hat tip to
mr takahashi over at
venturebeat for pointing out a new DFC Intelligence
report on the
projected market size for free to play online games. after publishing an
earlier report that pegged the overall global market size at $7bn in 2015, they have now predicted that the market in English language markets will be $2bn by 2015. I am not quite sure if this is a North American estimate, or North America + UK, but last time I checked, many other growing online gaming markets are English language as well (including all of Scandanavia, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, etc). i will go on a limb and predict that revenues generated by online game companies in English speaking countries will reach
$2bn by
2013. after losing ground and users to more agile startups in 2010 and 2011, you have to believe that incumbent
retail box dinosaurs will get their act together and make a stronger effort to transition their multi-billion dollar franchises to this model. additionally, it is unlikely that it will be creativity in packaging and bundling subscription-based offerings that will drive this growth, but rather creativity in design that will take this business model into account from the ground up to create a compelling user experience for players. more often than not, free to play online games run into issues around imbalance and creating a grind-based user progression to encourage players to pay for power to stay competitive or to pay to keep up. in any case, it is a fascinating business model which has proven to be very lucrative around the world, and the gaming industry is most definitely in the midst of an interesting transition.
Hello. My name is Jason, and here you will find some thoughts on the all things digital media, but with a focus on a couple of things i love: movies, music and games. I used to be a VC at FirstMark Capital in NYC, and now lead the International Publishing efforts at online game publisher/developer Riot Games in LA. It goes without saying, but all opinions found on this site are not representative of opinions of either FirstMark Capital or Riot Games. They are my own personal random rants.