Virtual World/MMO Market Set for Explosive Growth, Despite Dominance of WoW, According to Latest Research From GigaOM Pro
In recent years, virtual worlds — also known as massively multiplayer online games, or MMOs — have seen tremendous growth as the total consumer user base has reached more than 100 million worldwide. However, the most well-known sub-genre, MMORPGs, has hit a plateau, with the success of World of Warcraft dominating that market. However, WoW’s dominance will not slow the explosive growth in the virtual worlds market as new opportunities emerge through integration with social networks like Facebook and mobile devices such as the iPhone, according to a new report from GigaOM Pro analyst Wagner James Au,
“Social networks are becoming excellent platforms for virtual worlds through third-party application integration,” said Wagner James Au. “Casual virtual worlds such as Zynga’s Yoville have already gained 8 million active users through Facebook integration. It is meshing of social networks, virtual world and casual gaming that holds some of the greatest potential.”
The fast-growing availability of highly-connected mobile devices such as smartphones and netbooks will also drive greater adoption of virtual worlds. Whether it’s through specially designed mobile MMOs such as that being developed by Booyah, or the increased emphasis on cloud-based computing architectures for gaming such as OnLive, GigaOM Pro analyst Au expects a much greater number of mobile devices to connect to the virtual world universe.
“The virtual world space keeps evolving and growing,” Au said. “There’s inevitably going to be a shakeout of players who don’t adjust to broader market and technology trends. Hopefully my analysis will help GigaOM Pro subscribers stay ahead of that game.”
The report, entitled “Virtual Worlds: Trends and Opportunities,” is available to GigaOM Pro subscribers. You can see the report here on GigaOM Pro.
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About Wagner Au
Au is a contributing editor for GigaOM.com, primarily covering online worlds and games, and also writes about those subjects for GigaOM sites NewTeeVee, Earth2Tech, and the Apple Blog. He also writes about Second Life and “other metaverse” virtual worlds on his own blog New World Notes. He’s the author of “The Making of Second Life” from HarperCollins, based on his experiences as Linden Lab’s former “virtually embedded journalist” from 2003-2005. He’s also written on these subjects for Wired Magazine, Salon.com, the Los Angeles Times and Harpers, and has frequently appeared on NPR, the BBC, the New York Times, the Discovery Channel and other media outlets, and spoken on them at SXSW, O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 and ETech, the Virtual Worlds Conference, and elsewhere. As a developer and consultant, he’s worked on virtual world/game projects for Electronic Arts, the Naval Postgraduate School’s MOVES Institute, Wieden+Kennedy and other organizations.
