MMO subscriptions fall for the first time

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Subscriptions levels for massively multiplayer online games fell in 2010 for the first time ever, according to research from ScreenDigest.

There was a drop in purchases for MMOGs on the PC in both North America and Europe.

In 2009, $1.66 billion was made by the MMOG industry, but that figure dropped a year later by 5% to around $1.58 billion.

2009 had previously seen a 10% growth in revenue, whilst the year before that saw an increase of 21.6%.

Piers Harding-Roles, a senior analyst at Screen Digest, stated: “The 2010 decline in subscription revenue – the first annual contraction experienced by the market since our coverage of this segment started in 2002 – represents an inflection point for the industry.”

Microtransactions, however, saw an increase in revenue as they generated $1.13 billion – up 24.2% from the year before.

Mr Harding-Roles said of microtransactions: “This more than compensated for the decline in the subscription area and caused total Western MMOG/MOG market revenue – both subscriptions and microtransactions – to rise to $2.7 billion in 2010, up 5.3 percent from $2.57 billion in 2009.”

He goes on to say that microtransactions will continue to increase and will reach $1.8 billion in revnue by 2015.

This isn’t surprising as several big name MMOGs have made the shift to free-to-play models which rely on income from in-game microtransaction purchases, not subscriptions.

Funcom’s Conan recently made this shift with great success, and Star Trek Online is making the move later this year.

Tags: MMOG