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Gamer DNA: Plenty of market opportunity in MMOs
Today, we have another in a continuing series of articles written by the highly talented Sanya Weathers for GamerDNA. In this, her latest column, Sanya looks into the numbers and just what the breakdown for MMO players means.When you compare groups of MMO consumers, grouped by game title, it's easy to be overwhelmed by World of Warcraft's market dominance. Indeed, many developers have learned the wrong lessons from Blizzard's success, and copied/are copying WoW features – without copying WoW's reasoning, methodology, or execution. The results are products that feel derivative and incomplete, with features that the consumers identify as being less than organically developed. Furthermore, WoW's market reach is so extensive that the most influential players in a social network sense will identify a borrowed feature as being WoW's (even if WoW itself borrowed the feature), and cost the new product credibility as innovators.Still, when you just look at the data, it's hard to avoid the desire to copy WoW. As we saw last week, WoW players log in more often, and play for longer sessions.
Gamer DNA: Plenty of market opportunity in MMOs [part 2]
Another good measure of player engagement is by the average number of hours in a particular play session. Remember what I said about EQ2 being a success by any rational standard? The number of hours the EQ2 player spends in his game is illustrative of that point.
