Even if you have not read any of my posts before and even if you have no idea who I am, there is no way that you visited this site, saw this title, and did not at least read a few lines to see what it was about. I mean, there could be pictures, right? Welcome and apologies to those of you who found this article through a Google search on “bikini”, because there are in fact no pictures and this is an article on gaming.
Fantasy is hands down the most popular IP for both RPGs and MMORPGs. It is not even close. An old tracking site mmogchart.com (sadly not updating these days) showed in 2008 that fantasy accounted for 94.2 percent of the market share by users. Even if you exclude the WOW juggernaut, which accounts for about two-thirds of the market share, fantasy still accounts for over 80 percent of the market share. EVE, which is a very good execution for a sci-fi game and a personal favorite, is one of the top non-fantasy games but had only a 1.5 percent market share in the data analysis. Even popular IPs such as Star Wars and the Matrix have not put a dent in the fantasy genre MMORPG armor. Comic book IPs, which are kind a modern fantasy genre, also account for only a fraction of the total MMO market.