Zeta has a few thoughts on games (and, by extension, gamers):
Yet still the gaming companies seeks more for their market. So what happened? Why the boom in gaming? Or s it just that we all came out of the closet at once? I suspect it is not so much a boom as a unification in some ways. Remember when I mentioned back there that MUDS had maybe 200 logged in at a time? Multiply that by the list of MUDS that are active on The Mud Connector. Now add a few hundred more MUDs.
Actually, I believe most of us under-reported the number of active connections in MUDs. I know there was a big power struggle in the SMAUG community for a while as to whom could support the most active connections to the MUD (and I believe they were about as dishonest about their maxes as we were, just the other way around), but at least the MUD community of university and public systems liked to de-emphasize the traffic and strain on systems.
CrushMUD’s maximum simultaneous users was in the upper 400s, nothing compared to the 40k logged into WoW at any given moment, but more than some of the lower population servers. And definitely more than AoC, DnL, or DDO.
But she’s right - the 1990s had their games and gamers. It’s just that our money has become more valuable. In times of recessions (and one might reasonably argue that the MMO boom started in 2001-ish), online games are usually the last thing to go. XBox Live sells thirty days of entertainment, sixteen hours a day, at the price of six hours worth of movie-going. And that’s if you include the DSL or Cable subscription.
WoW and Warhammer cost the same as a single ticket on a Saturday evening show in San Francisco and offer the entertainment of a movie, the social aspect of a beer afterward, and a chance on competition and achievement of a soccer club membership - all from the comfort of one’s own home, free from four dollar gas prices and the various problems and risks of trying to get parking and walk to a movie theatre in any of America’s larger cities.
So, yes, we sell a commodity that’s not likely to be affected by recessions, unemployment, and political change as many other luxury items are. At the same time, the means of delivery of the commodity, network access and hardware, are getting cheaper and cheaper by the month. That’s a far cry from 2001’s professional game development.
Single-player games benefit similarly. While the subscription model (unlike Raph Koster’s doomy predictions a few years back) is the way to make money off gamers these days, today’s developers have access to a huge market of games-ready PCs in consumer hands. This market first migrated the DnD players of yesteryear but has since then expanded immensely. Dozens of friends of mine who would not have been caught dead rolling the dice, eating Cheetos, are today avid GTA, Halo, or WoW players.
The sale figures even of doomed and bad games (Terrawars anyone?) eclipse those of Wasteland by orders of magnitude. The Bards Tale 2005 beat the original Bards Tale by even more than that. And, believe me, it’s not for the higher quality of the game… (I am obviously biased).
Today’s games aren’t your mother’s Monopoly board anymore. That’s tragic in some ways, great in others. And while no MMO or single user game will for the foreseeable future beat the sales figures of Cluedo or Chess (but beating, for example, “The Settlers of Catan“), things are moving. Where the availability of cheaper print and design tools heralded the rise of DnD, so does access to more and more computer and console systems in American and the World’s households ring in the age of computer games.
Zeta is right about one thing - we’re a playful kind of people. And more and more so we get the tools to get it all out…
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