Valefor.Prothescar said:
»Mmos don't make a lot of money
Perfect time for me to ask a question I've ALWAYS wondered. During the WoW boom, they like 10M+ subscribers. $15 a month. That's 150M USD a month. Does it REALLY cost that much to design/produce/implement an MMO?
Pretty sure MMO was the most profitable genre in Asia(especially South Korea and China) from 2003-2011, many of WoW sub was from China if I remember correctly. but MMO craze in Asia is pretty much replaced by MOBA and Mobile games now. Player's preference has changed.
And it is indeed quite costly to make MMO compare with many other genres. From what I've heard when it comes to development difficulty it's
roughly:AAA>MMO>FTG,TCG>FPS,3D action>side scroll, turn based, sim> VN, P&C adventure, puzzle. Of course the hierarchy may change slightly depends on the budget and quality in that category.
That being said, any multi-player focused genre very much relies on having large amount of users at once. Nobody will want to play MMO/MOBA/trading card type of game without other players. So compare with single player games, multi-player games will need a much higher marketing and operational budget. You either get many players at once and make money, or you don't.
Further more, MMO is quite time consuming compare with other genres. If I have 2 hours of free time a day, I can consume 1 4-6hr single player games in 2-3 days, and 10-15 single player games in a month. If I play mobile game I can play at work, on bus or even when I go to bed since mobile game auto grinds itself these days. That means I can consume 1+ mobile game + 1 single player game at once because mobile games don't consume my free time that much.
If I play MMO like FFXI that will use all my free time for it and I can probably play 1 game per month.
Therefore MMO market is actually quite exclusive because every consumer has limited free time but MMO is competing with every other entertainment for that time slot.
It's probably one of the toughest genre to make money in today's market overall. Mostly because of how the market is.