Massive Online Games are only getting more Massive
It seems like Massive Online Games are on getting more and more popular. I remember when Ultima Online (One of the first MMORPGs) was released in 1997. By around mid 2001 the game peaked at around 250,000 subscribers. EverQuest, on the other hand, Ultima Online’s #1 competitor at the time peaked at around 500,000 subscribers 2003 and remained in that area up until mid 2005, when Blizzard’s World of Warcraft took off. Lineage, which started in mid 1998 before EverQuest reached it’s peak in 2004, with a whopping 3,000,000 subscribers. At this point, the MMORPG Market has grown tremendously, as the VERY FIRST MMORPG, Never Winter Nights, which AOL hosted back in 1991 up until 1997 started with servers that could only handle 50 players at once, but eventually grew to 500 players in 1995. The game peaked at around 115,000 players.
The MMORPG market really ‘exploded’ when World of Warcraft was released in late 2004. The game launched with nearly 250,000 subscribers and quickly grew to 1,000,000 players by the start of 2005. That game’s subscribers basically quadrupled in a matter of months. In 2008, within a short four years, World of Warcraft reached a jaw dropping 10,000,000 subscribers. Warcraft had trumped every other MMORPG on the market. The game basically had more players than its top 4 competitors combined (Lineage, Lineage 2, RuneScape and Final Fantasy 11). World of Warcraft though, wasn’t the only MMORPG to grow in popularity, as Pay to Play MMORPGs grew in popularity, an entirely type of MMO was born, the Free to Play (F2P) genre.
Although no Free To Play game can boast as many active players as World of Warcraft, some do come close. MapleStory for example, one of the most popular free MMORPGs on the market, has well over 50,000,000 accounts worldwide while other free to play MMORPGs like Rappelz, Free Realms and Ragnarok Online also boast well over a million players. Even though there is no one ‘Enormously popular’ free to play title, there are literally hundreds of games, each with a moderate amount of players. It’s amazing though how far the massive multiplayer game market has grown since its inception in 1991.
By, Omer Altay
