Lots has been written about the Long Tail of certain media assets, but here's a quick summary of the theory and an application of it to the massively multiplayer genre.
Long after certain consumer products are popular, they continue to sell and can, over the long run, ring up sales volumes that rival the biggest blockbuster products. Music, for instance, sells well for years after that music topped the Billboard pop charts. Some games also have a long tail: witness Atari's launch of retro gaming systems this summer and last summer.
But the MMOG genre has no Long Tail. MMOGs just die. They have no Long Tail because they cost bucketloads of money to run. Servers must be hosted in secure facilities and they must be connected to the Internet via costly bandwidth contracts. Staff must be trained to maintain those servers. Customer service people need to answer emails and resolve customer disputes. So instead of just sitting around forever and earning a trickle of revenue for a very long time, MMOGs are the only games products that are truly shut down.
Genre-defining games like Everquest will eventually be shut down in much the same way that Asheron's Call 2 will be shut down later this year. Even so, we predict that at some point Moore's Law will revive these shut-down games. As hardware becomes increasingly powerful and bandwidth becomes increasingly cheap, companies will be able to revive and run their most successful MMOGs at a fraction of today's costs.
Which of us wouldn't love get our nostalgic kicks on in World of Warcraft's re-release in 2030, long after its current popularity has faded?
