Gaming: Big Bucks in Multi-Player Online World
April 19, 2006 -- -- Kids often use their imagination to create fantastic worlds: An army figure marching across an unmade bed becomes a lieutenant in the Intergalactic Space Corps, navigating his way through the alien landscape of Nebulon-4. A doll in a plain cardboard box is transformed into a beautiful princess, greeting suitors and holding court in her grand castle.
But in the digital age, if someone wants to retreat into adventure and pretend to be something they're not, they can turn to a genre of video games called MMOGs -- massively multi-player online games.
They've become wildly popular with millions of adult gamers, and thanks to the billions of dollars they generate, developers in the industry -- and some on the outside -- are clamoring to get a piece of the pie.
These aren't your regular video games -- they're online worlds open 24 hours a day and inhabited by hundreds, even thousands, of players simultaneously.
Getting a key to the virtual city isn't cheap though. A wannabe player needs to lay down money for a copy of the game, which can run about $40 to $50.
But on top of that, most MMOGs require players to pay a monthly subscription fee which runs anywhere from $10 to $20 on average.
The leading game in the genre, "World of Warcraft," or WoW, recently announced it hit 6 million subscribers worldwide. WoW is a fantasy game based on a series of popular strategy games called "Warcraft," and is the exception to the rule when it comes to its universal success. This game alone brings in over $1 billion a year.
"The monthly/annual subscription fees can be hugely significant, as they are for WoW from Blizzard, but unless you get a critical mass of players to make the game interesting to participate in, it's likely to die quickly," said Anita Frazier, industry analyst with the NPD Group. "So it can be profitable or not, depending on its retail and subscription success."
Frazier notes that getting into the MMOG market is not without risks, because along with the potential for gigantic revenues comes massive costs.
Developing the game as well as maintaining the servers players live on costs millions, and much of the work and financial investment must be done before the game ever reaches players' hands.
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