Quote:
Originally Posted by CrimsonRabbit
Wow....that's almost an average of 3.5hours every single day of the year. Do some of you actually play this game that much?
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As near as I've been able to determine, somewhere in the low to mid 20s is a fairly consistent mean play time for the more established games. I recall a BBC article from 2007 that reported ~22 hours per week for Jagex's Runescape (with about 6 million accounts within 2 weeks of taking that mean). I think that I read somewhere that World of Warcraft's was ~25 hours per week (with about 9 million accounts active within 2 weeks of taking that mean), but I'm not as firm on the citation yet.
These companies really don't like to report those numbers, and it's for the same reason that one has to park out in Goofy and take the monorail the rest of the way in...to force the guest to break from the outside world psychologically. They don't like to report the mean period of customer retention either.
I have no numbers compiled, but based on experiences with several large pay games and a multitude of free games, I'd say it's usually about 0.5-1% of the population that feels there is no content that is suitable for them, but that still spends approximately the same amount of time logged into that particular game. Of course, long-term social contacts are the most frequently self-reported reason for that.
Nick Yee has probably compiled the most legitimate research in one place with his
Daedalus Gateway, but there has been some other decent research in virtual economics. Unfortunately, peer-reviewed literature is still pretty thin, but the academic community is starting to realize the research potential in MMOGs.
EDIT: Sorry to go farther afield, but I play online games ~15 hours per week, but with forum surfing time included it's probably closer to about dead even with the ~17 hours per week I spend practicing/playing golf. The funny thing is that golf is just the opposite of an MMO, there the social pressure usually works to sugggest that one doesn't spend enough time on golf.
EDIT2: Went and found that
BBC article also. That was a creat article because I finally got to see a company convert their free/trial version to an expected hourly amount for the content. They reported 100 hours, which used to be very common for offline RPGs.