Online worlds to become gaming's next big battleground

Posted on 23 Jan 2004 at 11:21

A new report from UK analysts The Themis Group is predicting the future is bright and it's going to be online.

According to Themis's analysis of future trends in the gaming industry, 2004 will be the first year when online gaming revenues will top $1 billion, which will rise to $4.1 billion dollars by 2008. Most of the money will come direct from subscriptions, but Themis is also forecasting a huge rise in advertising and sponsored content in persistent online worlds.

'It's clear that the online gaming portion of the industry continues to experience surging growth, especially in the area of subscription-based games. In 2004 alone, we expect to see over $1.1 billion in total subscription revenues for persistent worlds, such as EverQuest, Star Wars Galaxies and Final Fantasy Online,' said Themis Group CEO and co-founder Alex Macris.

Perhaps most intriguing though is Themis's analysis of both the current market leaders and who it predicts will be the big players in the future. Unsurprisingly, given Asia's addiction to online games, Korean giant NCSoft heads the list of current market leaders, followed in rapid succession by Sony, EA, Mythic and Microsoft.

However Themis also expects that of the raft of new persistent online worlds in development, Blizzard's World of Warcraft will become the most popular online game, followed by Sony's EverQuest 2, Vivendi's Middle-earth Online, Ubi Soft's The Matrix Online and EA's Ultima X Odyssey.

The growth of broadband access in south-east Asia will see it become the world's biggest region for online gaming and Themis expects that online sports will become a major arena as Sony goes head-to-head with Microsoft for hundreds of millions of dollars worth of revenue.

Looking even further forward to 2014, Themis says there could be over 15 million online gamers in the US alone, paying roughly $23 a month in subscriptions. The concept of virtual property will also develop exponentially driving a market which will be worth well over $9 billion.

Although all this crystal ball gazing is no doubt fascinating, there is of course no guarantee that any of it will come to pass. But with such large revenues for grabs, you can bet that online worlds will become gaming's next big battleground.

Author: John Houlihan