MMOs
Posted: Thu Nov 08, 2007 11:29 pm
This all stems from reading Jon's link to an article about how the creators made EveOnline. I love reading game postmortems and how indy game devs rise to success starting from little to nothing.
http://jonathan.pearce.name/mohtalim/vi ... php?t=2249
Anway, this got me thinking about how MMOs are doing nowadays. The gaming market is now heavily saturated with MMOs. How do they survive? How many subscriptions are needed before you are positive and growing? I did a little digging and found something on subscriptions.
http://mmogdata.voig.com/
According to this website and the article, Eve-Online started with 800 subscriptions and now has an average subscription base of close to 175k subscriptions. Based on it's monthly subscription rate...that's a monthly revenue of 2.6million dollars....seems very lucrative.....and don't get me started with the 8~9+ million subscription base of World of Warcraft....
But the subscription based MMO isn't the only business model out there. Out of Korea, spawned the concept of an "item mall". Basically it's free to play the game but in order to customize your character's abilities/appearance/unlock extra gaming material...you have purchase these small 'trinkets' for $1-2 a piece. Then there's the free to play with ads, or buy the game and free to play online (classic example would be diablo 1~2).
With all these various business models, it's hard to tell whether an MMO is doing sublime or subliminal solely on subscription base. And it's also hard to know if this website is accurately collecting subscription information to begin with! But regardless of all these unknown factors, it still makes me wonder how much effort and more importantly is it worth it to create a game like WoW.
More ranting....to come.....
http://jonathan.pearce.name/mohtalim/vi ... php?t=2249
Anway, this got me thinking about how MMOs are doing nowadays. The gaming market is now heavily saturated with MMOs. How do they survive? How many subscriptions are needed before you are positive and growing? I did a little digging and found something on subscriptions.
http://mmogdata.voig.com/
According to this website and the article, Eve-Online started with 800 subscriptions and now has an average subscription base of close to 175k subscriptions. Based on it's monthly subscription rate...that's a monthly revenue of 2.6million dollars....seems very lucrative.....and don't get me started with the 8~9+ million subscription base of World of Warcraft....
But the subscription based MMO isn't the only business model out there. Out of Korea, spawned the concept of an "item mall". Basically it's free to play the game but in order to customize your character's abilities/appearance/unlock extra gaming material...you have purchase these small 'trinkets' for $1-2 a piece. Then there's the free to play with ads, or buy the game and free to play online (classic example would be diablo 1~2).
With all these various business models, it's hard to tell whether an MMO is doing sublime or subliminal solely on subscription base. And it's also hard to know if this website is accurately collecting subscription information to begin with! But regardless of all these unknown factors, it still makes me wonder how much effort and more importantly is it worth it to create a game like WoW.
More ranting....to come.....