fact that we are talking about game studios selling out to "the man" just like musicians selling out to record labels and producing pop pablum.

There is good news. CCP is seeing steady growth.
http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart2.html

But it's hard to not be tempted by the lime green line.
http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart1.html

Sadly, the industry has changed. It's evident in the fact that we are talking about game studios selling out to "the man" just like musicians selling out to record labels and producing pop pablum.

One may choose to judge their position based on press releases and what amounts to speculation of their current allocation of resources. I prefer to instead judge them based on concrete facts of past release dates and current market position (>60%):
http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart7.html

and release cycles:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blizzard_games

This leads to a likely conclusion: Blizzard is not compelled to innovate in a certain gaming domain, so they have chosen not to do so. The press releases may in fact be accurate as to the delays caused by technical issues, but this should be put into the context of the larger issues that I have cited.

The internet is amazing. I found a site with charts!!

http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart1.html

This chart clearly illustrates that in the scope of MMO's FF was not terribly successful. It was successful in staying alive this much is true. And it has seen more success than few other MMO's. But are they a success in he general meaning of the word? No. They aspired to mediocrity expecting clients to rush in because the game had the final fantasy name stamped on it. And the results show. If they had made a fantastic game they would be trouncing WoW.

http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart7.html

If this chart is to be believed, FFXI is no WoW, but it's user base is larger than many of WoW's other competitors.

According to another chart on the site, 50% of all the active WOW subscriptions are asian, but I don't know how Bruce Woodcock defines an active subscription. http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart11.html A rough summary is: 30% asian WOW subscriptions. 30% non-asian WOW-subscriptions 40% subscriptons to other games

Apparently WOW had 60% of the world market in april 2008. I think this number was meassured in players.

http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart7.html
http://www.mmogchart.com/charts/

But I don't know if they have peaked now.

Apparently WOW had 60% of the world market in april 2008. I think this number was meassured in players.

http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart7.html
http://www.mmogchart.com/charts/

But I don't know if they have peaked now.

I have to say, I'm incredibly dubious of that bit about Runescape in the summary.

In fact, a former Jagex source tells me that when Jagex banned all IPs connected to gold selling, 'they lost 10 per cent of their membership, and still haven't recovered in terms of numbers since they did it two years ago. Even though they have almost stopped gold selling in RuneScape, it has cost them two million active accounts; i.e. there were four million players, there are now two million players, of which less than one million actually subscribe.'

For a start, by what manner of confused mathematics does two million out of four million consitute 10 per cent? Or is the claim that they lost 10% of their paying subscribers, and then a whole ton of players who were not paying them any money anyway? In any case, I think this chart should tell you everything you need to know about how well Jagex has recovered from this "setback". They've shown a considerable growth in the aftermath of the gold selling cull, because gold selling really was having a massively negative effect on the in-game economy. And a current Jagex source tells me that their non-subscriber membership has seen even greater growth. Quite a few of these players then do go on to subscribe. I'm honestly entirely confused as to how anyone could claim that this was somehow a loss for Jagex. In every MMO that I have played, any time the developers have taken action against gold selling, it has been an unequivocal win for the developers, for the players, and for the game as a whole.

He nearly ruined the original CoH before he left...

Prove it.

If you look at the actual numbers , you'll see that City of Heroes had its highest subscriber numbers while Jack was in charge. In fact, the thing that he's criticized most for, Enhancement Diversification, is widely regarded now as a necessary step for the game's gameplay systems to evolve as they have, and the game actually gained subscribers—that's right, gained subscribers—when it was released.

Jack-bashing is very popular with City of Heroes fans, but the truth of the matter is that City of Heroes was his baby and that the game's best years financially so far have been under his reign.

I don't mean to take away from Matt Miller's competence, because he's doing a fine job, and City of Heroes continues to be a great game. I also don't mean to imply that Jack was perfect, because I disagreed with him on one or two fundamental points. But this whole "Jack was destroying the company" line is so tired and really, it's always been nothing but a bunch of nonproductive BS propagated by fanboy forumites who don't know what they're talking about.

As for the whole "he didn't listen to the subscribers" crap, if developers listened to everything the subscribers whined about, we'd undoubtedly have a "make me level 50" button by now, complete with purple IOs, infinite influence, the ability to take all powersets on a single character, and a power that recharges instantly that immediately defeats all enemies. PvP matches would be won based on who could hit the button first. There's a reason that developers don't jump through hoops to do everything players ask for, why all games, even City of Heroes as it exists today, are the visions of their developers (duh...). If everyone got what everyone wanted, it would effectively destroy any game.

