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."

Comments

Time to buy stock

[svendsen]

in gold farming companies

Single player games

[toofast]

I hope game developers don't forget about those who prefer to stay out of the online experience. As a gamer in his early 30's, I got turned off by the online game experience years ago. At the risk of sounding scruff, I don't want to deal with childish and immature personalities, and the amount of crud coming from other peoples' microphones.

Re:Single player games

[toofast]

Perhaps because Slashdot has a great moderation system.. Nah, that can't be it.

Another thing..

[that IT girl]

Another thing that would help the sales is if they had some that didn't require huge amounts of memory and beefy graphics cards. I love those things and would have them if I could afford them, but I can't. The only thing stopping me from being a WoW nerd is my specs. No, these games wouldn't be as pretty and wouldn't appeal as much to some of the hardcore gamers, but it would get a lot more people "hooked" on the genre so to speak. Then a portion of those who never considered it before might start thinking of upgrading their equipment and playing higher-end games. Just speculating on that...thoughts, anyone?

Warhawk is a Shtty example.

[trdrstv]

Not because it's a bad game, but Sony fucked the Value proposition with the downloadable version by overpricing it, and crippling it with DRM. If this is how they plan to introduce full downloadable games then it won't grow nearly as big or as fast as they think.

The BluRay version (the one worth buying) comes with a Blue Tooth Headset, manual, packaging, etc... (which includes your ability to loan it out or trade / resell it). You also have the ability to play it splitscreen multiplayer, via Lan, or online. Also retailers can discount it in an attempt to get you into their store vs the next one.

The Downloadable version (for a grand savings of $20) can't be discounted or shared and locks the purchase to your account. You can't loan it, trade it, sell it and thanks to the dumbest implementation of DRM I've seen you can't even share it with someone locally on your couch. According to Sony, they didn't pay for the right to play it, so they can't play splitscreen multiplayer with you on the same machine (not even if they use a sub account under the master account that bought it).

Warhawk is a lot of fun despite having no single player campaign, but please, please, please buy the BluRay version and don't support this kind of DRM bullshit.