A Life Online

The biggest potential money-maker for the video game industry comes from online games which players pay monthly fees to access. However, industry executives fear the genre only appeals to hard-core gamers, according to this story in Wired News.

The massively multiplayer genre appeared on the verge of exploding just a few years ago. The Sims Online and Star Wars Galaxies were going to change the way the mainstream public perceived these games. Instead, we've seen that the mainstream perceived these games exactly right – as thought experiments for the gaming geek.

What hasn't been a failure, though, is the mainstreaming of online games through consoles. Sports, combat, and racing games have proved to be very popular – and both Microsoft and Sony hope to build out these online networks over the next few years.

Of course, this is bad news for anyone not involved in the hardware business. After all, it's going to be very difficult to offer an online gaming service that plays through the Sony Playstation or the Microsoft Xbox, which virtually insures that one of these two companies stands to make a boatload of money in the next few years.

It also explains the rush to launch handheld devices or competing gaming systems like the Phantom. Everyone wants a piece of this potential market.