Role-playing games at a glance

The market for Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPG) is huge, fast growing and highly lucrative.

MMORPGs have been available since the late 1990s, but the release of Blizzard's World of Warcraft in November 2004 took the online gaming community by storm. These games are cash cows because customers pay for an initial copy of the game as well as monthly fees to access the digital worlds that these games create.

"World of Warcraft is phenomenally successful for Blizzard,'' says Sid Shuman, an online producer at Games.net. "Not only are they making $50 when they sell the game, but they're making $15 a month for all those players. They have more than a million subscribers in the U.S. alone. They have more than 4 million subscribers worldwide. They've crushed all the competitors.''

Shuman says MMORPGs are popular because they create virtual worlds with thousands of players on a single server interacting with each other. In contrast, shooter games such as Doom or Quake require high-speed action but typically involve less than a dozen simultaneous users.

"World of Warcraft users want really great network performance,'' Shuman says. "If there's sub-standard network bandwidth, the characters will skip around the screen, which detracts from the reality of it. Plus, people are paying a significant amount of money - $200 a year - to play this game, and they are demanding superior performance.''

Providing the back-end network infrastructure for online gaming is "a phenomenal market for AT&T,'' Shuman says, adding that the market is poised for growth. "People want massively multiplayer games. The Holy Grail is to allow several hundred or thousand players on a server in a much more action-packed environment than what's available today.''

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