Market Research - Topical Reports & Briefs

The level of quality, realism and interactivity of online games has improved considerably in recent years, resulting in richly detailed worlds that feature virtual communities. We believe the evolution of online gaming presents an opportunity for some broadband service providers to tailor packages toward a growing customer base and thus benefit from service premiums and the resulting boost in ARPU. We forecast that the online gaming market will generate annual revenues nearing $2 billion by the end of the decade. In this report, we provide a detailed overview of the online gaming industry and project revenues and global market share out to 2013. We also provide a case study of a popular online game, and detail the opportunities and risks such games create for service providers.

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Executive Summary
Definitions
An Overview of the Online Gaming Market
Key Players
Second Life
Case Study: An examination of the World of Warcraft and its Web 2.0 ecosystem: Overview; Player Interactivity; The WoW Ecosystem; Summary; - Opportunities, MSO/Telco (broadband providers):; - Opportunities, Wireless carriers:
Outlook and Conclusion
Also from Pike & Fischer
About Pike & Fischer’s Broadband Advisory Services
TABLE OF FIGURES
Figure 1: U.S. Broadband Households (in mil.)
Figure 2: U.S. Estimated Online Gaming Market (mil.)
Figure 3: 2013 Worldwide Online Gaming Market
Figure 4: Massive Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games (MMORPGs)

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Online Gaming to Provide Rich and Diverse Marketing Opportunities for Internet Service Providers, Report Concludes

(Silver Spring, MD) Broadband service providers have a ripe opportunity to leverage the exploding popularity of massively multiplayer online games (MMOG) in order to launch innovative marketing platforms and capture new advertising revenue according to a new report by Pike & Fischer.

In the report, P&F forecasts that video game advertising in the United States will reach an annual $1.4 billion by 2013. This creates an opportunity for cable operators, telephone companies and wireless service providers to help advertisers maximize the effectiveness of their promotions in whole new ways.

In addition, many of these online games, such as the wildly popular World of Warcraft, have spawned massive social networking communities, notes P&F senior analyst Tim Deal.

“These communities are highly effective in getting users to interact online outside of the game world,” said Deal, “and they serve to create a thriving ecosystem around a particular online gaming platform. This ecosystem has created both unheralded revenue opportunities as well as licensing and intellectual property concerns.”

Furthermore, Internet service providers will face a variety of other prospects for capitalizing on gaming-related revenue, Deal says. They could, for example, offer specialized high-bandwidth packages, co-branded Web 2.0 templates and applications, or launch proprietary Internet voice services for gamers.

The report: Broadband-enabled Gaming Environments, also includes five-year revenue forecasts for the U.S. online gaming market, an overview of the key players in the multiplayer gaming world, and an in-depth analysis of the World of Warcraft gaming platform and its related user-community.

The report is priced at $699 and is available for purchase at www.broadbandadvisoryservices.com. For analyst commentary or to request a briefing, contact Tim Deal at / 301-576-4096 /tdeal@pf.com.

For information about Pike & Fischer’s Broadband Advisory Services, visit www.broadbandadvisoryservices.com or contact Jonathan Wentworth Ping at 973-718-4703 /jping@pf.com.

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Tim Deal

Tim Deal serves as our Senior Analyst, with a special focus on broadband-enabled consumer electronics devices and on emerging mass market applications such as online video sharing and VoIP-optimized e-commerce. Tim has developed SWOT analyses on such products as the iPhone, the Apple TV service, and rich-media applications on such social networking sites as MySpace. Tim has been providing detailed and actionable competitive intelligence analysis to leading technology firms for more than seven years. In that time he has authored more than one hundred comprehensive syndicated reports and an equal number of custom financial models covering the computing, consumer electronics, digital media, and storage industries. Prior to his career in competitive intelligence, Tim served as a counterintelligence/human intelligence and force protection analyst with the United States Army. Tim lives in the Seacoast area of New Hampshire. Contact Tim at tdeal@pf.com.

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