Comments on: More than 1 billion people play online games in 2008

By: T=Machine » Predicting player figures for any online game or MMO

T=Machine » Predicting player figures for any online game or MMO — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 14:05:14 +0000

[...] is rather the opposite end of interpretation to “Over 1 billion people play online games” – and make sure you read Raph Koster’s thoughts before trying to interpret these [...]

By: Jussi Laakkonen

Jussi Laakkonen — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 07:27:16 +0000

Great stuff Adam (as always ;-)). It’s superb to see how you arrived at the conclusion, which pretty much the same figure the European Network and Information Security Agency’s task group on Virtual Worlds also came up:

– clip –

http://www.virtualworldsnews.com/2008/11/enisa-highlights-security-risks-of-virtual-worlds-mmogs.html

The European agency counts 1 billion registered users for MMOGs and virtual worlds, racking up real-money transactions for virtual goods at $2 billion by the end of 2007. A 1,500-person survey in the report, though, found that 30% of users had lost virtual property due to some form of fraud.

By: 15Mb: another blog from David G.W. Birch » Blog Archive » Freaks or futurologists?

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 07:53:05 +0000

[...] [From T=Machine » More than 1 billion people play online games in 2008] [...]

By: No, Wait… Bots: Our Last Best Hope For The MMO Industry « Broken Toys

No, Wait… Bots: Our Last Best Hope For The MMO Industry « Broken Toys — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 23:46:42 +0000

[...] Adam Martin, late of NCsoft Europe and currently thinking deep thoughts, in the midst of writing an article about the potential size of the online industry (hint: it’s pretty damned big) postulates an interesting theory: it’s not in the [...]

By: There Are More Than One Billion Online Gamers : No Hype Reviews

There Are More Than One Billion Online Gamers : No Hype Reviews — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 18:27:38 +0000

[...] tidbit was taken from a thought experiment performed over at T=Machine. He essentially adds up the millions of players of various web based games. That’s right, [...]

By: Ted Howard

Ted Howard — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 16:54:45 +0000

I’m really just putting in a plug here for Kim Cameron, one of Microsoft’s identity gurus. Until I met Kim, I didn’t understand the intricacies of identity systems. Simply counting people and identities is the tip of the iceberg in understanding the full topic. For anyone interested in learning more about “identity” as it relates to computers, I recommend starting with Kim’s proposed Laws of Identity (http://www.identityblog.com/?p=354).

Loving the posts, Adam.

Ted Howard

By: mattb

mattb — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 16:50:10 +0000

Well, we may not care as developers or entrepreneurs about the numbers of actual people….. but it sure would make for some good armchair social science.

By: adam

adam — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 14:59:41 +0000

Well, my point is that this doesn’t matter – you never monetize a person, you only ever monetize a virtual identity.

Frankly, why should we care how many real people are involved? Whether one identity is more or less likely to also play other games is something we should be establishing independently as part of our demographic modelling in our own game – it varies hugely from genre to genre and game to game anyway, so why worry about the difference between humans doing this and virtual identities doing this?

By: Thom

Thom — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 14:49:50 +0000

Impressive and interesting stuff—but, while the number is undoubtedly huge, isn’t there a rather hazy gulf between the hard data on active registered identities (375m), and the number of individual people behind these (???m)—because we have little information on how many people have several active accounts with several games. For FTP games, it’s fairly likely that the kind of people who are consistently active on one game are playing at least one other, perhaps more. In this sense, paid-for games are a more reliable model: barriers to entry are higher, but far fewer people have multiple active accounts.

Nevertheless—fascinating stuff.