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Project Massive's Latest Findings
The ongoing study into the habits of Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games, Project Massive, has released their latest findings. Next Generation has a breakdown on what the numbers mean with help from the researchers. As always, they have some interesting things to say. From the article: "Saying that developers who are operating a monthly (and not hourly) subscription service have a financial interest in compelling people to spend 40-80 hours a week playing their game ignores the market realities of bandwidth, customer service, and content creation. I had the tools at my disposal to shed some light on this issue and the fact that I have no corporate backing or economic interest in the outcome puts me in a good position to tell the truths that the data reveal." If you're a MMOG player, you can participate in the latest wave of questions.
How good of a game is None overall?
Hmm.
Plus, a lot of the questions are badly worded. For example, one question is:
The options are:
Well, I have online friends, but I didn't meet any of them through gaming; I met them via BBSes and MUDs. This means I'd want to select 0%, but there isn't an option --- I have no online friends simply isn't true.
Plus, there are occasional questions like How many hours do you spend attending to work/school/life responsibilities in the average week? What the hell does that mean? In one sense the answer is All of it, but I think it's actually trying to ask how much time I have that isn't what I consider to be free time. It could be much better worded.
A lot of the questions are like that, and some are worse, and I've had to leave a lot of the entries blank. This doesn't give a lot of confidence in their results...
This is just a survey. The numbers provided under the "what MMOG are you playing most" question only tell you the demographics of the survey sample, NOT the total online population.
The best breakdown of total active subscribers can be found here.
The fact that well over 50% of the respondants were playing primarily World of Warcraft tells you more about the results of the other questions. For instance, obviously you could not have been playing World of Warcraft for longer than 12 months, which is why the results of that question reveal a huge dropoff after that. That does not mean most people play an online game for under a year before changing, simply that the one they're playing now hasn't been around for longer than that.