Playing an online game is fun. But how about going a step further to chatting and interacting and challenging one another while at play? Welcome to the new virtual world of social networking-based gaming — massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) and its big brother massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs).
While MMOGs enable players to cooperate and compete with each other on a large scale and interact with people across the globe, MMORPGs are games that are always ‘persistent’ or ‘on’, and allows millions of players to play simultaneously, form their own clans and then take on ventures (slaying dragons, capturing castles etc), even as they can meet and chat with other multi-players through an online chatting lobby. Both these gaming varieties have been around for the past three years or so in India but the market is gradually picking up as broadband subscriptions rise.
Quentin Staes Polet, chief executive of Kreeda Games, which developed India’s first MMORPG Dance Mela, reckons: “Multiple players (from 1,000s to millions), can assume the role of a fictional character and take control over many of that character’s action in the MMORPG genre at one go. MMORPGs are used by gaming companies to garner stickiness to a game through features including chatting so that they can deliver long-term cash flows.”
“MMORPGs are similar to movie or music business — involving huge investments and return on investments (RoIs) depending on their success rates. However, the timeline for RoI for MMORPGs is typically six months and the virtual online shops, where the player needs to purchase weapons and costumes for his character for about Rs 3-4 each, and online ads add up to the revenues,” Polet adds.
The typical investment required to develop an MMORPG, the word coined by gaming Guru Richard Garriott who created the game Ultima Online and popularised the genre in 1997, is $1 million (Rs 5 crore), while its would be anywhere between Rs 30 lakh and Rs 50 lakh for an MMOG. The world’s largest MMORPG ‘World of Warcraft’ (WoW), which took $50 million and six years of time to develop, has over 11 million paying subscribers as of 2009 and receives $100 million subscriptions a month. While the global online gaming market is about $10 billion, MMORPG accounts for about 30 per cent of this.
For Alok Kejriwal, CEO of Mumbai-based Games2Win, India has been a slow adopter of MMORPG games but what’s really working well here are ‘SMOGs’ or social multi-player online games. When asked why, Kejriwal reasons, “Because, consumers are online at work (BPO offices etc) and they have few minutes to game and also like to multi-task. Hence, social gaming seems perfect.”
