For our class today, April 19, I
will be discussing the growing infrastructure and competitive market of the
online video gaming world. My focus is on the company Blizzard, the owners and
creators of Call of Duty, Star Craft,
Diablo and my main topic World of
Warcraft. The topic for this week is mobile media and web 3.0: how are
emerging technologies impacting society? I aim to answer that question by
discussion the game World of Warcraft (WoW). This game started
online back in 1994 and has grown into a powerhouse of Massive Multi-player Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPG) that collect hundreds in revenue from those who play.
We may
not see the internet as an emerging technology, but the impact it has on our
daily lives is hard to miss. When it comes to Web 3.0, online gaming is very
much affected by this. A gamer will choose to play online with anonymous
players and live in a world that has been created for them by a team of graphic
designers, tech systems and the video game creators. Game companies can host
their products for free on the internet, or like Blizzard has found out, gamers
will pay for the best. To play a WoW game, the game price is from twenty to
forty dollars. If the player wants to take their skills on the internet, which is the point of MMORPG, then the
monthly subscription fee is fifteen dollars. Fifteen dollars multiplied by
twelve months means a gamer will pay one hundred and eighty (180) dollars a
year to play against other people they have never met. Based on data In 2011*,
World of Warcraft had twelve million (12, 000,000) active gamers.
$14.99/month x 12 months = $179.88 year subscription to
World of Warcraft
$14.99 x 12, 000,000 players = $179,880,000 subscription
profits for one month
$14.99/ month x 12 months x 12 million subscribers = $2,158,560,000
revenue from online subscriptions in one year.
The
economic revenue for online gaming is a considerable amount, probably more than
the developers were ever thinking they could make on a venture like this. The
online gaming technology has turned a generation from playing outdoors to using
LED screen as entertainment. The emerging technologies can be seen as a double
sided coin: one shows technological progression while another shows social
regression.
*Note: the active member figures given by gaming companies
are not completely accurate (trial members are considered active members even
if they never pay after the trial) so figures are rounded to create an idea of
the membership base.
