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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."
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.
moox. for a new generation.
rather than what people spend on the games. And I mean at the workplace, not at home.
No need to go back that far. There was a time where multiplayer was assumed to be free; paying for it wasn't even a question.
Why do I suddenly feel old?
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.
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.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
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.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
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
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.
Stale pastry is hollow succor to one who is bereft of ostrich.
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.
They also often seem like they promote some of those dungeons as being part of the expansion though. Fight the Lich King! In a year or so!
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!
Stale pastry is hollow succor to one who is bereft of ostrich.
For the children? You some sort of pedophile?
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
But, then I listened to what most of my coworkers were doing on their time off. They were watching American Idol and Lost. So, what's the bigger waste of time? I quit playing MMOs when I saw how much time it was taking away from my regular "life management" chores.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Whenever I watch people playing MMOs and have tried them myself, I've noticed that the graphical and story quality is far inferior to a game with a fixed beginning and ending.
It's the difference between episodic television and a film. A feature film has very high quality standard packed into every minute, because the entire story arc is contained within that time frame, and they can afford the best actors, director, vfx etc. for that hour and a half which will play to large captive audiences paying a one time fee to see it. Episodic television spans a much larger time frame, and the average episode is budgeted accordingly, with many sets and situations being re-used.
The top end of standalone games are extremely high quality and offer an excellence in storytelling that is unmatched in the MMO universe. They also keep your interest until the logical conclusion. With an MMO, you eventually lose interest and it just sort of fades away. A few MMOs have gone bankrupt and crafted actual 'endings' to their worlds, but that's as far as it goes. The whole point is to get people to keep paying that monthly fee, ad infinitum.
Playing MMOs is the equivalent to watching television. It's just scratching an itch of compulsive behavior.
My most recent game experience was BioShock II. What a great game in general, especially towards the end when it gets weird. Machinarium is a $5 puzzle RPG game on Steam that is very engaging and well crafted. I've played all the Half Life games as well, and most of the big FPS games going back to the original Doom. The industry has come a long way. Great interactive stories. I think the turning point was the original Unreal single player game, which dropped this huge and colorful world in your lap after the Voodoo cards made it technically possible. Since then we've experienced progressively more detailed and sophisticated storytelling as technology and budgets allow.
While MMOs have a higher dollar figure overall, I hope that highly produced downloaded content will always have a place. The multiplayer games I enjoy the most are the Starcraft type, where you can play a short campaign and be done. (no, that's not the same as going for a 'raid' in an MMO...)
I realize that there are two very distinct camps, and that the MMO players tend to be the younger ones with a lot of spare time on their hands. In any given Blizzard Q&A thread on Slashdot, the MMO related questions always far outnumber the Starcraft II / Diablo III questions, so the disparity in numbers is even evident there.
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.