It would genuinely surprise me if there were more console gamers online than PC gamers. 40 million Live members is great, I'm glad that many people have access to a service they can use to play online from their consoles. My son and I use it at least twice a month. But I still pay two monthly fees to Blizzard for me and my son's account for WoW, which we are on far more often than Live and are more enthralled in.
There's 9.1 million subscribers to WoW currently, but not sure how many of those millions have more than one account. That's a lot of people regardless, all paying a monthly or semi/annual fee. That's free profit basically even after all the new content and love and attention Blizz does with maintaining the game. It's the best example I can think of with a company truly devoting itself to making the game overall better (subjective I know) and keeping people around for years. And that's just the highest MMO. How many others have 1 million + subscribers?
And then there's Call of Duty, which is huge especially on 360 and Live. It sells millions the moment and a shit ton of people playing online. This coupled with all the other games that have online play does make the 360 a force to be reckoned with when considering online gamers. MW3 selling 13 million+, as ERP mentioned, beats Wow's peak right there. I wonder what the percentage of people buying the game plays online at least twice a month is. Regardless the game is a cash cow for Activision so the sales of the game more than make up for the cost of running the servers. Activision really lucked out this generation with having the best selling game series, and the Blizzard side with World of Warcraft. The amount of gamers that consume their products is astounding and truly wonder if they account for more online gamers as a company than any other.
In my estimation of PC gamers I do not account for those playing Facebook games like Farmville. One other side of the PC is the rampant piracy. WoW is a good example with all the private servers around. The number of gamers using them may have gone up since the patch to 5.x. And then Steam.
http://mmodata.blogspot.com/
This is a site that has data on millions of subscribers for MMO games. I wonder how accurate it is. If the total combined MMO accounts are around 30 million than the 40 million Live accounts blows it out the water.
There's 9.1 million subscribers to WoW currently, but not sure how many of those millions have more than one account. That's a lot of people regardless, all paying a monthly or semi/annual fee. That's free profit basically even after all the new content and love and attention Blizz does with maintaining the game. It's the best example I can think of with a company truly devoting itself to making the game overall better (subjective I know) and keeping people around for years. And that's just the highest MMO. How many others have 1 million + subscribers?
And then there's Call of Duty, which is huge especially on 360 and Live. It sells millions the moment and a shit ton of people playing online. This coupled with all the other games that have online play does make the 360 a force to be reckoned with when considering online gamers. MW3 selling 13 million+, as ERP mentioned, beats Wow's peak right there. I wonder what the percentage of people buying the game plays online at least twice a month is. Regardless the game is a cash cow for Activision so the sales of the game more than make up for the cost of running the servers. Activision really lucked out this generation with having the best selling game series, and the Blizzard side with World of Warcraft. The amount of gamers that consume their products is astounding and truly wonder if they account for more online gamers as a company than any other.
In my estimation of PC gamers I do not account for those playing Facebook games like Farmville. One other side of the PC is the rampant piracy. WoW is a good example with all the private servers around. The number of gamers using them may have gone up since the patch to 5.x. And then Steam.
http://mmodata.blogspot.com/
This is a site that has data on millions of subscribers for MMO games. I wonder how accurate it is. If the total combined MMO accounts are around 30 million than the 40 million Live accounts blows it out the water.
