Gaming research firm SuperData released a nifty pair of graphics on MMO retention last night.
The firm argues that a slim majority of MMO gamers actually play longer than six months, which might fly in the face of our modern assumptions. The reasons for moving on, however, ring true: A lot of us us move on to other games or leave when our friends do.
The company didn’t discuss when and how it came to these specific figures; it is a for-profit group that sells the bulk of its research to industry marketing teams and acquires its data from multiple companies and sources. Given that I just took an MMORPG exit survey yesterday that looked quite a lot like this one, however, I think it’s an easy guess.
Prior to its August 2016 release, SuperData defined F2P and P2P MMOs such that it combined MOBAs and MMORPGs, but last round it switched over to a free public release that is divided only by PC, console, and mobile. Consequently, we don’t know what it’s including as an “MMO” for the purposes of these charts.
More recently, SuperData posted metrics for the VR market and pointed to a growing “oligarchy” market shift in China as smaller developers have been squeezed out by megacorps.
