3) Understanding the Economy

Figure 3-1. Most popular MMOs

Before recently, your choice of MMO was very limited. Today, hundreds of strains of massively successful Bacterium Onlinius have infested the internet – all mutated from a small number of primitive ancestors. Several have proven deadly, and most are at least capable of hijacking the hum🧔an brain stem.

To give you an idea of today’s MMO landscape, we created figure 3-1, which compares the subscriber counts of three of the mostꦬ popular MMOs.

Figure 3-2. Budget Games

If you’re really strapped for cash, note the correlation between game pri⛦ces and the number of unnecessarily prominent ‘X’s. Also note that the tren🍒d equally represents game quality.

Figure 3-3. Understanding competition

The games industr🌸y is highly competit꧒ive - everyone is grasping for a share in the marketplace, clawing over each other like rabid house cats – or some other such clawed creature.

If a developer is lucky, it can establish absolute domina🅺nce over its arena, as depicted in our final chart.

Apr 30, 2008