Massively Multiplayer Games: Let's Run the Numbers

June 14, 2007

So who's the top dog in the MMO crowd? Sure everyone knows that Blizzard has around 8.5 million users with World of Warcraft. But what's the next biggest game? Or the third biggest game? What's the most popular free-to-play online game? It used to be that the website MMOGchart.com was the only place to get some comparisons and verified numbers, but it hasn't been updated in a year.

This left a black hole in my heart.

To my rescue comes Phil 'Vortal' White, an MMO industry veteran who now runs his own consultancy. White has picked up where MMOGchart left off, assembling his own confirmed numbers to create MMOGData.com. Check out the total number of MMO subscribers or the contribution from each game. View WoW's dominance in the over 100,000 subscribers chart or see how fantasy is king in the genre breakdown. Some of the graphs are admittedly a little hard to read, but you can always download the excel file if you want to crunch the numbers yourself.

White won't add any data to his chart until it's been confirmed by at least two sources. This makes the going difficult, as reported in this essay he wrote for our sister-site RPGVault. To quote:

It has been a bigger task than I thought... there is just less and less public information available now - why is this? In the movie industry, you can get the box office numbers from lots of different sources, but not for MMOGs; it is still all hush-hush, and with World of Warcraft redefining what is a commercial success, it gets even more difficult. -Phil White

Hopefully the industry will loosen up and be more open with the numbers -- having good data allows more and more people to invest in smarter games, instead of blindly guessing at what the market wants. Yeah, you heard me.       -Fargo

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