The MMORPG Market Is Shrinking in China

I have not played any Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) for ages, and the fact is that although I am still trying to track the gaming industry, less and less people are talking to me about MMORPG. Instead, we more focus on web-based game, social games and mobile (online) games.

Sam Woelm, Executive Director of CY Foundation Group gave us an interesting presentation on iGamingAsia congress. It’s about a case study of marketing a MMORPG his company is operating. Sam shared some figures which did show that the market for MMORPG is shrinking in past several years, at least in China. He said, the market share for MMORPG in 2006 is about 90%, 87% in 2007, 85% in 2008, 79% in 2009 and only 57% in 2010. And in 2010, the web game takes 14% of the market share and the SNS social game is growing super fast to reach around 28.6%.

However, MMORPG can still make loads of money, one of the reasons is that it has the aging players base who are more willing to pay. Sam pointed out that the Top7 MMORPG operators in China: Tencent’s game DugeonsNFighters etc takes 28.5% of the MMORPG market share, Shanda’s game Longzhigu, Aion etc take 18%, Netease’s WoW etc 16%, Changyou’s Tianlongbabu 7.6%, Perfect World’s Wanmeishijie, Shengui Shijie etc 7.4%, Giant’s Zhengtu 3.8%, Guangyu’s Wendao 3.1%.

So the competition is really tough in China. ‘You only have 20min to convince your players to like your game because they can be easily distracted by another game.’ Sam said.