I read an article, over Christmas which I cant find now, but it may have come from the Register or some other news/blog type site.
Anyway, the article had charts and quotes to backup what he was saying, which in short was that sales of High End, PC games were way down on what was expected of them. quoting crysis as one of the games that didn't ship nearly as much as (and he quoted one of the developers) they were expecting to.
The reason he gave for it tho was not so much hardware, and the lack of people with high end systems, he attributed it to less people looking for what he called small multi player base, in a nut shell the guy was explaining how that with so many people now on fast internet connections, gamers were seeking out the MMO feel to games, and old style games like HL2, Crysis, COD4, while awsome games, were not offering that MMO feel.
He also went on to explain the numbers behind the top 10 MMO's and just how big a chunk of the gaming market they made up, I dont recall the numbers but it was a HUGE %. something like 11 Million in Europe playing World of Warcraft, Another few Million were playing EQ-EQ2, around a Million Playing EVE, and those were just the Pay to Play games, Guild Wars Rivals WOW and its free, he also listed about 10 complete FREE mmo's like WOW,EVE etc. that also have HUGE player bases.
The final thing he explained was that due to the nature of character development, 90% of the people playing MMO's invest a large amount of time into the game, to the exclusion of all other games, kinda like if you play WOW, then you dont really have time to play anything else, I know that happened to me so it seemed to make sense.
Anyway. MMO seems the genre of the future, and small networked games of 20v20 10v10 etc seem to be set to be console domain.
My View on read this guys article is that he hit the nail right on the head, there are now so many new MMO's coming onto the market to try and grab some of the BILLIONS that world of warcraft is raking in, that its becoming the gaming norm.
Anyway, the article had charts and quotes to backup what he was saying, which in short was that sales of High End, PC games were way down on what was expected of them. quoting crysis as one of the games that didn't ship nearly as much as (and he quoted one of the developers) they were expecting to.
The reason he gave for it tho was not so much hardware, and the lack of people with high end systems, he attributed it to less people looking for what he called small multi player base, in a nut shell the guy was explaining how that with so many people now on fast internet connections, gamers were seeking out the MMO feel to games, and old style games like HL2, Crysis, COD4, while awsome games, were not offering that MMO feel.
He also went on to explain the numbers behind the top 10 MMO's and just how big a chunk of the gaming market they made up, I dont recall the numbers but it was a HUGE %. something like 11 Million in Europe playing World of Warcraft, Another few Million were playing EQ-EQ2, around a Million Playing EVE, and those were just the Pay to Play games, Guild Wars Rivals WOW and its free, he also listed about 10 complete FREE mmo's like WOW,EVE etc. that also have HUGE player bases.
The final thing he explained was that due to the nature of character development, 90% of the people playing MMO's invest a large amount of time into the game, to the exclusion of all other games, kinda like if you play WOW, then you dont really have time to play anything else, I know that happened to me so it seemed to make sense.
Anyway. MMO seems the genre of the future, and small networked games of 20v20 10v10 etc seem to be set to be console domain.
My View on read this guys article is that he hit the nail right on the head, there are now so many new MMO's coming onto the market to try and grab some of the BILLIONS that world of warcraft is raking in, that its becoming the gaming norm.