JonricMMO

It's approaching two decades since I started writing about the massively multiplayer category. I don't recall the exact date or even which title was the first I covered, but since then, I've played hundreds for at least a few hours each, and seen lots more. Recently, I was asked which ones I most remember. While this question may seem simple enough, it took me a fair bit of time and thought to answer.

Over the past decade or so, I've had occasion to wonder if various free to play titles would have benefited from more visibility than they actually achieved. Most of these times, I thought they could have done better in terms of reaching their potential target audiences. So, why didn't they?

Research house SuperData recently released some findings on the average revenue per user for 10 prominent free to play online games. This is an area in which there has never been much readily available data. So, while limited, the bits that were revealed about the likes of World of Tanks, Guild Wars 2, DOTA 2 and League of Legends grabbed my attention and got me wondering.

Do you get the feeling that there has been a lot of recent activity in the area of game-related corporate ownership changes? If so, your impression appears to be very solid. According to information released late last month by UK-based Digi-Capital, the total value of mergers and acquisitions during the first quarter of this year was more than $5 billion.

To avoid any chance of confusion, today's topic isn't the business model. Rather, it's the documentary of the same name that Valve released last week. Available at no charge on Steam and elsewhere, it takes us back to August of 2011 and the first ever e-sports tournament with a top prize of $1 million. Called The International, it took place during Gamescon in Germany, with 16 invited DOTA 2 teams battling it out for a total of $1.6 million.

If there's a truly accurate figure available for the total number of people who currently play F2P MMOGs, I'd love to know what it is. That said, it seems pretty safe to think it's in the tens of millions. Indeed, even higher isn't out of the question. So, whenever I see yet another statement to the effect that (almost) every offering in the entire category is bad, I can't help but ask whether their players agree. Invariably, my answer is that they don't.

Pop quiz. Which title generated the most revenue for NCsoft in 2013? As I noted last time, February is always an informative month for those of us who like to follow the state of the global MMOG industry because it's when various publicly traded publishers report their Q4 and full year financials. So, we now know that the answer to our question was not, as many here in North America might have guessed, Guild Wars 2.

'Tis the season for 2013 fourth quarter and full year financial reporting, which means we can update ourselves as to how various publishers and their key titles fared during these periods. It's an unfortunate fact of life that game companies dislike making their numbers more transparent than necessary. That said, a little data mining can often be edifying and interesting. Last week learned about World of Warcraft, and from elsewhere, about the Russian market.

Research company SuperData recently released a list of the top 10 F2P games based on their estimated worldwide revenue last year. Not surprisingly, the top position was occupied by CrossFire, which is said to have brought in a cool $957 million. Depending on how this figure was sourced, is it possible that the MMO shooter from SmileGate and Tencent may actually have surpassed the $1 billion mark?

It isn't difficult at all to find predictions that this year will be a very good or even a great one for the subscription MMOG segment. For the most part, this thinking seems to be fueled by the impending arrivals of two high-profile titles. The more prominent of the pair is Zenimax' The Elder Scrolls Online, which brings one of the game industry's premier properties into the massively multiplayer space that has undoubtedly consumed hundreds of millions of dollars.

With 2014 a few short hours away, it's time for our annual speculation about the coming year. The Free Zone today looks ahead at 2014 and offers a few thoughts about what we'd like to see. Agree or disagree? Let us know in the comments.

Our latest Free Zone column takes a look at new and assertive steps being made by Webzen to gain a foothold in North America and Europe. See what we discovered and then leave us your own thoughts in the comments.

With this year's GStar 2013 behind us, it's time to take a look back at some of the annual event's highlights in this week's Free Zone. Read on to see what shook the game world at GStar before heading to the comments.

One of the things we like to do with The Free Zone is take a look at all of the news surrounding the MMO genre. In our latest column, we do just that, checking out market growth, Trion's Trove and much more. Head through the jump to check it out before leaving your thoughts in the comments.

Free to play is a relatively new phenomenon in the MMO space and it comes complete with growing pains on many levels. In today's Free Zone, we take a look at ways to critique F2P to make it fair and effective. Check it out before leaving your impressions in the comments.