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Our friends at Joystiq reported on this fascinating survey by GamesIndustry.com that broke down responses from 13,000 US and EU citizens about how they spend their gaming time. While they don’t have specific numbers for World of Warcraft, the survey says [PDF link] that overall, 15% of gaming time is spent playing MMOs. US players spend about 14% of their gaming time on MMOs, while EU players range from 8% to 16% by country. In the EU, 14% of all players have played an MMO, and in the US, 21% of everyone playing games has played a massively multiplayer online game.

Again, these numbers aren’t specifically for World of Warcraft (and because the survey went down to age 8 and up, they do include the vast virtual worlds aimed at children, like Club Penguin and Disney’s Toontown, which probably throw the numbers off quite a bit), but they do show the effect that WoW has had on the gaming population over the last five years. Five years ago, MMOs were definitely a niche — some hardcore gamers played them, but most people didn’t have the Internet connections to play an online game, much less pay a subscription for one. Nowadays, MMOs represent over one out of every ten minutes of overall playtime, and those numbers are only going to go up.

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, News items, Quests, Leveling

Survey says 15% of overall gameplay time is in an MMO originally appeared on WoW.com on Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Arbor Networks is a company that continually monitors the Internet and its usage — they keep track of Internet outages and site visits on a global scale. They just recently released a report of when traffic peaks in the evenings around the world, and at least one of their results is about the game we’re all playing, none other than World of Warcraft. In terms of just general consumer traffic online, the numbers tend to peak, according to the report, at around 8-11pm — the time right before bed when most Americans are done with dinner, and have a little free time to jump online and browse around. In terms of what they’re doing when online, simple web browsing makes up most of that traffic (52%), what’s the rest of it? Gaming, including WoW.

More than any other gaming service (they also take a look at Steam), WoW‘s chart is extremely interesting — it peaks solidly at 8pm every night, and then falls back down just as sharply around 11pm. In other words, the biggest audience for WoW (during this time period — this is over ten days in July of this year) is raiders, who show up on time at 8 and end the raid around 3 hours later. In other words, if you want to avoid the crowd, show up after 11. Or even better, raid in the mornings. Interesting stuff — certainly Blizzard has much more detailed information on when people log into the game (and where they go when they do), but as an overview of traffic patterns, Arbor’s research all makes sense.

[via Network World]

Filed under: Realm News, Analysis / Opinion, Virtual selves, Odds and ends, Instances

World of Warcraft in the ‘net’s traffic patterns originally appeared on WoW.com on Thu, 22 Oct 2009 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Our favorite DIY web series star Felicia Day showed up on network television last night, and you can watch the result after the break below. She appeared on Jimmy Fallon’s late night show to promote the release of The Guild’s new retail DVD, in stores right now. I watched it in HDTV on my regular television, and it was a pretty surreal experience: this is the Internet gaming culture moving mainstream as we watch it. Sure, it’s just Fallon (and he’s made a commitment to gaming and its culture already), but to have people talking this frankly and honestly about the gaming experience on network television is a nice step forward.

The two chat about their first meeting, where Felicia helped Fallon roll up a draenei, as well as Dr. Horrible and how all of The Guild DVDs are made. And at the end of the interview, Fallon even hooks her up with some tickets to a NY show. Looks like it was a lot of fun, and it’s great to see someone who’s worked so hard on something they love get a nice bit of recognition for it.

Update: Sorry, forgot that Hulu only works in the US. Here’s another video that should work outside the States.

Continue reading Felicia Day on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon

Filed under: Fan stuff, Virtual selves, Odds and ends, News items

Felicia Day on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon originally appeared on WoW.com on Wed, 30 Sep 2009 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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His latest idea is a system called Gaikai, a “game streaming service” that allows players to jump right into any PC games they’d like, no installation or hard drive space necessary, online. There are a number of services like this springing up lately, including the much-discussed OnLive, where instead of depending on your local hardware to render and produce the game you’re playing, you just send and recieve information with a remote server. As you can see above, Gaikai is focusing on PC games, and anyone who’s planning on running a PC gaming service has to include World of Warcraft. Starting at about 6:00 into the video above, he shows off a version of WoW that requires no installation or loading at all; just sign in and play.

Continue reading Gaikai promises to stream PC games like WoW straight to your browser

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Odds and ends, Blizzard, Hardware

Gaikai promises to stream PC games like WoW straight to your browser originally appeared on WoW.com on Fri, 03 Jul 2009 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Normally, this wouldn’t rate too high for us — lots of people have ideas about how to use World of Warcraft, and many of them never actually come about. But then again, this is in the Wall Street Journal of all places, so we’ll give it a look. If you’re on Twitter, you’ve probably heard about what’s going on in Iran right now — there was an election, the “official” results given were judged as rigged by many involved, and the government seems to be cracking down on both news media and citizen journalism, as well as protesting citizens, to very sad results. How does World of Warcraft fit in to all of this? Andrew Lavallee of the WSJ’s Digits blog points to this report by Craig Labovitz, which talks about how Internet traffic has been filtered out of the country around the election. At the very end of his analysis, Labovitz points out that channels for videogames, including both Xbox Live and World of Warcraft, have shown very little government manipulation. That suggests that if the government in Iran does continue to shut down certain channels, citizens there might be forced to spread the news through any virtual route they can, including possibly Azeroth.

This is obviously all just analysis and speculation so far — while there clearly (from those charts) has been interference in the media, no one (as far as we know) has yet had to resort to chatting in World of Warcraft to get their message out, and though what’s happening in Iran is made up of some very serious (and seriously unfortunate) situations, the fervor online about using brand new channels like Twitter to share real-time news is often overstated. Personally, I believe that even if Twitter didn’t exist, this information would find another way to get out. Still, the interesting thing to take away here is that even our “silly” video games today are actually media on a global level.

Thanks, Cedars!

Continue reading WoW as a channel for news from Iran?

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Events, Virtual selves, News items

WoW as a channel for news from Iran? originally appeared on WoW.com on Sun, 21 Jun 2009 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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