Achieving Mass Market Status

The Holy Grail for subscription games is to create similarly compelling games that can crack the mass-market niche, which contains the bulk of the potential customers with about 70% of the total market. Examples of mass-market brands as MMORPGS include Star Trek (rumored to be in development by Activision), Harry Potter (rumored to be in development at EA in 2000, but now rumored to be dropped from the development list), Star Wars (in development by Verant/Sony), Barbie (Mattel is rumored to be searching for a developer), and Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) (purchased from Hasbro by Infogrames).

The first one to three months of an MMORPG's lifecycle see a tremendous rush of customer subscriptions. This rush then levels out and stabilizes at a predictable rate, marked by growth spikes when a retail add-on pack is released to refresh the game. Figure 16.1 charts the growth line for three popular US PWs, showing the variation between the initial launches and subsequent growth periods.

Figure 16.1. Subscription growth for three US MMORPGs.

Note that EQ was released initially in North America alone, and EQ is now available in Europe and Korea. Versions for China, Taiwan, and Japan are planned for the first quarter of 2003. The Asian market makes up approximately 30 “40% of the world MMORPG market; if EQ were more available in that market today, the game's monthly subscriber base would likely be between 520,000 and 560,000. If Far East versions had been ready at launch in March 1999, at the end of the game's first year of life, it would have had between 325,000 and 350,000 monthly subscribers.