Analysis of the consumer data coming from the Today’s Gamers MMO Focus Report by Gamesindustry.com and TNS reveals that 1.5 million Brits spend an average of £10.50 per month on Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games. More than 90% of this budget is spent directly online. 2.5 million Brits play these games without spending any money. Revenues in Britain are slightly higher than in France and Germany but way behind the staggering amount of £2.55 billion spent in the US. The largest growth is expected to come from countries such as Italy, Spain, Russia, Turkey, Poland and Sweden, and these countries are the subject of the new MMO Emerging Markets Survey.

‘Free to play’ versus ‘Pay to play’

The majority of the British MMO players do not ‘pay to play’ but still a significant share of 38% does. It shows that MMO games are being accepted as a type of game worth paying for. Of the hundreds of MMO games in the market, only a few require payment up-front, mainly by selling software to be installed on the PC. Brits spent approximately £25M on this, split up into boxed products and online downloads. £95M is spent on monthly or annual subscriptions. Many free-to-play MMOs rely on selling in-game virtual items using direct micro-transactions or a virtual currency approach, grossing another £75M in revenues.

World of Warcraft versus ‘the long tail’

Looking at number of players, World of Warcraft and Runescape clearly lead the pack with approximately 750,000 Brits admitting to have played. This includes people only making use of the free trial. These two major players are followed by the kids MMO Club Penguin, Final Fantasy and Lord of The Rings Online. No doubt World of Warcraft is grossing most revenues but the launch of hundreds of new MMOs over the last years has definitely attracted new players to the genre and other companies are also finding ways to get payers to pay.

Spenser Chi, responsible for the EU operations at Aeria Games & Entertainment, comments: “With every game launch, we find a new population of users without noticeable cannibalisation of our other titles. This is a sign to us that the MMO market will continue to grow in number of players as well as revenue.”

Today’s Gamers MMO Focus Report and the MMO Emerging Markets Survey

Online business models and game platforms are currently driving the growth and diversification of the games industry, and Today’s Gamers believe that the only way to understand the changes in this field is to ask the consumer. Three main drivers behind this approach are:

• Tracking retail sales covers only a shrinking part of the games revenues.
• The long tail of companies and games involved no longer allow extrapolation of revenues from a limited number of publishers.
• Total revenues are not enough to back-up business plans. Spending needs to be connected to numbers of players and their profile as well as cross-platform and spending insights.

The data in this press release comes from the Today’s Gamers International Survey held in US, UK, GER, FR, NL & BEL. All MMO-relevant data is comprised in the MMO Focus Report.

For more information on the MMO Focus, visit: www.gamesindustry.com/profile/service/1870