Online gaming market hits record
NPD: Teens lead continued surge; most play on PCs
By Danny King -- Video Business, 4/2/2008
APRIL 2 | About 60% of computer-game players compete with others online, fueling a multi-billion-dollar industry led by Vivendi unit Blizzard Entertainment and prompting social-networking Web sites to include games to attract visitors, according to a report released this week by NPD Group.
Almost three-quarters of the U.S. population played videogames last year, and online gaming participants will account for 42% of the population this year, up from 40% in 2007, according to an NPD online poll of more than 20,000 people. About 40% of the online gamers are under 18, NPD said.
"Despite the buzz in the industry regarding online gaming, it is still relatively small compared to offline gaming," said Anita Frazier, industry analyst at NPD. "There is still a large, untapped market for gaming in general and online gaming in particular."
Online-gaming subscribers have tripled to about 16 million in the past three years, according to Web site Mmogchart.com, while social-networking sites such as News Corp.’s MySpace are jumping into free online gaming in order to secure visitors. Estimates of worldwide revenue from online gaming subscriptions vary widely, though last year, the BBC, citing Screen Digest, estimated the market at $1 billion and projected it to grow to $1.5 billion by 2011.
Blizzard’s World of Warcraft dominates the online-games subscription market, with a 63% market share, according to Mmogchart. With more than 10 million subscribers, Warcraft helped Blizzard boost its sales by 58% last year to 814 million euros ($1.19 billion). U.K. software maker Jagex’s Runescape and Seoul-based NCsoft’s Lineage and Lineage II each have about 6% of the market, the Web site reported.
Meanwhile, MySpace this year started its online gaming page, where multiple players can compete in games such as Poker and Darts. The page stems from a partnership with Oberon Media that was announced last October.
About 90% of online gamers use a personal computer to play online, NPD said. Of the one in five using videogame systems, about half use Microsoft’s Xbox 360 console. Portable-system users spent the most time per week playing online, according to NPD.
The worldwide gaming audience rose 17% to about 217 million, or almost a third of the world’s Internet users, as of last May, according to ComScore Networks. Yahoo! Games attracted the most participants, with a gaming audience of about 53 million, ComScore said.
NPD announced it would track online games in February.
