In an otherwise fluffy survey piece (nothing new to Joystiq readers) on the Massively
Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG) market, the New York Times stuffs an interesting quote from Wedbush Morgan Securities
analyst Michael Pachter in the last paragraph of the two-page article.
In the quote, Pachter predicts nothing short of MMOG implosion: "I don't think there are four million people in the world who really want to play online games every month…. eventually it will come back to the mean, maybe a million subscribers." If that prediction is to be true, World of Warcraft will need to lose over 75% of its subscribers, all of the other MMOGs will need to shut down, and Xbox Live will fail. The Metaverse will never come to exist!
Joystiq to Pachter: you're out of touch with the future.
Our prediction: 100 million people worldwide will pay to participate in persistent worlds of some sort or another by 2020. Given the inevitable ubiquity of wireless broadband and the way it will enable online sessions to leap from desktop to mobile device, maybe sooner.
While we're paying the New York Times a visit, we should also note that they have likely overestimated the total annual subscription revenues of WoW, pegging them at "more than $700 million." They forgot to factor in the lower costs that Chinese consumers pay to play WoW. Oops.
