[MUD-Dev] Re: Online vs Offline (was CoH and others)

[Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes]

Thu, Jul 15, 2004 at 09:47:40AM +0930 in
<00ae01c46a01$2647ae80$5f438790 at Rozak25>, Mike Rozak
<Mike at mxac.com.au> spake:
> Byron Ellacott wrote:

>> Would there perhaps have been a far larger potential audience for
>> an offline game?  Not everyone has broadband, not everyone is
>> willing to pay a subscription fee, and not everyone is interested
>> in playing with a bunch of adolescents.

> I tried to figure this out the other night...  If the technology
> in a MMORPG were sold as a stand-alone game, would it sell more or
> fewer copies? This question isn't going to be answered directly,
> since no MMORPG will risk cannibalizing their market with an
> offline version.  However, I was wondering if it would be possible
> to compare the sales of a best-selling MMORPG against an
> equivalent bestselling offline CRPG - which is about as close a
> comparison as one can get.

Final Fantasy XII is a single-player console RPG, using either the
same engine as FFXI or a very similar one, with AI-run party members
responding to your commands...  Like .HACK//SIGN, a virtual MMORPG.

There are currently over 500K FFXI players (and there will probably
be 25% more when Europe goes online next month).  Final Fantasy
console games consistently sell several million copies, with no sign
of letting up.

It'll be interesting to see what happens to the FFXI players when
the single-player game is competing for their time and interest, but
either way, Square/ENIX wins.  They're not worried about eating
their own market, they openly state they want market saturation in
every medium.

--
 <a href="http://kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu/~kamikaze/">  Mark Hughes </a>
"Doing the impossible makes us mighty." -Captain Malcolm Reynolds, Firefly
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