MMO Market Trends
Here's my thoughts on the matter for anyone who's interested.
WoW is still at the top so not much interesting there, until you take a closer look at it. This is only the 2nd time since WoW's launch that their subscriptions have gone down. After the first decline the only thing that caused it to spike back up again was the release of Cataclysm, but after that spike it has gone right back to declining again. You can see this trend in other MMO's that were declining, there'll be a sudden spike that usually coincides with a major update or an expansion and then it resumes it's decline. EVE seems to be the only MMO in the 150k+ group that has shown steady increase in subscriptions, while most others seem to reach their peak shortly after launch and then die off very quickly.
Another thing to consider is that there's two very distinct MMO markets: Western(US/Europe) and Eastern(Asia). When looking at the Western market nothing even comes close to WoW, however in the Eastern market you have: Aion, Lineage 1+2, and Runescape all with over 1 million active accounts. None of these games are or were very popular in the US and Lineage 1 has just recently shut down their US servers, but it’s interesting to see that Lineage 1 held so many active accounts in the Eastern market even after the release of Lineage 2. In case you were wondering how dinky looking games like Runescape or Dofus can have such impressive numbers over seas while being almost unheard of in the US, you’ll have to take a look at the culture. Both those games have FP2 (Free to Play) options and very low system requirements and with net cafés being so popular in most parts of Asia these games are far more accessible to people than titles like Aion or Lineage 2. Aside from the payment model and system requirements, there’s still the massive issue of design concepts that further separate Eastern MMOs from Western MMOs, but that’s a topic I won’t be touching on in this post.
The main focus here is the trends in growth and decline that MMOs have shown both before and after WoW’s release. Since the growth is different based on which market you look at, I’m only going to be focusing on Western MMOs. You’ll notice up until 2004 there was a steady increase in several MMOs with no real sign of massive decline, and when they did decline it was gradual. Post 2004 most tend to reach their peak within the first year and then die off almost immediately with only a few exceptions. Looking at WAR for example I’m able to tell that I correctly predicted how successful the game would be, but I failed to predict how quickly their subscriptions would die off after they reached their peak and how drastically it would decline. WAR was the 3rd most successful MMO that has been released since WoW came out, but due to many factors they’ve been unable to hold onto those subscribers. The 2nd most successful MMO since WoW’s release was Aion and it completely tanked in the Western market but has been so popular in Asia that they’ve still managed to take a huge portion of the MMO pie.
To fully tie all this together, we need to look at just how the market has grown and how it’s divided by the various types of MMOs that exist:
For now, the MMO market seems to have reached a plateau but most of the growth the market has experienced has been directly related to WoW, so when WoW stops growing, so does the total number of MMO subscribers. However, what’s even more interesting is how the market is taken up by almost exclusively fantasy based MMOs with 92.3% of active MMO subscriptions being fantasy.
Just based on that alone it’s clear that games like SWTOR won’t be hugely successful, but should still be able to experience a good level of growth. However it would be unrealistic to think that any Sci-Fi MMO is going to peak high enough to break the one million subscriber mark. Instead I’m going to be looking towards Guild Wars 2 as the next major contender in the MMO market, not to the point that they will surpass WoW, because that is still no where in sight for any game, but to the extent that I think they will be able to get and maintain a sizable portion of the MMO market. The main reason I feel this way is because WoW has finally started to show a decline which should allow other MMOs a better chance to prove themselves before they start to hemorrhage subscriptions like a hemophiliac being eaten by a tiger. I don’t think we will ever see WoW decline as quickly as other MMOs, but instead have a more gradual drop off similar to games like Lineage and still not be passed up for quite some time. Let’s face it, WoW is old but even games that were less successful than WoW have been around for more than 10 years so don’t expect anything to dethrone it anytime soon.
Another interesting prediction that can be made from these trends, is Rift is likely going to continue to lose a lot of subscribers. They’ve already peaked so you can expect them to drop down to around 100,000 subscribers in the next year or so before their decline slows down. I don’t think it’s likely that they’ll be able to turn this around because no other MMO in the past 10 years has been able to come back from such a steep and sudden drop off. It seems to be that once an MMO starts to lose subscribers it will continue rather quickly. Eastern MMOs however don’t seem to show such sudden drop offs, even Aion has been gradual and their US market fizzled and died almost instantly.
I will continue to monitor Guild Wars 2 quite closely and I encourage everyone else to do the same because it looks like it should be able to stay around long enough to make it worth the move.
