Waste of Warcraft…
According to the New York Times, Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft is on pace to generate over $1 billion in revenue this year. The massively multiplayer on-line role-playing game (MMORPG) has over seven million paying subscribers and is the first video game to reach such a large market in the history of Internet gaming. Just fewer than two million of those subscribers are from the United States.
In the 20 months that I have played the addictive game so far, I have personally contributed well over $300 to the coffers in monthly fees — not to mention some of the price of the game also went to the now software giant. Doesn’t seem too bad, considering it works out to a little over 50 cents a day, but at what cost?
Three of the dozens of available servers (or world “realms”) house my twelve current game characters, most of which reside on the Hyjal realm. Adding up the total played time on only those twelve characters (not including the several that I had started to work up for quite a while across several other servers, but then subsequently deleted for whatever reason) adds up to over 1,215 hours.
That’s the equivalent of thirty weeks of full-time work, an average of 60 hours per month, or about 2 hours per day!
I’m a fairly average player on World of Warcraft; I don’t measure up at all to the hardcore PVP players, and I’m not a power leveler that gets my characters as fast as possible to level 60. I work with one guy who puts in a full eight-hour day at work and at least an eight-hour night at playing Warcraft. So, I figure I’ve got to be about average when it comes to the amount of time I play.
That got me thinking — if there are about two million other people in the United States playing on average the same as I do, what is that costing the US in lost productivity? After all, I should be developing software at home in my spare time and generating income instead of developing my Warcraft characters! The most up-to-date WorldBank statistics indicate that in 2003 per capita income in the US (using purchasing power parity estimates, not gross domestic product) was $37,000. Assuming they all subscribed at the beginning of the year (not likely, I know), the estimated value of all that wasted time for American gamers from January 1 through October 7, 2006 would have been an astounding $19.6 billion! And that number keeps growing every second. Thus, the birth of a fun piece of JavaScript…
Feel free to include the script on your own World of Warcraft fan website if you like. Please note that the year-to-date estimate should reset after January 1, 2007, starting again at $0. Copy and paste the following into your HTML code:
<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://www.richardsramblings.com/downloads/WarcraftCost.js"></script>
So why is a “massively multiplayer on-line role-playing game” abbreviated to MMORPG? Shouldn’t it be MMOLRPG? Or if that’s too long and consonant heavy, why not MMORG which is actually much easier to say?
Hey, when you’re riding you griffin from Ironforge to Booty Bar to catch a ship to Ratchet you have time to ponder these things.
Because “on-line” is more commonly spelled as “online”, without the hyphen. In contrast, “role-playing” is still most often spelled (or spelt, if you’re British) with a hyphen.
Where’s Booty Bar? Sounds like a fun place that I might have missed. More importantly, how is it that you’re playing World of Warcraft at 8:38 a.m. on a workday?! I’m jealous!