Industry Insider - March 2008

Tracking MMOs – What It Tells Us about the Industry
by Eric Marlow

A number of years ago I was doing research on Asian online games, and a friend forwarded me to an incredible website: MMOGCHART.COM Developed by Bruce Woodcock, this website and the included analysis summarizes available subscription data for world-wide Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs). I find the information so insightful that I want to pay it forward to you the reader so you can better understand some of the dynamics that are involved behind the scenes with the development and marketing of such products.

In a nutshell, the website tracks subscription growth and decline of individual MMOs, and lays them out in comparison to one another. By viewing the graphs, one can see how many subscribers there are, how your favorite game stacks up against its competition, and where it might be in its lifecycle.

It’s quite an interesting read. Several conclusions can be drawn from this collection of data:

• All MMOs have a fairly consistent lifecycle that can be examine by parabolic curve over time; sometimes a game takes a number of years to reach its apogee; very popular games may be around for years!
• Add-ons and upgrades rarely increase the subscription base of users, they only seem to extend the product’s lifecycle.
• MMOs, with the exception of World of Warcraft, are a highly regional products; this is a topic for future Insider articles, but how games appeal to certain countries and cultures is the Holy Grail for MMOs.
• Overreliance on the Fantasy-RPG genre: with over 94% of MMOs being in this category, finding a niche in a genre that is NOT Fantasy-RPG based may hold promise to anyone contemplating a new MMO.
• Although it is highly desirable, a regional breakdown of this data isn’t easily available; companies generally do not report their subscriber information this way, though I am sure they have non-public data that shows subscriber data by country.

So this is all well-and-good, but what should the Insider do with such information? Well, for starters if you are a game designer and aspire to be the next Lord British, you can look at the information for opportunities in the marketplace. What kinds of game genres do the MMO customers play? Now go out there and play those games and check out their features: What’s good? What’s bad? What do the game magazine reviews and players say about them? What’s special or unique about the game when compared to other games? And the $64,000 question: what makes World of Warcraft so special as to accumulate over 10 million subscribers?!? Yikes!

If you consider yourself to be marketing savvy and are interested in the business side of the house, you should be asking yourself what kinds of games work, how many subscribers can be expected, and most importantly how long can I hope to hold onto my customers. Obviously the quality of the game will be the overriding factor here, and there are no formulas that can definitively state how profitable a future MMO might be. But if history is any guide there is information now at your fingertips that should give you reliable insight into subscriber peak and long-term attach rate for various MMO genres and styles. Such information will start you on your quest and get you into the right ballpark. I’m sure such data will prove helpful in building your business plan.