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Tuesday, May 30, 2006
MMOGChart.com updated
Following my advice (just kidding), Sir Bruce updated his MMOGChart.com website with the latest subscription numbers of MMORPGs.
May I draw your attention to the market share chart, which shows over 50% of MMORPG players being held captive by World of Warcraft. Another graph on market share by genre shows 92.6% of players being in a Fantasy MMORPG. Given the much lower market share of Fantasy in other forms of entertainment (books, TV, movies), this suggest the market is ripe for games exploring other genres. Fortunately there seem to be more Science Fiction, Pirate, and Historical themed MMORPGs announced nowadays than Fantasy.
I still wonder if Fantasy inherently makes better MMORPGs, or whether it was just an accident of history, coupled with the natural desire of game companies to clone instead to innovate, which leads to this crushing dominance of Fantasy in the market.
- posted by Tobold @ 2:42 PM Permanent Link
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There isn't as many MMOGs in the market for the market share by genre graph to be meaningful. 92.6% could mean only a handful of MMOGs base on Fantasy (around 10-20).
WoW was the franchise that turned MMOGs mainstream. Before that, there were afew fantasy games that were successful but didn't make an impact. In orde to grab a bite from Blizzard's pie, most developers choose to produce MMOG of another genre instead of crashing head-on with WoW.
MMOGs aren't cheap to develop. Going head-on with WoW is risky, it's much wiser to discover new opportunities by attracting fans of other genres.
WoW was the franchise that turned MMOGs mainstream. Before that, there were afew fantasy games that were successful but didn't make an impact. In orde to grab a bite from Blizzard's pie, most developers choose to produce MMOG of another genre instead of crashing head-on with WoW.
MMOGs aren't cheap to develop. Going head-on with WoW is risky, it's much wiser to discover new opportunities by attracting fans of other genres.
# posted by 
: 30/5/06 16:23
: 30/5/06 16:23
I think that perhaps Fantasy makes for a better MMORPG for 2 reasons. First, it's easier to create unique fantasy properties. Many Sci-Fi properties start to sound the same after a while, but more importantly, it's harder to balance a Sci-Fi game and still maintain disbelief.
I can believe that a mage throwing a fireball at me isn't enough to kill me because I have innate fire resistance or fire resistance items that help me survive (hit points) but I have a hard time wondering why I have to shoot that rat 8 times with my "beginning rifle" to kill it.
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I can believe that a mage throwing a fireball at me isn't enough to kill me because I have innate fire resistance or fire resistance items that help me survive (hit points) but I have a hard time wondering why I have to shoot that rat 8 times with my "beginning rifle" to kill it.
# posted by : 30/5/06 20:14
: 30/5/06 20:14<< Home
