A Taxonomy for and Analysis of the MMOG Landscape

Abstract

Massive Multiplayer On-Line Games exhibit specific trends that evolve over time. To efficiently analyze these evolutions, one needs to obtain information from multiple sources and correlate it in a meaningful way. Typically, this process involves manual labor and/or is left to specific community sites. In this paper, a semi-automated mechanism is presented that scrapes this information from community sites and `tags` games depending on their properties, independent of the source of the information. By correlating the tags, one can easily create a large database of MMO games and extract historical trends from the data. Also in this paper, the analysis of such a dataset is presented, which sheds light on the historical evolution of MMOs based on several metrics such as genre, type, monetization, deployment technology and game-dependent characteristics.