With the explosive growth of MMORPGS on the PC, people are probably asking yourself when it comes to console MMORPG. Unfortunately, I don't see that happens ... ever. Sony bet by releasing their title "everquest", famous for the Playstation 2 and the final result was bankruptcy. The game simply doesn't attract enough attention from players.
The console market MMORPG is simply too small. Let's take a look at the numbers for a minute. For this scenario we will look at only the United States. Suppose a fictional game editor, games of Altai, wants to make an MMORPG for the console market. Suppose also that this MMORPG will be published on all three "next gen" console, Wii, Xbox360 and Playstation 3. If all of you all "next gen" console sales, you'll end up with about 29 million units. There are over 200 million internet users in the United States. These numbers alone are daunting enough for a game publisher to consider also looking to bring a MMORPG to the console, but let's go a bit further. For a game publisher to release a game on any console, they have to pay the company owning the console, in this case our imaginary game publisher, Altai, games would have to pay a license fee for Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo. On top of these charges, how the heck could Altay Games collects monthly subscription fees? Should work with all consoles of three companies to develop a platform to collect monthly subscriptions. In the end, there is no way that any company MMORPG can justify all of these costs for a small market. There are simply too many barriers to entry.
MMORPGS have thrived on your PC simply because there are barriers to entry for a game publisher. If you look at Dia7maria, the company behind the secret of the Solstice and Fiesta, it's amazing how easy it is to publish MMORPG. Plan d ' dia7maria undertaking, as most of the WORLD publishers, is to bring the popular MMORPG from Asia to the United States. Because MMORPGS in Asia are already on your PC, there are no costs for the porting of game or anything. Today the face of MMORPG publishers only expenses to bring a MMORPG in the United States is of licensing fees and translation. Sure, there are other committees with the maintenance of a game, but is much cheaper to publish an MMORPG on PC a console.
If MMORPGS cannot expand console, where it can expand? I Predict phones. Think About It. The mobile phone market is ginormous; Yes that is actually a Word. Almost every single person in the United States has a cell phone, and even people in Asia and Europe are the phones. Believe it or not, there are almost twice as many users of mobile phones worldwide than users of the internet. With mobile phones, being a wider market than PC and automatically having access to a kind of internet, MMORPG space have a lot of potential here. A free MMORPG that I found fascinating was shadow of legend. The game is playable on both phones and PC. The game doesn't have "perfect world" as graphics, but are tolerated. When I started playing the game on PC, I was wondering why the game was so poor graphics, but after I learned that the game works on cell phones, I was immediately impressed. Sure the game had its flaws, but mobile MMORPG are still very new.
More information on MMORPG games and MMOS like gunbound [http://mmohub.org/2008/gunbound] to Mmohub.