The funny thing is that I see plenty of posts on the City of Heroes forums making the same tired old claims that you're making about Jack about the current developers. Waaah.

Patent filed in Aug 3 2000. Prior art in the form of launched MMORPGs: Dec 31 1996 The Realm Online Sep 30 1997 Ultima Online Sep ?? 1998 Lineage: The Blood Pledge Mar 16 1999 Everquest Oct 31 1999 Asheron's Call Source: http://www.mmogchart.com/analysis-and-conclusions/

You couldn't point me at them anyway, because they don't exist. You don't even have to show me a 'removed' post - if a post was deleted, there would still be posts referencing it. Your 'all posts critical of NC get deleted' position is completely refuted by the existance of this thread, which includes comment gems like "the animation engine was written by someone under the influence of some heavy-duty 'shrooms".

In answer to your second lie, here's the populations chart: For your perusal. Your assertion that subs are dropping by '8,000 a month' is so far off target it's hilarious. Taking a round figure of the most favourable negative difference on that chart, they were 200,000 about 2 years ago, and they're about 140,000 now. 60,000 / 24 months is 2,500 a month, not 8,000, and that's the worst case scenario from those statistics.

If you have a better source, please feel free to supply it, otherwise I'm forced to conclude that you're talking out of your arse.

Here's a neato graph of Eve Online subs

quoted from CCP CEO Hilmar Petursson on 17 Aug 07

"We began full-force in 2000," he continued, "by raising $3 million, which is about one-tenth of the current MMORPG." Its flagship product, EVE Online has been in development for three years, "the last year of which we had no money, but everyone turned up to work anyway despite us not being able to pay them," he admitted.

"This created a core of people who have gone through hell with us, and helps with the community especially," said Petursson.

"We had publishing problems with Simon & Schuster," he continued, "which resulted in no distribution or marketing, despite having 30,000 players. We ended up buying the rights back at 2002 and going into digital distribution. This has forced us to treat [EVE] more as a service than a product, and using viral marketing techniques to propagate the product out, long before others were doing this."

Petursson said CCP is planning a "massive graphical upgrade to the game," and also predicted that this year would see a total of 200,000 subscribers, after reaching 100,000 subscribers in February of last year.

"We have had different growth than most other games," said Petursson, "because the whole game takes place on a single shard, which allows escalation of power and social equity as the size of the community grows."

The rest of the article

EVE seems to have succeeded because the people who made it love it and won't give up.

Or lack of there of... Can I end that with a preposition?

Looking at this thing you can really tell when the game was launched, and when the free month ran out. And there is no reliable data since. Not a promising sight for a WoW-killer.

But don't pretend like it is the only way. There's a lot that WoW does better than Runescape. Graphics, would be a big one. WoW is just a beautiful game, especially with the Lich King expansion. Part of that is because it uses and requires 3D hardware, but also that is because there were some really good artists behind it. IT actually isn't the most high end, photorealistic game out there. I've got games that hit the GPU a lot harder. However the art assets in it are very well done, and the game looks fantastic for it.

So while there is certainly value in games that are easy to access, there is also value in games that have more design effort behind them. That, of course, requires more money and also is likely to require a more powerful computer to render.

As far as numbers go, I think you are confused. For one, the 10 million number cited isn't people who've tried WoW, it is the number of people who are currently paying Blizzard on a monthly basis to play. For US and Europe that means people with the month paid out (you pay per month in those regions) in Asia it means people who have paid to play at least once that month (it's pay per hour over there).

Now look at this chart: http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart1.html

Unless they are drastically wrong, and as far as I know they are the best numbers out there, Runescape doesn't have near the players you are claiming.

So I think it is wonderful that there is a game like that. It is somewhere in between a more expensive, large, typical MMO and a totally free web based game like one of my coworkers likes to play (I can't remember the name right now). However please don't pretend it's the One True Way that all game studios should be going.

http://www.mmogchart.com/charts/

There's some data.

If your numbers of players are declining, your product is in a death spiral, even if it takes 10 years to drop to something equating to nil. If you are not doing well financially now, having fewer players - meaning less cash coming in - means you can afford to develop less and have even less chance of turning things around. And there are several MMOs that have closed down.

http://www.mmogchart.com/charts/ - have fun checking it out.

