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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."
Why? Because MMOs will be what will eventually remain of games, at least A-Title games, in the forseeable future. Think of it: Recurring revenue, no copying worries, customer loyality even big brand names could only dream of today (aka fanboys that will defend any shit you cram down their throat) and even the "this sucks" lamenters will pay. They might not play (for now, when their favorite class gets nerfed) but they still pay!
Even add-ons are superior to sequels, despite (usually) not going for the same amount of dough. Think about it: A sequel may or may not be to your customer's liking, so he may or may not buy it. He WILL have to buy the add-on just to stay in the loop, like it or not, buy it or the months you "invested" in the game are wasted. And just like the main game, you will sell them not only today but for years to come. And when your next add-on is due, bundle the original and the first add-on and again you can sell them to all those that didn't catch on earlier. Oh, did I forget to mention that you can still sell your same old, dated game five years down the road? Yes, that's right. You can still sell your title five years after its initial release and people will still buy it! Now name a single non-MMO that can boast this (I'm not talking about the 2-bucks-bin here, ok?).
Wait, it gets better. If you craft your game carefully and make it juuuust easy enough that you can play it with half your brain's attention, people will actually go out and buy TWO, read it, TWO copies of your game. Or three! Or four! Watch people buy their own group, their own raid, their own ... well, however large you make your sensible grouping, you just have to dumb it down enough. And people will go and buy not one, but five or ten copies of your game and pay for every single one every month.
And since companies tend to follow exactly that logic, this is what we get: Shallow, repetitive, faceroller MMOs that fulfill only a single letter in MMORPG. And that's only if the servers are not offline.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Multiply that $319M by 12 months and the numbers make a bit more sense.
While MMOs are attractive, they aren't easy. An MMO requires a substantial investment to start up, far more than a single player game. Also MMOs are the sort of thing that there's more of a limit on how many there can be. Many people will pay for one MMO, far less will pay for two MMOs, and so on. As such to get in to the market you either have to get a new segment of gamers that weren't doing MMOs before, or take gamers away from MMOs already out there. With a single player game, you just have to convince someone they want to play your game, they may well play others.
MMOs will doubtless continue to be very popular, but they are hardly all that is going to be out there. I mean look at Blizzard they are -THE- kings of the MMO world currently, yet they are making Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3, both non-MMO games. Reason is they know they'll make money on those too. Heck some of their WoW players will buy them. Just because people play MMOs doesn't mean they don't also play other games. I've played an MMO of one kind or another for about 6 years now or so. However I still buy single player games all the time. Just because I like MMOs doesn't mean that's all I play.
So sorry, I'm not buying this doom and gloom "Only MMOs are the future!" All evidence seems to say there will continue to be games of many different types. After all, MMOs are not new, yet game studios continue to roll out non-MMO titles as well as MMO ones.
As for your analogy, well guess what? Fast food hasn't taken over the world. You are right that I can find McDonalds all over my city. However I can find hundreds of non fast food restaurants too. There are sit down chain restaurants like Olive Garden or P.F. Changs, and there are plenty of little ones that are just someone running their own thing. Fast food has not replaced where you can go to eat, it has supplemented it. Also turns out that you can eat fast food for one meal, and then eat at a nice place the next, they don't get mad at you or anything.
I think it'll be the same for MMOs. Sure, a lot of people are going to play them, but it won't be the only thing they'll play.
I don't really see MMOs as a waste of money. The game fee and then the monthly probably give way more hour/$ of entertainment than most $60 console games. What MMOs do waste is tons of time.