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>Consider movies or television, where science fiction is featured
>far more often than high fantasy
> with a correspondingly higher financial success

It’s much cheaper for TV to make a SciFi serial then a fantasy RPG one. For SciFi one can just dress actors in something unusual, stick a few extra ears/horns, paint walls in studio in mad colors and order a few easy to render space ships shooting at each other.
For fantasy same won’t work as it will look very poor. One has to pay more for decoration, and renders. I think its one of major reasons why SciFi TV serials have bigger market share.

Computer games, from other side of view do not have such limitation. It’s completely same amount of money for 3D design of alien, orc, or average monster. Some monsters are even cheaper.

And here players, prefer fantasy by some reason. There are a lot of reasons, and I will not ever try to list them here. 1. I just mention a few, my own. I like magic, and sci-fi representation of it usually luck realism. 2. Good fantasy games use natural bright colors for terrain, while sci-fi designers like to create a lot of dark-grey-brown-black worlds, for post apocalyptic future.
3. Shooting from future technology weapons of destruction and doing 5% damage to opposite player or mob, does not look realistic, while slashing with a sword same opponent who can use parry, dodge, avoidance and just thick natural armor, fit in content perfectly.

Dixi

Great update from Wow.
But i am 56 … I go back to the game
Cia

Hmm not sure if you will be interested in this piece of information.

A Chinese MMORPG (Zheng Tu) has released figures claiming to have 1.5 million users logged on at the same time on 03/02/08.

It claims to be the biggest MMORPG in China, which means it surpasses the number of subscribers WoW China has.

The link to the announcement http://bbs.ztgame.com.cn/viewthread.php?tid=1283039&extra=page=1 (It is in Chinese).

Seth - You saw the website for Giant Interactive, publisher of ZT Online. ZT is a “free to play” type mmorpg - but here’s the catch - if you choose to buy nothing, you will get nowhere in the game. Pretty much anything you want to do costs money. The players are like addicts, which is why one commentator called it “Digital Crack”, which sounds like a pretty apt description. Check out this must read article (in English) about the game. IMO, this is game journalism at its finest.

http://www.danwei.org/electronic_games/gambling_your_life_away_in_zt.php

Can you seperate ptp from ftp mmorpgs? Would be awesome!

Would it be possible to have separate charts for the EU/US/Asian markets and/or an average population/server density? I know for example that WoW has roughly 2 million EU subscribers spread across around 240 EU servers for a rough average of 8.3k subs/server; which raises an interesting contrast to WoW’s reputation as the “biggest” MMO (on a personal level) since despite it’s volume of subscriptions you’re more likely to be playing with LESS people on a WoW server than (for example) EVE’s server, which currently has 30k concurrent players/server.