New report summary from DFC Intelligence, a market research and consulting firm focused on interactive entertainment and the emerging video game, online game, interactive entertainment and interactive television (ITV) markets

The Service-Oriented Game Industry: Paving the Way for New Business Models.
Extract: "The forecasted $580 million 2005 China game market, has been dominated by one very particular type of game, the massively multiplayer online game or MMOG. MMOGs are baseline more resistant to piracy than standalone games because the game is not a product but a service requiring an authenticating connection with an (expensive and technologically sophisticated) server array. As the chart shows, these MMOG products are expected to make up over 75% of the China game market in 2005."

And here is a recent article from the New York Times about the success of WoW: Conqueror in a war of virtual worlds.
Extract: "'World of Warcraft' has shattered earlier assumptions about the potential size of the market. 'For many years the gaming industry has been struggling to find a way to get Internet gaming into the mainstream,' said Jeff Green, editor in chief of Computer Gaming World, one of the top computer game magazines. 'These kinds of games have had hundreds of thousands of players, which are not small numbers, but until 'World of Warcraft' came along no one has been able to get the kind of mainstream numbers that everyone has wanted, which is millions of players.'"