f13.net

(http://www.worldsinmotion.biz/100309-today.png)

From Gamasutra (http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/27581/Study_US_Gamers_Spent_38_Billion_On_MMOs_in_2009.php) the US spends 3.8 Billion a year on MMOGs.

That's a lot.

Nothing like a good pie chart.

The % spent on virtual currency is way higher than I expected for non-Asian countries.

Can I have my money back?  :grin:

I'd take those numbers with a very, very large grain of salt.  One of the guys behind it is responding to comments on Gamasutra, and it's readily apparently they're extrapolating data, and not mining it directly from the source.  I've yet to run into an MMO company ready to actually go into full details about the amount of money they're actually pulling in.

Lemmie guess, the guy commenting has a first name Bruce?

You're kidding me right?

www.vivendi.com/vivendi/Financial-Reports.  Click the link and start on pg. 18.

EBITDA is another work for, "How much money we're pulling in."

*Edit:   it's actually page 20

Their yearly revenue reports are not their subscription information as shown in the graph above, which is what I was referring to.  Even if they used this as part of their extrapolation, it'd be incredibly flawed, since it doesn't really account for the development and profits from their other non-WoW projects, and it definitely doesn't give a subscription type breakdown of any sort.  They also go a ways out of their way to avoid saying where their information comes in the first place.   I'm calling bullshit on those pie charts.

Fits with the whole "theorycrafting" concept quite well. I'd like to know what their definition of MMO is to be honest.


I found that part speaks volumes.

Where's Asia.

Why do you have a problem with Runescape having high numbers?

According to Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RuneScape

Because it looks like shit, and if it looks like shit, it can't be popular.

The thing with Runescape is that it seems hard to find anyone who plays it or even talk about it. I never met anyone playing it at all, never. That doesn't mean much but the reason I think it feels weird bout the 10 millions is that you kind of ask yourself "ok, but where are they hiding?"

Junior high school.

True story, my cousin is...12? now, and he's been playing runescape since he was about 8.  I have no idea if he knew what he was doing at 8, but he seems to have a good grasp of it now.

I see a lot of ex-Runescape players in WoW; presumably they move up when they make it to High School.

I'm astonished at the comparisons between France, Belgium and The Netherlands. 

Physically located between France and The Netherlands, Belgium is culturally much closer to France, even though they hate each other.  And culturally France has next to nothing in common with The Netherlands.  Yet France and The Netherlands are spending their MMO money very similarly while Belgium is radically different, and very similar to the U.S. 

I don't know what it means, but it is very odd.

70 million Farmville "players" don't care.

I'm guessing it could be legal or banking issues with microtransactions and/or DRM. They had some unusual legal issues with file-sharing (http://www.pcworld.com/article/134159/belgian_isp_held_responsible_for_file_sharing.html) a few years back.

The numbers feel right, but yea, the sources of info are going to be more extrapolation than anything else. For the same reason Bruce's stuff was always educated guesswork with the occasional press release and insider knowledge: there's no benefit to individual game companies to report the numbers in a way that can be easily aggregated. And there's even less reason for the successful ones to do so. The only people these aggregations benefit are gamers (who cares?), companies wanting to get into MMOs (there's better ways to get info), and maybe investors (most of these are not publically-traded companies).


Farmville doesn't look like shit. There's not much game there to be had, but it's a nice enough looking games that others are apeing the style now.

Runescape meanwhile...

I'm surprised anyone here is surprised by Runescape. That's been the bellwether of middle school first-timer library-playing MMOs for years before Club Penguin made it big (and then only made it big because of its purchase). RS has been around forever. It's part of the scene. People graduate from that to WoW mostly, even though RS has more to it than your standard dku grind/raid. In fact, I've often found it curious how long it took to go from 3D web back to 2D Flash/Smartfox and only now are we getting back to 3D with thin clients.

How much is Runescape?

Props to the Germans for spending a greater percentage on the boxed products. They are ruthlessly efficient at boredom and quit early.

Free. Or pay fees starting at $5.95/mo for other features. I've never been arsed to play beyond the free, and even that was years ago. I think I put more time into Wizard101 :-)

Here (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/facetious).

A lot of people conveniently forget Runescape, despite doing a lot of things differently and arguably being the first modern browser MMO (though I'm sure someone will point out a title I didn't know that was browser-based, not client-based). Runescape deserves more respect than it gets, flaws and all.