To Paul Sams, Blizzard COO: What is the hardest thing in managing the operations of what is arguably the largest MMO? At 10,000,000 subscribers, what are your number one concerns? What challenges do you face in an average day?

To Jeffrey Kaplan (aka Tigole), game director for World of Warcraft: Do you feel that Blizzard's dominance hurts other MMORPGs? Do you see yourself in direct competition with the other studios & products? Do you ever play these games to see what has been reused or what is new? Do you ever feel like another MMO has extended from World of Warcraft? Do you owe any credit to previous MMOs that have influenced your creations?

Yep it's not like anyone played FFXI or anything.

Ya, that's about right

See these charts:
http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart1.html
http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart2.html

Notice the arcs of SOE's products. This company is washed out. And no wonder; the way they jerk their players around is unbelievable. This company is run by sociopaths.

See these charts:
http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart1.html
http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart2.html

Notice the arcs of SOE's products. This company is washed out. And no wonder; the way they jerk their players around is unbelievable. This company is run by sociopaths.

As soon as LOTRO launches...
Dungeons and Dragons Online, for example. ...
Vanguard. ...
AOC. ...
Tabula Rasa.

I think the problem with most of those games is that they are primarily PvE and grind-heavy. AoC is probably the exception but has really floundered on content at their level cap. Having to buy a new computer to play some of these because of their graphics was a downfall too (AoC, definitely Vanguard). D&D was just so-so. But all of that was predicted in commercial and beta tester reviews. Read the DDO & Tabula Rasa reviews from slashdot. Not pretty but were mostly just rehashes of other earlier reviews. And while Vanguard wasn't reviewed here just check out a few of the articles that covered the game before and immediately after release. After seeing those did anyone really think they were going to hold casual gamers interest?

I'm not saying that WAR is going to become the 10 million+ juggernaut that WOW has, but I will say that, baring major problems, it will become the premier PvP MMO that people play. Since WOW has already softened PvE'ers up to the idea of PvP, I think a lot of people are more willing to play a primarily PvP game especially since they've removed the ability to gank lower-level players. I would love to hear the preorder numbers for WAR. I imagine that one of the most anticipated MMOs of the last few years is going to have a very good launch.

According to mmochart.com there are about 4.5 million North America and European players for WOW. As much as I like WOW and have played it for years, I do feel that they are going to see a major hit in those markets but will probably continue to 'grow' due to Asia. Until WAR offers an Asia subscription they aren't ever going to flirt with WoW numbers. And besides, do they need to? With 500,000 subscribers I think any game would be considered a success and continue to get updated.

Apparently? OK, so not a lot, but according to MMOGChart.com, they've both got a little under 200,000 subscribers, which isn't too shabby.

Granted that doesn't exactly match Blizzard's 10 million, but hell, what does?

EQ2 is still the third largest MMORPG (if you ignore Asian MMORPGs and Dofus) behind WoW and EVE.

So, yes, it still has a presence amongst western MMORPG players. Well, if you completely and totally ignore WoW.

You mean something like this?

the most widely used Battle.net cheats are actually licensed under the GNU GPL - there's even some kind of application framework for interacting with the game programmatically floating around on the web...

The MMO Asheron's Call, a contemporary of better-known Everquest, has had a framework like this for years, known as Decal.

Interestingly, the developers of asheron's call (Turbine) chose to embrace the 3rd party development community. As a result, players have used the framework to extend and improve the game client; many community improvements have eventually been rolled into the official client (e.g., showing the health/mana of your party members in a single panel, and allegiance-wide chat). Turbine even went as far as to hire several of the top decal plugin developers.

This has lead to a fairly unique game, with player-run bots running unattended trades, offering trade-skill services, and help new players with magical enhancements.

Of course, with all the positive contributions that enhance gameplay, there have been negative ones as well. Combat macroing became commonplace, allowing characters to advance without human intervention; at first this was more or less endorsed by Turbine, but a few years ago they finally ruled against running combat macros while away from the keyboard. To enforce this, they started giving basic Turing tests to players that were suspected of violating this rule.

It's been an interesting experiment. I definitely respect Turbine for *not* taking the Blizzard route, and banning players by the tens of thousands, and suing third party developers. Their philosophy that it's the developer's responsibility for creating exploitable bugs, and not the players' fault for exploiting them is certainly player friendly.

