MMO Report Tips World Of Warcraft As Leader

Thanks to VE3D for reprinting details of a new online gaming report discussing MMO trends and estimated game popularity. According to the excerpts from the Themis Group's report, online gaming will grow from $960 million revenues in 2003 to $4.10 billion in 2008, and the chart estimating "expected popularity of new persistent worlds... in descending order by projected subscriber base twelve months after launch" is headed by Blizzard's World of Warcraft, followed by Sony's EverQuest 2 and Turbine's Middle Earth Online. The report also suggests: "Success with a license challenges developers to find a way to implement the license's core appeal into an MMG-style game - a challenge which Final Fantasy Online met, but Star Wars Galaxies did not."

Comments

On the contrary...

[*weasel]

quite to the contrary.

the happy math for corporations is that the costs of a massmog fall as it becomes more popular.

consider bandwidth:
an OC-24 can handle 8 times more players than an OC-3, and yet it costs far less than 8 times more per month. (more like 3-4 times as much.) as the game becomes popular, and bandwidth usage increases -- bandwidth cost per player drops.

consider bugs:
using the 'shard' model (several 'copies' of the world that each serve a subset of the total playerbase) - the number of bugs to fix holds steady as the number of shards is increased. You don't have to make twice as much content to appease twice as many players - you just plug in another shard.

Also, as the game ages and becomes more popular, the bugs decline. (bugs such as anything that isn't a GM-request like harassment and such) the number of calls to customer support (eg. hardware compatibility problems, crashing problems) decline. the growth of the 'known bugs' means average call time itself drops. the cost of customer support per player drops.

consider hardware:
hardware costs decline as time goes on (and it takes time to become popular). what was a very expensive server farm for Sony when Everquest started in 1996 is now slower than the much cheaper server farm they last added around 4 years later. Hardware cost per player drops. Assuming the worst case, the cost of hardware doesn't measureably fall, still only means that hardware costs would hold steady as the game becomes more popular.

consider staff:
you need a certain number of people to ensure 24x7 service at a constant level of quality for a single server farm. yet you do not need twice as many people to cover twice as many servers. furthermore, over time, utilities and procedures will make the most commonn problems easier to deal with, and the bug fixes will make exceptions less frequent. server-maintenance staffing costs fall as the game becomes more popular and the game ages.

customer support for bugs also decreases as outlined above.

the only staff that need to increase in proportion to the growth in playerbase are in-game customer service staff (GMs). this at worst is another cost that holds steady as the game becomes more popular.

consider content:
also using the shard model (purely a business decision, not a technical one, i assure you) the same number of designers/artists that supply an expansion that will keep 1 shard of 2000 players happy, will keep an infinite number of shards of 2000 players happy.
average cost of content per player decreases.

also keep in mind that Sony had a 60% profit margin on monthly fees for Everquest when it cost $10/mo. now it costs 30% more (at the least), and do you honestly think they're spending a dime more on service and support?

Sony even had a profit on retail box sales, for the game and expansions, over their costs to develop the software and install the hardware. (the reason everyone charges for the box on the shelf - even if subscriptions flop they break even if they can sucker a couple hundred thousand people into trying it).

the way these games are designed, the bigger the game gets - the more they profit.

only when the player population starts to dwindle do the profit margins fall again. when you have too many underutilized servers. when you have too much staff. many companies will slowly consolidate and layoff to maintain their profit margins for awhile - but eventually running the game just won't be worth their time. They could put those resources on the Next Big Thing and go back to their old profit margin.