Online Games Boom - Who Benefits? 33
Next Generation has a piece looking, in some depth, at who exactly is benefiting from the boom in online gaming. From the article: "Electronic Arts provides a prime example of the struggles traditional publishers have faced when it comes to online games. Back around the turn of the century, the market visionaries at EA boldly declared that online games would be a prime driver of future growth and would account for as much as 20% of revenue in a mere three years (by 2003). EA even set-up a separate stock for its online game holdings. Since that time, Electronic Art's growth has been nothing short of spectacular. However, that growth has not been because of online games. This is despite the fact that EA is a leader in an emerging online game category, subscription-based casual games. "
Trick question? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Trick question? (Score:4, Insightful)
Game companies are poised to see continued growth in online gaming revenues, the point of the article is that a lot of the successes are companies that did not come from established, traditional game companies.
"Unless an online game hits it big, or has a very dedicated group of fans, there isn't any money to be made as every two-bit publisher is trying to ride this fad with their Evercrack clones."
Not even close to accurate. Yes, there is a lot of competition, as is true with any emerging market. But that doesn't mean that the market doesn't exist and there is no money to be made. It just means that more companies are vying for the increasing slice of pie.
Now, IMO, the companies who will profit greatly in the long run are those who:
(1) Publish the games best tailored to the subscription model -- like scheduled content, etc.
(2) Have the best variety of games tailored to their market (i.e., Popcap shouldn't publish an MMORPG, while Blizzard should publish a SciFi MMORPG)
(3) As with any entertainment business, the company with the best marketing usually fares well -- look for the companies with the largest marketing budget.
Re:Trick question? (Score:1)
Re:Trick question? (Score:4, Insightful)
I was at Fujitsu when they had the WorldsAway virtual chat world in 1997. At the time, it seems like everyone was trying to build a virtual online chat world community. I even got the book, "Avatars!" by Bruce Damer, at a convention that was held at San Francisco State University to showcase the new technologies. Looking through the book now, I don't any of them survived except for a few niche survivors. Fujitsu sold the division since it never made any money after so many years. That was definitely a fad.
The second one was Horizons [istaria.com] at Atari in 2004. This online game was picked up by Atari because they wanted an online game to compete with every other gaming company getting into this "next big thing". (This was also the same time the video game industry was rushing into Hollywood licenses.) Horizons wasn't a bad game. It's just another Evercrack clone that may survive with dedicated fan base but won't really change the gaming world.
Whenever the video game industry is stampeding in the same direction, I consider it to be a fad. How many times have we heard that the PC was dead? Or the console is dead? Or Duke Nukem Forever is coming out Really Soon Now (TM)?
Re:Trick question? (Score:1)
And my Grandpa considers the Internet to be a fad, so who knows.
Re:Trick question? (Score:2, Informative)
Project Entropia [project-entropia.com] has been around for like 8 years now. At first, there were not many players. But today they have over 300K players. Second Life [secondlife.com] has been around for about 3 yrs and is boasting around 30K user base. And these games are going strong. I'm sure theres lot of other games that have mad
prioritized content (Score:2)
Re:prioritized content (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:prioritized content (Score:1)
Most growth in South Korea, China and Taiwan (Score:3, Interesting)
I've noticed that Konami, for example, does well with martial arts sector games, and that these are especially popular in those countries.
Am I the Only One? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Am I the Only One? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Am I the Only One? (Score:3, Insightful)
MMO's are definitely not just a fad. I agree that there's a huge market segment that has no interest in them, and by no means are we at a point where the majority of games are MMO's, but you can't deny the fact that MMO's are here to stay, and that a large segment of the gaming population likes and plays them.
Re:Am I the Only One? (Score:2)
There was also another MMOFPS called Neocon or something like that, though I never tried it. I heard it kinda sucked.
For single player games with some sort of surprise/shock I'd look into BioShock [gamespot.com] which should be out this year as well. It's a sequal to System Shock 2 [gamespot.com], which was IMO one of the best FP
Re:Am I the Only One? (Score:3, Interesting)
Probably. I grew up in the NES/SNES generation and while back then I bought games that I would play alone and/or with friends, today I only buy games that have multiplayer, like (XBOX 360) NHL 2k6, COD 2, Perfect Dark Zero, and I am going to pick up Fight Night Round 3 this week.
What I hated as a kid (And my parents really hated it) was that I wanted a game so badly, and when I finally got it, I was pretty much bored with it
Re:Am I the Only One? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Am I the Only One? (Score:1)
Re:Am I the Only One? (Score:1)
Re:Am I the Only One? (Score:2)
subscription services suck (Score:1)
Re:subscription services suck (Score:1)
That's because EA is a console company (Score:1)
Do the math. (Score:4, Insightful)
8 Million * $15/month * 12 months = $1.44 billion dollars per year.
That's probably a bit on the high side, and doesn't include the box price (8 million boxes at $50 = $400 mill), but regardless, blizzard stands to pull in billions of dollars over the life of the franchise.
Re:Do the math. (Score:3, Funny)
Good thing they didn't make any more, otherwise you'd have to get a zip program to make it fit on the floppy.
Yarg, No. Remember, the lion's share are in China (Score:2)
Re:Yarg, No. Remember, the lion's share are in Chi (Score:2)
Have fun,
Blizzard. (Score:3, Funny)
To put that in perspective, it's about $999,985,000 more than I expect to earn this year.
Subscription-based? (Score:1)
Ill just keep playing my Descent 3 [planetdescent.com] against others on the net [descentbb.net], for free, thank you very much.
Yayaya Descent is dead (despite the enjoyable game I played in a level called circumference [descent.cx] last night) yada yada.
Weeeeeeeeeeelllllll. Oh geee. There is Core Decision [highoctane.biz] coming soon which will have the same server based gaming system, allowing users to play against each other GASP for free. Minus the cost of broadband of course.
Wonder what big greedy pigopolists like EA will think about that?