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

Farmville

[Hadlock]

Roughly a quarter of the US population plays some form of MMO

Does "Farmville" count as an MMO? Along with Mafia Wars and god knows what else? If so, then that number is probably conservatively low, judging from my Facebook newsfeed.

MSN

[BlackHawk-666]

I like to think of the MMO I play as hanging out with friends on MSN/Vent...with dragons!

The MMO gives my hands something to do while I chat to my peer group.

Perspective

[Ghubi]

For comparison, US consumers spent almost 10 billion in theaters and almost 9 billion on DVDs in 2009. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB20001424052748704789404574636531903626624.html

Re:Corporate Shills

[Rei]

Which raises some good questions, re: lowest common denominator. The general question with MMO design isn't whether the focus should be grinding to gain more ability, or even whether the focus should be grinding in combat to gain levels; it's "what sort of variant of a common formula should be used". A MMO that doesn't stick to the standard tank/healer/damage dealer party formula gets considered as innovative. And, sure, there's usually some form of resource harvesting or crafting in addition to the fighting, but that's usually half-arsed, and even more of a grind.

Sure, there are exceptions. But not many. Second Life an obvious one, for example, but that's little more than a graphical chat room, and a couple steps away from being an interactive porn site.

Is it unreasonable to expect more diversity from MMOs? Or is the grind, and in particular combat grind, the only formula that will really work?

I'm curious as to what others think about the subject.

Re:Corporate Shills

[Rei]

Some of my fondest coding memories were programming for an LP mud. :) I loved the fact that wizards (coders) could literally have programming wars. For example, one wizard makes a dest ("destruct" -- basically, kicking off another player or wizard, with a lot of fanfare) that has a big leadup to it. So another wizard, tired of getting dested, writes a rapid counter-dest that kicks off the wizard doing the dest before it completes. So the first wizard writes an insta-dest that doesn't give the second wizard a chance to counter. So the second wizard writes an object that seeks out the first wizard's inventory, intercepts their commands, and if they try to start a dest against them, it instead turns the dest on its caster. So the first wizard writes an object that scans their inventory for objects to intercept the dest, and if it finds something that shouldn't be there, the object kills it off for them and then dests its owner. And on and on, back and forth.

Then there was the simply humorous aspects. A friend of mine had a dest where he would pick up a flower and contemplate whether the person being dested loved them. "(S)He loves me; (S)He loves me not. (S)He loves me."... and so forth, ending up on "(S)He loves me not." As they throw the flower away, the person gets kicked off the server. So I wrote a parody wherein, first thing, an object gets added to the inventory of the target to prevent them from quitting or counter-desting. A bumbling ogre version of my friend stumbles in and picks up the person being dested and starts pulling off limbs, doing the "(S)He loves me, (s)he loves me not" thing with them, and causing the person to randomly scream out in pain.

I used to occasionally disguise myself as the developer's board in the main development room. When people tried to interact with me, I'd manually make up responses. Occasionally I'd jump into other wizard's inventory or other things like that, perhaps making myself into a talking sword and having them wield me or the like. A neat feature was that you could "patch" objects to call any function that object possessed, including the objects that it inherited from. So changing things' descriptions or making them call actions was a snap.

I once wrote a program that would compile statistics about the most used words on the wizard chat line. When I informed everyone of it, all of the sudden, they started shouting out random obscene words over and over for days on end to try to get them high up on the ranking list. ;)

At one time, I accidentally wrote an object that landed on the floor of the room everyone logged in to and which dested anyone the instant they logged in. This kicked off all but one player, who was in another room coding an area. I couldn't get in to tell them not to log out and to please dest all objects in the login room; if they logged out, we'd have to wait for a sysadmin to restart the server! So I connected in through the FTP server and uploaded some files in the area they were working with file names in all caps that would tell them what to do as soon as they LS'ed. Thankfully they did ls, noticed the files, and fixed the problem!