General Discussion

Background info:

I am a graduating student who lives in chicago and these are observations from this geographic location.

Observation:

99% of people who I know who play wow, out of about a few hundred that I have met in the last five to six years, cannot play a game that requires more system resources than wow.

Analysis:

Statistically using  Z chart, this would mean that in the midwest 95% of players cannot afford better gaming rigs.

Question?

How is a company going to turn a profit in this market if it needs 200,000 subscribers to break even, as I've heard mnetioned before.....witht hese figures...it is impossible unless they are aiming at other global markets like the asian market or in greece, where kids who don't even own computers play at cafe's. It's impossible.

Prognosis: Any game comming out in the near future in the U.s. with higher specs than wow, will not succeed, and no people do not buy new computers every year...the average is every seven to ten years, unless they are getting some sort of money from work or school or scholarships. My dad is a Doctor, and he cannot afford to buy a computer right now because of rising gas prices college tuition and a slumping economy. I have been working for a year now and make about 30 grand a year. I cannot afford to pay for a new computer because of my rent and college debt. So how are people, who are not in the top 5 percent of the wealthy, going to play these games? They can't, and blizzard has researched the demographics and that is the answer to why they do so well...simply because they have common sense.

I think your stats are a bit off.  There are a lot more people than that who have the means to play games with specs greater than WoW's. 

How can you say 95% of the midwest when you are getting your data from a very small pool of people?  And I would say people can "afford" better rigs, they really arent that expensive.  Although they can afford them, not all people have them.  But if they needed to get them to play a certain game that they wanted, many people could easily do that.

Originally posted by Wow4Lifer

Background info:

I am a graduating student who lives in chicago and these are observations from this geographic location.

 

Observation:

99% of people who I know who play wow, out of about a few hundred that I have met in the last five to six years, cannot play a game that requires more system resources than wow.

 

Analysis:

Statistically using  Z chart, this would mean that in the midwest 95% of players cannot afford better gaming rigs.

 

Question?

How is a company going to turn a profit in this market if it needs 200,000 subscribers to break even, as I've heard mnetioned before.....witht hese figures...it is impossible unless they are aiming at other global markets like the asian market or in greece, where kids who don't even own computers play at cafe's. It's impossible.

 

Prognosis: Any game comming out in the near future in the U.s. with higher specs than wow, will not succeed, and no people do not buy new computers every year...the average is every seven to ten years, unless they are getting some sort of money from work or school or scholarships. My dad is a Doctor, and he cannot afford to buy a computer right now because of rising gas prices college tuition and a slumping economy. I have been working for a year now and make about 30 grand a year. I cannot afford to pay for a new computer because of my rent and college debt. So how are people, who are not in the top 5 percent of the wealthy, going to play these games? They can't, and blizzard has researched the demographics and that is the answer to why they do so well...simply because they have common sense.

There is a thread on this in a KOTOR MMO thread i made that has a link to the developer on the new MMO talking about this. But i tend to disagree with no being able to afford a new PC. you just by part by part. Most games today just need a better graphics card and thats only for the few who want there systems on the highest graphics.

edit: linky

http://mmocodex.com/blog/?p=14924

Some contentions to the responses above.

Statistically, I used a Z chart to calculate this figure so it is statistically accurate based on my sample of 100 people from different places all around illinois, from Greenville illinois to downtown chicago to benton...all random players who played wow from different places, but most are concentrated in the northshore suburbs, which is accoridng to newsweek, a place where only "Those with money" live.  And no, people cannot afford to pay 2g's 1g for a game when they can buy a console for 300, and even if they needed to would not be able to without taking out a loan, which they would not do, since they do this for cars, etc. or things more important and necessary to them.

Second, not everyone knows alot about computers. The average gamer can barely put his graphics card in right, so what makes you think that they are going to risk no warranty on their own machine? That simply does not happen, or else there owuld be no best buy's or comp usa's selling premade machines with warranties, or no dell....you see my point?

People will not pay to play new games especially when there are old ones. There are still more people who play diablo II than who have played oblivion on the pc....so my point is pretty much right....and that is this....no people will not buy new computers to play your game, so making it without the average specs in mind is already a financial failure. That's it, proven over and over by sales and facts and established cases.....this is the argument though, why continue to make games, and lose sales, and fail...look at all the mergers recently....merging is a sign of a highly competitive market turning into a not competitive market, or oligopoly...so my point is confirmed by happenings in the industry...game companies are failing at capitalism and resorting on mergers to aquire value...this is accounting 350 studies of industry...and it has happened in other industries as well.

