[MUD-Dev] Re: MUD-Dev Digest, Vol 4, Issue 30

[Dave Rickey]

From: "Matt Mihaly" <the_logos at ironrealms.com>
> On Fri, 10 Oct 2003, Lee Sheldon wrote:

>> UO, EQ and SWG -are- small niche games on entertainment's grand
>> stage, and that's why pointing at them as a successful model can
>> be counter-productive to put it kindly. What else do we have now
>> or in the predictable future? More niche games or design-limited
>> subsets of our already over-crowded niche like Shadowbane and
>> Horizons.

> On entertainment's grand stage they're niche but on
> entertainment's grand financial stage they are not niche for a
> single product. They're racking up revenue and profits equivalent
> to some summer blockbuster movies.

By the most generous possible estimate I can come up with, The Sims
has generated $300,000,000.00 in gross revenue (no more than $150M
of that going to EA).  EQ, on the other hand, has generated just
about the same gross revenue, but more like $250M of it has gone to
SOE.  UO has probably generated as much money for EA as The Sims.
*Very* few movies break the $100M mark in any one year.

The difference is that you would probably recognize the names of
nearly all the movies to do so (even if you hadn't seen them, they
have become a near-universal part of social awareness, as hard to
avoid as knowing who won the last Super Bowl), while probably half
of the people who have heard about EQ did so through the TV "48
Hours" hatchet job.

The market is not yet over-crowded, in fact it is drastically
under-served.  However, it is also demanding, in the sense that the
level of service and entertainment they consider minimal is actually
very difficult to achieve.  But this seems to be typical of
entertainment, those that succeed do so with high returns, but most
fail.

--Dave
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