These numbers aren't for World of warcraft

Our friends at Joystiq revealed on this amazing study by GamesIndustry.com that divided down reactions from 13,000 US and EU people about how they invest their game playing time. While they don't have particular numbers for World of warcraft, the study says [PDF link] that overall, 15% of game playing time is spent experiencing MMOs. US players invest about 14% of their game playing time on MMOs, while EU players range from 8% to 16% by country. In the EU, 14% of all players have performed an MMO, and in the US, 21% of everyone doing offers has performed a extremely multi-player online action.

Again, these numbers aren't for World of warcraft (and because the study went down to age 8 and up, they do consist of the wide exclusive planets targeted at children, like Team Penguin and Disney's Toontown, which probably toss the numbers off quite a bit), but they do show the effect that WoW has had on the game playing inhabitants over the last five decades.

Five decades ago, MMOs were definitely a market -- some serious players performed them, but most individuals didn't have the Online relationships to perform an online action, much less pay a registration for one. Nowadays, MMOs signify over one out of every ten moments of overall fun time, and those numbers are only going to go up.