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Playing games is serious business
The world of online gaming is expanding rapidly. A report from market analysts The Themis Group predicts that multiplayer games will generate USD 1.3 billion in 2004 and USD 4 billion by 2008. Most of the money will be made in Asia.
February 06, 2004
The world of online gaming is expanding rapidly. A report from market analysts The Themis Group predicts that multiplayer games will generate USD 1.3 billion in 2004 and USD 4 billion by 2008.
Most of the money will be made in Asia. South Koreans are already playing games online in huge numbers, due mainly to the high proportion of the population with broadband access. About seven in ten households in South Korea have broadband.
Big in China
Analysts also expect China to be another major source of income. In 2003, the number of people playing online games rose by 63.8%, according to an industry report. The official Xinhua news agency reported that 14 million people regularly played online games in China last year, a 45.5% increase on 2002.
The bulk of the revenue is coming from massive multiplayer games. These are games where you pick up where you left off each time you log in. They are often role-playing games where the player chooses a character and develops it as the game progresses.
Monthly subscription fees provide most of the revenue. Themis estimates that subscriptions will make up USD 1.1 billion of the USD 1.3 billion that will be earned from multi-player games this year. Some of the more popular massive multiplayer games attract up to half a million people into their virtual worlds.
Also available online are regular multi-player games. These involve logging in and getting started immediately, pitting your wits against whoever else is playing at the time. Some games are played by individuals while others require teams.
Multi-player games
Anders Rask is founder of arguably the world's largest team (or clan as they're called) for the game Battlefield 1942. He sits in his apartment in Stockholm, while friends sitting in other parts of Sweden, the UK and Holland are all online at the same time, speaking to each other via voice-over-IP and tactically manoeuvring together through a virtual battlefield against an equally dispersed team.
Both massive and regular multiplayer games are extremely popular and the number of players is growing all the time. This means that both kinds of games are taking up lots of network capacity.
Rask warns operators to cater for the growing numbers. "We're a pretty picky bunch when it comes to the services that operators offer," he says. "There's a lot of discussion about the Swedish operators at the moment. One provider has a very fast connection but it won't connect to other networks very well.
Then you've got another operator that offers slightly lower speeds but is more stable when it connects to other networks. That's our preferred choice these days."
