US Gamers Spend $3.8 Billion On MMOs Yearly

eldavojohn writes "A new report from Games Industry indicates that MMO gamers in the United States paid $3.8 billion to play last year, with an analysis of five European countries bringing the total close to $4.5 billion USD. In America, the report estimated that payments for boxed content and client downloads amounted to a measly $400 million, while the subscriptions came to $2.38 billion. Hopefully that will fund some developer budgets for bigger and better MMOs yet to come. The study also found that roughly a quarter of the US population plays some form of MMO. Surely MMOs are shaping up to be a juicy industry, and a market that can satisfy people of all walks of life."

Comments

The Expansion Problem

[BlackHawk-666]

MMOs have a problem which is slowly creeping up on them, I guess the EQ crowd are already well familiar with it. As they release more expansions, all of which are required to play with the level capped players it becomes more and more expensive to enter the game. Over here in Aus WoW classic is about $40, Burning Crusade $50, and the latest pile of WoW is $60 - total price to enter the game is current $150 and then on top of that you pay about $24 / month to play. This means over the course of a year you will have paid out $438 and most likely only experienced the top level content. The rest will have been an endless grind of UPS/Kill/Kill+Collect quests - oh sorry, at lvl 60+ bombing quests are added to the grind. Unless you have a friend joining at the same time or one who will level with you you're stuck doing all this shitty content solo.

When the next expansion is out you will need to buy class+3 x expansions. I expect that to cost about $190 total and then subscription fees bringing one years playtime on WoW up to almost $500.

The amount of money you have to pay keeps rising, but the amount of useful content doesn't - it stays at the top level of the game. As soon as the gates are opened everyone floods out of the current top level zone and into the next, leaving only a desert behind.

Re:The Expansion Problem

[HybridJeff]

Are you sure about those prices? The USD and AUD are pretty close right now and you can buy every wow product online at blizzards battle.net store. $20 for original wow, $40 for the battle chest (original+first expansion) and $40 for the current expansion. Assuming you wanted to go from not having the game to being current all at once you would need to put out $80 US (which as of this post is equivalent to 87.57 AUD)

Is the blizzard store not available in Australia or something? I can use it seamlessly from Canada with a Canadian credit card. Those prices are nearly half what you're describing. I can understand if its not your cup of tea and you don't want to play,but whats the point of over inflating the cost to such a large degree?

Answers from the MMO Survey publisher

[Gamesindustry.com]

Hi guys, good to read your comments. I am Peter Warman, MD of gamesindustry.com, company behind the survey. Just to clarify: indeed, not 72% of 50+ play MMOs. Only 4% of female and 5% of male 50+ people play MMOs. You can see it by scrolling down the graphs here: http://www.gamesindustry.com/about-newzoo/todaysgamers_graphs_USA. The 72% accounts for all platforms. Elderly play mainly on online game portals. The money spent does NOT include Farmville or Facebook games in general. It DOES include kids MMOs/Virtual worlds such as HabboHotel and ClubPenguin. The respondents were selected from a huge panel that represents the complete nations surveyed. A lot of effort has been put in to get respondents representing the country. So we did not just ask gamers but all kinds of peopel evenly distributed across demographics. Please keep the questions coming.