Mobitrends

Deconstructed by Kevin Rose

I ran across this charts (TNS/Sofres for GamesIndustry.com) about the revenue from MMOs in the game industry and found it pretty interesting. First it shows that in 2009/2010 MMOs were representing about 6B$ of the 50B$ cake of the game industry. About half of that comes from monthly subscriptions (WoW-style) while 10% from annual subscriptions (Xbox-live ? ). Virtual currency is oddly high in France, probably the effect of MMOs such as Dofus which are highly successful around here.

One thing is puzzling me though : where are Russia and Asia ? Blizzard launched both countries and I have trouble believing the market may be too small to show up on this chart…

The Nintendo 3DS has been finally confirmed for February 2011. An intro video of Street Fighter IV has also leaked which shows that the 3DS is not only about a 3D screen it’s also about instant gaming with people around you, adding a nice touch of instant interaction to that gaming console.

Keep in mind that Unity is a 1500USD game engine … which totally can stand the comparison with Gamebryo’s or UT’s ! (who are priced with 2/3more digits…)

We had a little talk that had me gather a few interesting figures about MMOs:

World of Warcraft stats:

• Blizzard Online Network Services run in 10 data centers around the world, including facilities in Washington, California, Texas, Massachusetts, France, Germany, Sweden, South Korea, China, and Taiwan.
• Blizzard uses 20,000 systems and 1.3 petabytes of storage to power its gaming operations.
• WoW’s infrastructure includes 3,250 server blades, 75,000 CPU cores, and 112.5 terabytes of blade RAM.
• The Blizzard network is managed by a staff of 68 people.
• The company’s gaming infrastructure is monitored from a global network operating center (GNOC), which like many NOCs, features televisions tuned to the weather stations to track potential uptime threats across its data center footprint.

This is my preferred casual game right now, Taito has been revamping his old classics (like puzzle bobble) and have successfully managed to give them an HD spin while keeping the old magic. Can be tried/bought from PSN right from your PSP.