What are you guys talking about? Why are you comparing Walmart to the video game industry? People go to Walmart to buy everything from socks to groceries to tires. People go to video game firms to buy video games. Of course the scale is going to be different, but that's not an apples to apples comparison.
Nintendodogs has sold 23 million copies. Ok. The price point was $29.99 at launch. Let's be as liberal as possible with our assumptions about Nintendogs and assume every single unit was sold to vendors at $29.99. That's $709,000,000 in revenue. Now, let's compare that to WoW and let's go ahead and make really conservative assumptions about WoW. Let's say only 2 million of the 10 million people subbing are paying $15.00 per month and everyone else is paying 2 dollars That's $552,000,000 in revenue in a single year. That's 77% of Nintendogs lifetime revenue using very liberal assumptions about Nintendogs and very conservative assumptions about WoW.
77% of the lifetime revenue of an extremely successful game like Nintendogs in a single year makes for a pretty damn important market. While a product like WoW will never post sales numbers like a Call of Duty or a Mario game, it will create an annual revenue stream that will regularly make it one the highest grossing products in the video game market every year. That's why EA has tried to crack into the MMO market twice.
When survival is the goal, it's into the spider hole!
Ima let you finish, but console games have the best sales of all time. Of all time.
Do you even understand what you're talking about? We're talking about MMO players being insignificant in the grand scheme of the entire market and the video game market. You can't use money to compare amounts of people. That's illogical. We were specifically talking about the sheer amount of people who don't play MMOs vastly outnumbers MMO players.
If you want to continue with your 'apples to apples' and use monetary information as a means to somehow quanitfy amounts of people, you are still wrong. You compared the largest MMO to one of the random other games available. You took at least 50% of the MMO market to compare financially to .001% of the console market. Do we need to really continue to explain how insignificant MMO players are in the big picture?
Of course people will sell to this market, because it makes money. Anything that makes a profit will be pursued. Why do you think there are paperclip factories and rubberband warehouses?
I will defend blizzard for most of their actions. (I tend to agree with them most of the time) But in the grand scheme of gaming the only, ONLY reason World of Warcraft has any recognition is because it's a MMO.
I doubt it would hit top 100 of all time best selling games.
I don't know if Disney even wants to take over SWTOR. Disney must be thinking,"Why bother?". Not like they need to. I can only for see Disney taking control over SWTOR just for the sake of controlling everything Star Wars.
Really I could care less who takes over SWTOR as long as a dye system is added, transmog, hide hood option, more content that isn't crap, and cut down on the ridiculous f2p restrictions. I mean, you can't even /lol without being subbed.
Of the entire market? Like the global market place for all goods? Of course they're insignificant. The top 3 oil companies raked in a trillion dollars in revenue combined last year. But, comparing a market of billions of potential consumers to a market of tens of millions is asinine. It's like you're saying Call of Duty is insignificant because a billion Chinese people buy rice. What planet are you living on where it even makes sense to compare those two things? Hell, you can compare the consumers of free public goods, like air, to, I dunno, consumers of Italian supercars. That doesn't make that comparison pithy or worthwhile. Can't into economics, I guess. (I know memes, too!)
And .001% of the console market? Can't into math, either, I guess. Blizzard pulled in $1.5 billion in digital revenue last year. If only a quarter of that is from WoW subs, we're talking $375 million. (It's probably closer to 2/3s) That would mean the console market is $375 billion, which it isn't. The total global video game industry was worth $65 billion in 2010. That includes hardware and software sales, subscriptions, digital delivery, mobile phone games. Everything. So, don't come at me with scale when you're overestimating the size of the console market alone by 600%. It looks to me like you're pretty much just making up numbers.
From a revenue perspective, which is the only thing that anybody cares about in economics and business, WoW subs and digital purchases alone are the annual equivalent of a major triple A release. Every year. That's a very worthwhile market to pursue.
Last edited by Beavis; 2013-01-03 at 07:31 PM.
When survival is the goal, it's into the spider hole!
I realize that, but from a revenue standpoint, that's just flat out wrong. Activision-Blizzard is the second biggest gaming company on the planet and digital receipts made up a 1/3 of it's revenue in 2011. I don't have clear numbers on how that breaks down, but I know Call of Duty elite was only like $60 million of that. So, it's safe to assume that WoW subs and digital purchases constitute a large portion. So, we're talking about a product with revenue equivalence to a top 5 (maybe even top 3) AAA console release. To look at those numbers and then turn around and say that isn't a major market is bizarre. Is Call of Duty insignificant? What about Battlefield? Or Madden?
Last edited by Beavis; 2013-01-03 at 07:32 PM.
When survival is the goal, it's into the spider hole!
Activision-Blizzard is just one case with an exceptionally popular game that really isn't representative of the rest of the mmo market. It's the exception not the rule.
You don't realize anything, because you are still talking to a damned tree. I don't know how many times I can tell you, since it's been in every post, that this has always been about an AMOUNT OF PEOPLE. Not money, not revenue, not whatever you want to talk about. It's about fish in the sea. People in the market. Let me show you the original statement that led to this:
Now if you had bothered to read the thread at all before blasting us with drivel, then you wouldn't still be arguing with someone who isn't even talking about what you think they are. Additionally, you criticize math that never took place and then go on to mention revenue again.Its more than just smaller.
The pc gaming community is smaller.
The mmo community is infinitesimally small.
Please stop wasting our time.
And I'm saying that the number of people in the market is irrelevant because the only metric that matters is money. If you're a firm and you can sell 6 people a product for a billion dollars a unit or sell a billion people a product for 5 dollars a unit, which would you rather sell? The obvious answer is the first product. Who cares how many people you sell to? You're trying to make money, not win a fucking popularity contest.
When survival is the goal, it's into the spider hole!
Oh yes, more massive changes and layoffs is exactly what the game needs. Especially now that it is finally stabilizing out with the population expanding rapidly and profits rising. /sarcasm off
SWTOR is a great game. Sure it has its issues, but it is far better than the trolls in this thread who have never even played it make it out to be. I strongly believe it is the best MMO on the market right now, and I have played most of them.
So instead of admitting that you have no idea what we're talking about, you try to say what we're talking about is irrelevant? If you'd like to discuss what we were actually talking about, let me know. Additionally, your logic is flawed and presents no understanding of real world economics.
The fact that you don't factor pretty much anything except a sell price is pretty evident of that...not to mention that you seem to think large, publicly traded companies don't care about popularity?
Whew boy, you just can't win today can you?
I realize that the vocal minority opinion right now is that Disney has unlimited money, they do not. They have a policy of aggressively seeking out brands that have a high profile but lack the backing needed to move them. That's why they got the Muppets (and sat on it for years, true), Marvel (a company that was making money but making terrible business decisions on their characters, resulting in their loss of a major character ((spider-man)) and others) and most recently Star Wars (a huge brand that had essentially lost its creator, who was tired of the fact that people arn't content with letting him do what he wants to with his idea).
What Disney *doesn't* do is fix the old mistakes of these companies. They haven't purchased Spider-man or the Fantastic Four back from the studios Marvel sold them to. Likewise they are not going to buy the rights to Knights of the Old Republic from EA, when the very nature of the license agreement means they can just take it for free in a few years when EA inevitably lets the rights fall through after a few more years of awful sales.
Also, while I don't pretend to have even a drop of a clue about their plans, it is far more likely that Disney attempts to revitalize Star Wars by bringing in new fans (children). This is going to mean a lot more Young Jedi type things, as opposed to the cesspool that is the KotOR community/world.
When survival is the goal, it's into the spider hole!