But at the end of the day, it's hard to say if it was all for the better, as the game slowly fades into obscurity, with subscription numbers a tenth of what they were at the game's peak. Those of us who played during the game's heyday certainly enjoyed the ride, but blizzard's aggressive anti-cheating stance may be necessary to building a billion-dollar a year revenue stream.

You're exactly right, I'm basing that entire post from a WoW player's perspective.

And sure, not everyone plays or has played WoW that will play AoC/Warhammer.

But if these are of any remotely correct value:
http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart1.html
http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart2.html
http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart3.html
http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart5.html

Suddenly you can see why I based my post off of that. Nothing even compares, even a little bit.

Every other MMO that has been released or will be released in the near future has been hailed by one person or another as the "great WoW killer" and in that regard, they have all failed.

It's just my opinion that they will all continue to keep failing until we get a company willing to push the release dates back enough to get a decent game out.

You're exactly right, I'm basing that entire post from a WoW player's perspective.

And sure, not everyone plays or has played WoW that will play AoC/Warhammer.

But if these are of any remotely correct value:
http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart1.html
http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart2.html
http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart3.html
http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart5.html

Suddenly you can see why I based my post off of that. Nothing even compares, even a little bit.

Every other MMO that has been released or will be released in the near future has been hailed by one person or another as the "great WoW killer" and in that regard, they have all failed.

It's just my opinion that they will all continue to keep failing until we get a company willing to push the release dates back enough to get a decent game out.

You're exactly right, I'm basing that entire post from a WoW player's perspective.

And sure, not everyone plays or has played WoW that will play AoC/Warhammer.

But if these are of any remotely correct value:
http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart1.html
http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart2.html
http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart3.html
http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart5.html

Suddenly you can see why I based my post off of that. Nothing even compares, even a little bit.

Every other MMO that has been released or will be released in the near future has been hailed by one person or another as the "great WoW killer" and in that regard, they have all failed.

It's just my opinion that they will all continue to keep failing until we get a company willing to push the release dates back enough to get a decent game out.

You're exactly right, I'm basing that entire post from a WoW player's perspective.

And sure, not everyone plays or has played WoW that will play AoC/Warhammer.

But if these are of any remotely correct value:
http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart1.html
http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart2.html
http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart3.html
http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart5.html

Suddenly you can see why I based my post off of that. Nothing even compares, even a little bit.

Every other MMO that has been released or will be released in the near future has been hailed by one person or another as the "great WoW killer" and in that regard, they have all failed.

It's just my opinion that they will all continue to keep failing until we get a company willing to push the release dates back enough to get a decent game out.

That one backfired. If you believe the data on http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart2.html, SWG is down to about 100k subscribers. According to the same chart, EVE Online (which is also not for everyone) is approaching the 250k from below, after 5 years of steady growth.

So a well designed niche game can be a better success than a would-be mass market title :-)

I think the pre-existing fan-base explains the initial uptake, but I don't think it explains the insane, continued, and even accelerating growth. Especially compared to the other games on the list, some of which I would consider to be "better" games.

I think that if they had written their game with higher end hardware in mind, the growth would have slowed after that initial fan-base got their fix. I think there are two reasons behind it. First, it would have taken them less time to saturate the market of people with that type of gaming rig. And second, the types of people who are into those types of gaming rigs are also likely to move on to the next big thing when it comes out. Those gamers already left WoW for LotR, and that's where I would bet most of Conan's players come from too.

The real problem with MMOs like WoW is that the meat of the game isn't all that fun.

You say this, and yet WoW is possibly the most successful game of all time. Only The Sims can definitely top WoW in sheer sales numbers on the PC, but WoW has over 10 million *active subscriber* (and an unknown number of sales) -- and subscribers are more meaningful (and valuable) than plain sales.

It is by *far* the most successful MMO ever:

http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart1.html

Clearly, a lot of people find it to be quite fun.

Recognize that you, your interests, and your arguments simply represent a minor fringe group and that, while your opinion is valid on a personal level, your comments hold no value in the wider world of gamers.

BTW: A fast look at http://www.mmogchart.com/ and you'll see that, yes, EQ1 had over 500,000 subscribers. And that yes, EQ1 subscriptions went down at the same time EQ2 came out.