My point is this too....as the american economy continues to slump, gaming companies will have to focus on foreign consumers rather than native american consumers, and we will actually see alot less games catering to us....i.e. fallout anyone? And more along the lines of final fantasy...

      Hmmm judging by your forum name I detect a little bias maybe in these figures..........

Originally posted by Theocritus

      Hmmm judging by your forum name I detect a little bias maybe in these figures..........

That's great but my name really has nothing to do with anything considering I have played every mmorpg for at least a year besides eve and the ones with heroes...here's a list, by all means not exclusive or inclusive of all the games I've played that are mmorpgs...

Magestorm

Meridian

UO

EQ

EQII

Lineage I

Lineage II

WOW

VANGUARD

AOC

LOTR

Anarchy online

The one I played the longest was DAOC and UO...but my brother helped me level to 70 in wow and the bg's I must say are a blast, which is strange for someone who is a die hard ganker....let me tell you why I enjoy it even though I am a pvp-sandbox type player...

A) It turns nicely. when I hit attack, I attack, no pause to drive me insane....which is good because UO would have been perfect if it weren't for the lag and outdated graphics.

B) Downtime - no such thing in wow, no sitting around getting fat, lazy, and brain dead looking at a meter replenishing....only downtime is game mechanic downtime which is as quick as blinking....

C) Easy to get into pvp- no need to travel for fifty to sixty minutes to fight in pvp battles....don't get me wrong i love exploring but optional exploring not mandatory exploring when you what to be fighting....

D) the possibility of world pvp with destructible buildings...wow will be the first and only game to get this right, at first, becuase of their engine, and expertise in polished game engines...imagine a game like aoc with graphics like farcry - i.e. warhammer, with exploding buildings...its going to have to be 10 v 10 at most because any more than that and even the best gaming rigs will not be able to handle that with low ping and low fps...just not possible....when your getting like 80 fps and 200 ping in wow, how can another game come and get better performance than that, and anything less than 50fps is just not exceptable for a game that requires reaction to play...it just isn't....its like playing basketball by announcing your going to shoot, then waiting, and then shooting, no fun...

so please tell me where you see the bias in this post....separate it from hard facts which i have stated in quantitative and relative terms...I have given you fps, and i have given you ping times, and my specs relative to the industry of gaming....1.9 year old gaming system...pentium d: 3.6ghz, 512 mb ati graphcis card, and  4 gigs of blazing fast ram which only 2 of is used cause windows xp sucks.

BTW that's just a short list of games, i've played more, including some muds....my system runs all of them, however, I run wow at about 80 fps, and vanguard at about 40 fps at default, and my system is about one year old....but I got ripped off when i bought it, so more about 1.9 years old....

that being said, Out of all the 100 players who I sampled, actually adding a few more now from the internet....I have the best system...which is sad considering I can't even run FARCRY 2...

The purpose of this post is to make developers aware that they will not be rewared for graphics, but rather gameplay....this is evident in wow and daoc...both did not have the best graphics when they were released but both outperformed any other mmorpg...and this is also true with other games...look at oblivion - welll that's a bad example.....look at games like farcry...awsome graphics, mediocre gameplay, gets shelved and forgotten about in a week...half life 2 on the other hand, even though i think they used similar engines....well you get the idea....longevity is not shine, longevity is logic.

Here's something for you to consider.  You only sampled wow players.  What of the others who don't play wow?  You're assuming that everybody plays WoW and that's painting some broad strokes.  Of the supposed 10 million players that WoW boasts, if I recall corectly the projected numbers only put about 2.5 million of them on the North American continent.  Now realize that Canada has about 30 million people living in it, and the USA has 300 million.  Now that 100 people is nothing more then a drop in nothing but a small bucket when you consider that all the games (including wow) make up an ocean.

    I can kind of see what the OP is getting at ,about the low end of WoW and people's Computers being able to  run it on them.  Kind of like having pong running on the Comp and asteroids and checking frame rates and ping for each.

    as to the affordability of computers and parts needed to play a said game is all relitive, some will be able to and others will not but that runs into being able to afford to pay for the game aswell and expansions aswell.

  I think that WoW has , in the fact that it is a large and well known MMO, set a standard of a sort. People compair games to it all the time  and it wouldn't be such a large step to use it to compair Comp. Specs. aswell.  I do think your sample is not large enough to be accurate, I think that connection type might be a large reason for playing WoW. It does have low specs in order to play it and both connection speed and the Comp should have been taken into accout when making this poll.