What percentage of gamers play PBBGs?

[Perry]

I have been looking for my 'place' so to speak in the game development world lately and a lot of questions have been going through my head so I am going to ask the people who I think know the indie game scene the best. You guys. If you have any opinion please share I am looking for all feedback.

I have been thinking a ton lately about php browser based games and I got to wondering what is a realistic goal? Of all the people that play games, how many play PBBGs? Would 500 active members be a fair goal to aim for or is that aiming high? (active in my opinion being someone playing 4+ hours a week.) If that isn't a fair goal for a small team then what would be a decent goal?

Thanks for reading.

[Callan S.]

Hi,

What do you mean, a fair goal? Fair goal just in terms of some sort of galactic standard?

I think a goal would be to make a game you would want to play - if it's a game even you wouldn't want to play, why subject 500 other people to it, for example?

One of the issues I think people fall into is that they intend to do a metric crap ton of coding and design work simply because they have been conditioned to think only in terms of metric crap tons. Then they think about the amount of work compared to how many people will play it and if the number of people would be low to them, they lose motivation to continue and drop the project.

I'd suggest making a very minimalist game at first and then complicating it over time IF you get enough players playing it that you FEEL like complicating it further.

Hope that's not overwhelming advice.

[Jackolantern]

I can see what Callen is saying. For me, the most important thing to me is that there is a community. Whether or not the players are playing directly with each other (because of course they do in some PBBGs, but not all), they should know about each other at least through the game forums, create friends, have idols in the game (that guy at the top of the ranks/level/king, etc. that everyone knows about), etc. If there is a community that exists around the game where people want to log in to see what is going on, where people have friends that mean something to them, and who are excited about what changes are coming next to their game, I am happy, whether that is a group of 10 people or 10,000. That is what I personally am always shooting for.

[hallsofvallhalla]

I don't care what anyone says. The largest games played are browser games. Period.

Dark Orbit has had over 54 million registered users. Urban Dead over 2 million, Travion 5 million, Sherwood Forest has 1 million unique players a month.

Total player time with browser-based online games increased 42 percent in 2008, says online measurement service ComScore in a new survey shown to Gamasutra.
According to its latest study, the online game category has gathered 86 million total visitors as of year's end, up 27 percent.

Bigpoint's more than 63 million users globally and 200,000 new registrations daily

That is listing only a few games.

[Jackolantern]

Definitely PBBGs represent the largest segment of MMORPG players right now. As Halls mentioned, there are PBBGs with tens of millions of players. The most populated graphical MMORPG is still World of Warcraft, which has 11.5 million, a number it has stalled out on for years now (it is unlikely to hit 12M at this point). Dark Orbit has close to 5x that amount. That is staggering. Farmville has nearly over 80 million monthly players. No graphical game nor console game comes close to that.

[Perry]

I love getting others opinions on this stuff.

I agree with what jack said and in my opinion that is the best part of online gaming. Getting to know the community and looking forward to updates and all of that. In a way I want to build a community more than a game. I think I could build a strong small community with a PBBG. I feel good about where my project is going now and look forward to what the future holds for it.

[Zak Zillion]

One of the best games on the internet that i have found is not that great playing wise, but has one of the best communities ever. http://darkgrimoire.com I have left that game like 8 times but I always come back just to see old friends.