Do MMORPG's Cause People to Buy Fewer Games at Retail?

Grimwell writes NPD reports that the video games industry isn't doing so hot in 2006. Information on a report found at GameSpot indicates that consoles are down, but PC titles are up, led by MMORPG sales. From the article: "Do MMORPG's benefit the industry by bringing in more actively involved gamers? Or do they bleed money away from other companies in the industry as MMORPG players spend their money on subscriptions and skip out on trying other games that hit the shelf because they already have something to go home to?"

Comments

Re:Yes

[npsimons]

By that logic, movies would be better if they were 24 hours long, and novels should be 100,000 pages.

You're exaggerating; by your exaggerations, games would be 1,000 hours long

I love movies, and books, and games. That means I actually want to experience many of them, not buy one book and spend the next 5 months reading it, or reading it over and over again.

Must suck to be you then, what with the ADD and all. Some of us *like* books that take more than a week to read. Why do you think there are so many series of books out there? Some of us also like our games to be a bit more involved and more attention spanning than "shoot this bad guy, complete this quest, level grind, a winner is you!" which seems to be the norm these days.

When I hear that some RPG has "100 hours of gameplay" I usually suspect that's bullshit and is padded out with half-assed reasons to replay the game.

I don't know what games you've been playing that pull this padding bullshit, but the last games I played with 60+ hour playtimes actually justified this by having a plot and very large and detailed worlds to explore (FF7 and NWN for examples), no replay required. It sounds like what you are really against is not long games, but shitty game quality which will show up in longer and shorter games no matter what. In shorter games, it's just easier to hide or gloss over over.