The Research: Americans spent $3.8 billion on MMO games in 2009

Do you know how much money have you spent on playing MMO games? The answer is $3.8 billion in 2009! This is not a joke but Today’s Gamers MMO Focus Report by Gamesindustry.com and TNS. Below is the detail of the research.

Analysis of the consumer data coming from the Today's Gamers MMO Focus Report by Gamesindustry.com and TNS reveals that 21 million Americans spend an average of $15 per month on Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games. More than 90% of this budget is spent directly online. 25 million Americans play these games without spending any money. Revenues in main EU countries are around $250M with the UK having a slight lead over Germany; nowhere near the staggering amount of $3.8B spent in the US. Growth is expected to come from countries such as Italy, Spain, Russia, Turkey, Poland and Sweden, and these countries are subject of the new MMO Emerging Markets Survey.

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'Free to play' versus 'Pay to play'

The majority of the American MMO players do not pay to play but still a significant share of 46% does. It shows that MMO games are being accepted as a type of game worth paying for. Of the hundreds of MMO games in the market, only a few require payment up-front, mainly by selling software to be installed on the PC. Americans spent approximately $400M on this, split up into boxed products and online downloads. $2.4B is spent on monthly or annual subscriptions. Many free-to-play MMOs rely on selling in-game virtual items using direct micro-transactions or a virtual currency approach, grossing another $1B in revenues.

Klaas Kersting, CEO of Gameforge, comments: "The market for MMO games definitely still has a lot of growth potential. We were able to increase our revenue by 6261 percent over the past 5 years. Delivering long-term quality and depth are major success factors in expanding our player base. And it definitely works - with more than 100 million registered users, we are growing fast and expect to continue on this path."

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World of Warcraft versus 'the long tail'

Looking at number of players, World of Warcraft leads the pack, just in front of kids MMOs NeoPets and ClubPenguin, with approximately 12,500,000 Americans admitting to have played. This includes people only making use of the free trial. The top five is complemented by Disney ToonTown and Runescape. No doubt World of Warcraft is grossing most revenues but the launch of hundreds of new MMOs over the last years has definitely attracted new players to the genre and other companies are also finding ways to get players to pay.

Spenser Chi, responsible for the EU operations at Aeria Games & Entertainment, comments: "With every game launch, we find a new population of users without noticeable cannibalisation of our other titles. This is a sign to us that the MMO market will continue to grow in number of players as well as revenue."

Today's Gamers MMO Focus Report and the MMO Emerging Markets Survey

Online business models and game platforms are currently driving the growth and diversification of the games industry, and Today's Gamers believe that the only way to understand the changes in this field is to ask the consumer. Three main drivers behind this approach are:

· Tracking retail sales covers only a shrinking part of the games revenues.

· The long tail of companies and games involved no longer allow extrapolation of revenues from a limited number of publishers.

· Total revenues are not enough to back-up business plans. Spending needs to be connected to numbers of players and their profile as well as cross-platform and spending insights.

The data in this press release comes from the Today's Gamers International Survey held in US, UK, GER, FR, NL & BEL. All MMO-relevant data is comprised in the MMO Focus Report. The full international MMO Focus Report and full dataset are available for 4,950. Launch partners of the MMO Emerging Markets Survey are offered a price of 1,500 per country with a minimum uptake of 5 countries. Contact peter@newzoo.com or visit www.todaysgamers.com.

For more information on the MMO Emerging Markets Survey, visit: www.gamesindustry.com/company/542/service/2434

For more information on the MMO Focus Report, visit: www.gamesindustry.com/profile/service/1870

High resolution MMO Graphs are available for download from

www.gamesindustry.com/about-newzoo/todaysgamers_graphs_MMO