A brief, limited look at MMORPG popularrity in 2008
DateTime:7/8/2009 5:21:12 PM

It is notoriously difficult to accurately assess the population and popularity of massively-multiplayer online games. Companies rarely release up-to-date figures aside from specific milestones, so it's usually hard to gauge how many players are actually playing a given game. The full analysis has a number of additional graphs and further critique of the industry, but suffice to say that it only reiterates what many suspected: WoW has a market-wrenching stranglehold, but there is still plenty of room for other MMOs to maintain a reasonable playerbase and survive.

Unfortunately, the main issue with the report is the data source. The representative pool is drawn from Xfire users that have GamerDNA profiles. With this limitation in mind, the data shows what many would expect: World of Warcraft has a staggering market majority and suffered little in the wake of competition from Age of Conan and Warhammer Online. Notably, the analysis claims that Warhammer Online only had an impact on Age of Conan, which was already in a steady decline prior to the release of EA Mythic's PVP-oriented title.Massively and GamerDNA have done their best to provide a picture of the MMORPG genre in 2008, though, and the results paint an unsurprising, but nonetheless telling, picture.