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The Top MMOs of 2007
What were your most favorite MMOs in 2007?
What were your most favorite MMOs in 2007? According to GigaOm’s Blake Snow in “GigaOM Top 10 Most Popular MMOs”, World of Warcraft, Habbo Hotel and Runescape are leading the pack, subscriber-wise. Runner-ups further down the list include Club Penguin, Webkinz and Guild Wars – you might object with the compilation of competitors here like some commenters who are missing virtual worlds like Maple Story, Disney’s Virtual Magic Kingdom, Final Fantasy XI and so on. But it’s already quite a smorgasbord of massive avatar chats and hardcore-mmorpgs. It’s pretty much a comparison of apples to oranges raising the question of a more detailed definition of the word MMO (massively multiplayer online world/game). Do Habbo Hotel and Webkinz fall into the definition of a multiplayer game? It’s a similar problem like the compilation of the top 10 social networks (where sites like Gaia Online had their place, too).
An accurate classification will get more and more important, the more online-worlds position themselves on the thin line between game, social network and massive avatar chat – the very genremix Coobico is set out to conquer, too. This is going to be especially important for the media and advertisement industry.
According to an industry forecast for 2008 from 45 industry leaders (done by Virtual World News, download the PDF here), a massive boom and fragmentation of virtual worlds and their genres is going to happen in 2008. Wagner James Au gazes into the crystal ball in “My 2008 Gaming and Online Worlds Predictions” and shares the same opinion:
“The GigaOM Top 10 Most Popular MMOs from June tracked some 35 million active members, and was already in serious need of an upward revision a few months later. I’m working on one now, but if I had to hazard a rough guess, I’d say it’s approaching 50 million. (Which means it beat Gartner’s oft-cited estimate by four years.) Given the ceaseless growth, investment dollars, and new startups (especially for kid-oriented MMOs), it’s reasonable to expect that level of growth will continue next year.”
It’s going to be an interesting (and industrious) new year. Anyway, a happy and fruitful 2008 from the Coobico development team to everybody.
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