by: Reinout te Brake
Only 20% come from Europe, 30% from North America, and a whopping 50% from Asia. That's according to a new report from InfoCom, a research company that broke the international demographics down by region and estimated the money involved totals between $5.5 and $7 billion.
Other fun facts from InfoCom's report:
- 17 million (of 48 million total) residents in South Korea regularly play online games.
- Online game providers in South Korea make money primarily through micro-transactions, i.e. sales derived from minor customizations to a player's character.
- Within the Asian sphere, South Korea's PC online games market alone was around 25% of the total worldwide pie.
- In Japan, the most popular platform for gaming was the PC (35%), followed by mobile phones (14%), game consoles (9%), and portable gaming devices (7%).
The most popular games, to put some of this in perspective, were table/card, role-playing, and puzzles. Which means casual and MMO games have effectively become PC gaming's lifeblood, both in the U.S. and abroad. In other words, pull casual and MMO games and the PC would virtually disappear as a mainstream gaming platform.
That's perhaps good news for casual and MMO fans, but bad news for traditional PC gamers, or at least those of you who want the PC to maintain its edge against consoles at a feature-for-feature level.
Original Post: http://reinouttebrake.blogspot.com/2008/03/global-online-game-revenues-90-pc-games.html
gaming // MMO // online // Reinout te Brake // revenue
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