Success in MMOGs: Careful Planning Vs. Wildcat Drilling
Careful Planning Vs. Wildcat Drilling
Source: DFC Intelligence
Next month DFC Intelligence will be publishing its latest research on the massively multiplayer online game (or MMOG) market. This is a well-established, but often misunderstood, segment of the interactive entertainment industry. The success of World of Warcraft (WoW) from Vivendi Universal Games is leading to interest and investment in the segment that is far above what its current market size and usage can support. Therefore we feel it is critical to look at some of the factors that could separate the handful of winners from the many losers.
Perhaps the most important point to note is that there will be a great deal of money lost. Since the emergence of the current MMOG market, which we pegged as 1997, there have never been more than a handful of hit products in a given market at the same time. In North America there has been one product (Ultima Online, then Everquest, then World of Warcraft) which stood head and shoulders above a small group of second tier products that had 25-50% of the top game's subscriber base. Never in the over thirty year history of massively multiplayer games has there been more than five top-line products in existence at one time in a given market. Even then, the top two or three games have always commanded between 85% and 90% of the market
Below that level, there have been niche efforts and upstarts. Despite the increasing variety and number of MMOGs in the market, this quasi-network effect appears to be strengthening, not weakening. The good news, thus far, is that the overall pie does seem to be expanding. That is to say, the niche efforts now sometimes have 50,000 subscribers instead of 5,000 and the mid-level games have 150,000 subscribers instead of 50,000.
