Analyst claims MMO market will not get bigger...

[LonestarHero]

http://www.incgamers.com/2012/07/mmo...-says-pachter/

Speaking earlier today at the Evolve conference in Brighton, videogame analyst for Wedbush Securities, has stated his belief that the MMO market is as big as it’s ever going to get.

Pachter’s session as the conference was focused on the big events of the past ten years that have helped shape where the industry stands today, and where it’s going in the future. Part of the session focused on the rise of the MMO, and Pachter’s belief that it will not rise any further.

Using Star Wars: The Old Republic as an example, Pachter said:

“In the next couple of years [following 2008] MMOs peaked; we didn’t know that [it had peaked] until Star Wars launched. I, and many other likeminded people thought that Star Wars would expand the market place.

I think he is wrong.

Seeing the propagation of DLC over the last five years, the idea of paying extra for more content is not foreign to gamers anymore. The current crop of gamers are trained to spend money on a title after buying the initial box or digital download. If one ends up spending upwards of $15 a month on DLC, how is that any different from a subscription?

I believe the market for subscription MMO's will grow greater than 7-8 million.

[Larynx]

I express my doubt.

I don't think the MMO market will ever have the monstrous, grotesque mutation that WoW is. No MMO will ever achieve that kind of success, having a near monopoly on the MMO market, again. And I think that ~10 million is a reasonable ceiling for subscribers for a single game. But saying it wont grow at all? That's just silly.

Also, TOR didn't fail because the market wasn't big enough. TOR failed for a number of reasons, including but not limited to:

Rushed release
Terrible PvP
Uninspired game design
Overhype for what it was

Two of those are shared by almost every recent MMO's release. I'll let you guess which two.

You don't need to have a degree to figure something as simple as that out.

[Deleted]

I believe the market for subscription MMO's will grow greater than 7-8 million.

It is already 40-50 millions at least when considering all the subscription based MMO's out there. Even WoW alone should still be over 10 mil.

And I think he's right unless innovations are made. Everyone already knows about MMO's and if they had any interest in them, they already started playing one. Currently, the new ones don't bring anything new on the market so I doubt they have anything that will attract customers who previously weren't interested in MMO's.

[Larynx]

It is already 40-50 millions at least when considering all the subscription based MMO's out there. Even WoW alone should still be over 10 mil.

And I think he's right unless innovations are made. Everyone already knows about MMO's and if they had any interest in them, they already started playing one. Currently, the new ones don't bring anything new on the market so I doubt they have anything that will attract customers who previously weren't interested in MMO's.

WoW is approx. 60% of the MMO market, excluding F2P (and B2P...) titles. F2P playerbases are always inflated, so you can't get an accurate estimate from what the company releases. B2P as well is inflated.

Take Guild Wars 1 for example. Sold 7 million copies. Probably has under 100k active players right now. At its peak, maybe a little under a million. But not 7 million. F2P games, they might have 100 million accounts but that doesn't mean anything for obvious reasons.

[Noemonad]

I'd like to be optimistic and think that the MMO market will grow in the future, especially with the recent trend of F2P games and the impending release of GW2, which I hope will be a juggernaut in the market. It's all just speculation, though.

[Edge-]

It's Michael Pachter, take everything he says with a truckfull of salt. He's spectacular at predicting the painfully obvious and being spectacularly wrong.

As far as subscription games go, he's mostly correct. There isn't a ton of room for growth in the subscription market. It's actually pretty much stagnated over the past few years with very minimal growth overall. The subscription model will always be around, but it's getting harder to justify it.

The F2P market though continues to grow at a pretty steady rate and will probably continue to grow, especially with F2P games dramatically improving in quality nowadays. As these higher quality F2P games come out I see more than more subscriptions dropping over the years. Subscriptions won't go away and there will always be a market for subscription based games, but its "boom" days are winding to a close.

[Mad_Murdock]

Let's pretend that it is true, that the MMO market is as big has it can get. Then, wouldn't that mean all the people who are saying that Blizzard ruined wow, because they lost subs (due to making it a casual game) are basically wrong ? That it was simply that the market doesn't have enough growth for Wow to be 15 million and not enough for it to sustain 12 million forever ? Hell maybe 10 million might be too much to maintain.

To me, it is rather a funny thought that all the people who said Blizzard catered to casuals and all that, and it turned out to be the right decisions, because it's possible that WoW would have shrunk more if they hadn't. Obviously, we'll never know what could have been. but it's a funny thought.

I'm in the camp that thinks subscription based MMOs are a dying breed. I think micro-transactions will eventually take over. There just needs to be that one game that does more right than wrong or at least does it different enough that it becomes the new cool.

[Deleted]

Quite obviously, the market is only likely to significantly expand if a newly released MMO is significantly innovative, which has usually not been the case for past releases.

[Edge-]

Quite obviously, the market is only likely to significantly expand if a newly released MMO is significantly innovative, which has usually not been the case for past releases.

It just has to be good. Doesn't need to innovate a single thing. WoW wasn't significantly innovative at launch, they just made a damn good game. This assumption that innovation sells is kinda silly. If anything, stagnation has been proven to sell FAR better than innovation and it's far less risky.

[Loaf Lord]

People still take Michael Pachter seriously?

[Edge-]

People still take Michael Pachter seriously?

Business trades do. They don't know squat and somehow Pacther built up a name for himself so they listen to him. I can only hope/assume that he feeds this kind of trash out publicly while saving all of the worthwhile analysis for the reports they sell.

[Korgoth]

I dont think he understands that SWTOR is a bad game. It's a game that made playing your own Darth Vader lame. You can't expand a market with a shitty product.

[Edge-]

SWTOR is a fine game, people just expected way more than was realistic out of it.

That being said, let's not turn this thread into a game bashing thread please.

[Poppincaps]

Pachter isn't a very smart guy in my opinion. I really wouldn't listen to what he says.

[Defengar]

I actually think its growing.

Millions of kids play Runscape, and runscapes active population is actually growing. Those kids go on to play WoW and other "real" MMO's when they become teenagers. WoW's average player age is 33, so that means people are not leaving WoW/other MMO's because they are "grow ups", but for other reasons.

People are entering the market faster than they are leaving.

[Flaks]

I honestly believe WoW is the first and last game of it's kind. No MMO ever again is going to reach those types of numbers. Not even Titan. The overall MMO market itself is probably also reaching a breaking point. There's too many MMO's out for too few players right now.

[Wildmoon]

IMO WoW is the only game that will have that kind of impact on gaming industry. No game will ever achieve WoW's level of success again.

[Edge-]

IMO WoW is the only game that will have that kind of impact on gaming industry. No game will ever achieve WoW's level of success again.

Not true. CoD has had that affect. So has Starcraft. So has Doom. So has the Ultima series (the initial games at least). There are tons of games that have had MAJOR impacts on the gaming industry like WoW did. Before WoW EQ revolutionized MMO's and set the standard for what a MMO should be. Now it's WoW. Some day another game will usurp it.

[xervyn]

I can't remember what the website was called but it had graphs of how many subscribers and active sers all the MMOs have.

In the graph that shows all of them put together you can see the whole genre has began to decline recently.

[Deleted]

If the economic situation does not improve, then he'll certainly be correct regarding a lack of major growth. Though the people praising WoW as some sort of holy grail need to realise that a great many games existed before it which were just as well received. I suspect that will apply to the future, too.