1. Half Life 34676 servers, 123626 players
2. Half Life 2 32855 servers, 59992 players
3. Battlefield 2 4301 servers, 11245 players
4. Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory 2911 servers, 9100 players
5. Enemy Territory: Quake Wars 1112 servers, 5142 players
6. Unreal Tournament 2004 1608 servers, 4220 players
7. Battlefield 2142 1534 servers, 4044 players
8. Call of Duty 2295 servers, 3009 players
9. Call of Duty 2 533 servers, 2948 players
10. Quake 3: Arena 1835 servers, 2766 players
11. Soldier of Fortune 2 710 servers, 1875 players
12. Americas Army: Special Forces 1823 servers, 1804 players

I dunno, it seems like a rather circular statement about the "emerging" field of games studies: "I don't think it is healthy for the field of games studies, which is still emerging, to be so fixated on a single game franchise -- no matter what the franchise. A few years ago, it might have been The Sims or GTA, now it's WoW"

Doesn't 'emerging' seem to suggest that there is going to be a rather narrow sample size, to begin with? And I don't really fault researchers focusing on WoW; I mean yes, they could grab whatever game is on the shelf, but you have no idea if it's going to be another WoW or if it's going to be Vangers (look it up). I would imagine that anyone in this 'emerging' field would want their results to be reasonably relevant, interesting, and applicable to as broad a field as possible.
Right now, there's really only one game that hits that mark, and that's WoW.

For those researchers who are looking for other interesting fields of study in this area, I would make some other suggestions.
Look at http://www.mmogchart.com/:
  - The Matrix Online, Asheron's Call, Anarchy Online all have very interesting player number curves. Why?
  - WW2OL has fewer subscribers than most of the 'big name' games and quite a few of the middling ones, yet it seems to be surviving where others are shutting down. Why?
  - Runescape - real MMOG or webgame? Is the distinction important?
  - These various games have a host of pay/play models, what's working, what isn't?
  - MMOGs are in a way the descendants of online mass flight sims - Warbirds, etc. How do flight sim pay/play models compare? User numbers and retention?

WoW has also borrowed many ideas from the games before it, you could as well have said that WoW is an Asheron's Call or Everquest clone.

Not really. When a game triples or quadruples the number of players in a given genre it is not a clone of the earlier endeavors. It did something the others did not, and did so in a very very big way. See http://www.mmogchart.com/, click on "Subscribers 120+".

Not to derail this too much, but I do believe that complaining that the WoW launch had "Major lag" is overlooking that nobody, Blizzard included, had any idea what WoW would become. They probably thought by February of '05 they might have 500,000 subscribers, which was roughly the peak of EQ's success. I'm sure the concept that there would be (at that time) 1.2 million people playing (based on information from http://www.mmogchart.com/ )was almost their publisher's wet dream, not something that could actually happen. Most of the lag was caused by Blizzard underestimating how popular their product would be and not building up their infrastructure accordingly. Sure, it's an error on Blizzard's part at the end of the day, but all the same had you said in May of 2004 that there would be an MMO out there with 8 million+ people paying to play it, I think anyone around you would have asked for whatever it was you were smoking. That was a major monkey-wrench in their launch plans, but I'm sure most companies would kill to have the problem of "there's too many people paying us". In contrast, their expansion's launch was fairly smooth. There was a lot of off-hours instability, but the general performance during prime-time was quite good overall and the game mechanics were adjusted appropriately to account for the insane rush of people in the same areas.

Hopping back on topic, this reminds me of another article I read on /. talking about MMO design and how many MMO developers don't seem to grasp that much of what they do is downright annoying to their customers and could probably be done differently and that people would probably respond. Most of his criticism seemed to be leveled at EQ (and those EQ-ish features that WoW seems to have included) and when Vanguard was presented as a refinement of EQ, it seemed to me that his thoughts on at least that count were correct. While it appeals to some people, if you're looking for the mass-market appeal, you need to *gasp* appeal to the mass-market and not a niche! While they might have targeted a niche from the get-go, it's still a very foolish idea to look at the majority of the marketplace and tell them "We're not interested in your money, now go away."

I too grow tired of hearing about "The game sucks, but it has a great vision!" (and it's been said about more than just Vanguard). When someone figures out that how to balance solo play with group play with PvP and PvE so that any combination you want to choose is viable and actually delivers it...that's an MMO who's "vision" I'd like to hear about. WoW works for now, but their developers are oftentimes just as guilty of forgetting the core question any games developer should be asking themselves: "Is it fun? And not just to me, but other people?" Seems like that question never got asked around Sigil....nor did the "Will this even run properly?" question. Were there external factors to that? Sure, money is a big driving force in any business. Still, "release now, patch later" is the singularly most stupid business practice to indulge in. Good customers don't mind waiting for quality, and when you release it they will be happy they waited. Bad customers do mind, but probably nothing you release would satisfy them in the long-term anyway. Release a bad or half-baked product and you lose them both.

