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Online Games to Make up a Third of All Game Sales by 2011
GameDaily reports on analyst research indicating that online games will be a huge part of the games market in a few years. The online portion of games sales hit roughly $3.8 billion in 2006, and is expected to grow at a rapid rate in the next few years, with Massively Multiplayer Online Games leading the way. By 2011 analysts expect that number to hit $11.8 billion, which would be about a third of all game sales. "'The main driver for sustained growth in the online games market will be the continued uptake of broadband services around the world,' said David Mercer, Principal Analyst at Strategy Analytics. 'Additionally, the very lucrative revenue opportunity in both the massively multiplayer segment and the electronic sell through market will continue to attract new entrants into the online games market.' While digital distribution is making more and more full games available for download for PC gamers (through services such as Steam, Direct2Drive, etc.), console makers have been much slower to offer entire games for download - although Sony is starting to do this on its PlayStation Network, with Warhawk being a primary example since it's available for download or on Blu-ray disc."
Actually, I wholeheartedly agree. The majority of the MMO "communities" are comprised mainly of people who didn't have the social prowess to situate themselves comfortably in a real community. Not only do you wind up with a ton of social rejects, you wind up with a ton of social rejects who were ostracized in the real world and now have a sort of anonymity with which to adapt vindictive and vicious personas that they can use to lash out at other people.
Toss in the fact that most MMOs reward players primarily on time spent playing, thus giving these people a digital sense of "accomplishment" to fill their otherwise unaccomplished lives (few things seem to me as pathetic as gloating over your prowess at pressing keys on a keyboard in PvP), and you have entire worlds filled with people that perfectly normal human beings generally prefer to avoid.
I would like to see a game where there is a rating system in place that applied account wide so that if you got a bad reputation for childish antics and generally bad behavior, you could be excised from the larger worldview of players who don't want to put up with little kids and angry social misfits.
Alas, I don't see that happening. People without dates, friends, or real hobbies have a lot of spare money, so catering to them makes a lot of sense.