Maybe SOE can fix the game, but given their body of work with Star Wars: Galaxies, The Matrix Online and PlanetSide (a great concept game that SOE did nothing with and allowed to wither on the vine)...I wouldn't hold out much hope. If a quality game emerges though, I'll be happy to be proven wrong.

http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart7.html

Anyone know of any newer data?

Your saying Final Fantasy XI isn't popular and almost no-ones heard of it? or was that sarcasm.

It may have a small share http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart7.html but it's certainly known by anyone that knows FF games.

After all, we're talking about a game with less than 1/10th the players of World of Warcraft, and yet there seem to be almost as many stories about it on Slashdot.

According to MMOGChart.com, that would cover literally every MMORPG other than Lineage I and Lineage II. Considering that chart is almost a year old and those trends have in fact continued (WoW has broken 8 million subscribers), it's entirely possible that there are literally no other MMORPGs with at least 1/10th the players of WoW.

http://mmogchart.com/Chart2_files/Subscriptions_11 327_image001.gif

FFXI had more subscriptions then you might think, up to at least last year.
It had an official port to 360 as well.

My experience with MMOs is pretty limited: I played some UO during the launch, played YoHoHo! Puzzle Pirates for a few months, and tried Second Life once. My understanding is that, for the most part (and particularly WoW) they're about dungeon-leveling. Kill monsters, level up, kill bigger monsters, continue. There's not much variety in what you can do. The Ultima series (and to some extent Bethesda's Elder Scrolls) gave you some variety: you can spend hours, if not days, not killing monsters and still enjoy it. As the article mentions, there's other MMOs: puzzle ones, racing ones, sports ones, FPSs ones.

Well... what if all those were one and the same? More on that in a second. A quick look at MMOG Chart reveals the market to be, at most, about 15 million players. Considering the increasing popularity of the genre, increasing access to broadband worldwide, and economic conditions worldwide, the market will be increasing. Maybe some day there will be 30 million or 50 million MMO players.

What this means is that there's room for other types of games (I can see a Cabela's Big Game Hunt MMO as being appealing). If Ultima Online can survive a decade on 100,000 subscribers, we could see an explosion of focused , low-population MMOs if the overall market keeps increasing. It would just be a continuation of what we see today.

But back to my earlier question? Why do these all need to be separate games? Why can't they all be in one?

What if there was a game that combined all of these elements and let players decide what they wanted to do? I'll put my example in "real-world" terms but this would obviously be modified to sci-fi or fantasy terms as needed. Let's say you've got a dog breeder that wants to breed his prize dogs with a specific type of wild dog (this player largely plays a Nintendogs-type of sub-game). This wild dog is only found in a very dangerous nature reserve (dungeon) controlled by an enemy territory. He'd have to hire mercenaries to infiltrate and capture this animal (traditional combat MMO players). The enemy territory also has players protecting their resources.

Let's say something needs to be transported. Ordinarily, you might be able to use in-game methods (CPU controlled) but you may need to hire a smuggler to take it (combat driving game). The goal of this, the end result is to have a lot of different sub-communities while on the larger scale, you've got a lot of players you're interacting with.

I think that's the "next level" in MMOs and it would solve a lot of the problems with current ones (albeit introducing new ones).

Ran across this site a while back before WoW launched and it has been fairly regularly updated, check out that WoW impact on the 120k+ chart :)

http://www.mmogchart.com/

OK, how about this as a basis? I'd still like to fling some poo at you though.

PC games != retail sales.

PC games = retail sales + download sales + recurring subscriptions + ad-based revenue + Korean microtransactions. Heck, World of Warcraft's recurring subscriptions alone count for an estimated 100 million dollars Per Month. Again, WoW is making a bit over A BILLION DOLLARS A YEAR, not including box sales, and it only accounts for an estimated 50% of paid MMPORPG subscriptions out there.

If US videogame sales are estimated at 10 billion dollars per year, it's not unreasonable to imagine 5 billion dollars coming from MMPORPG subscriptions, online purchases, the softer retail sales, and (yes) computer upgrades to facilitate gaming (are there really any other kinds?)

The real question is will it take a part of WoW's part of the pie.