What was the first PC game which really grabbed your obsession? Counter Strike? Command & Conquer? Quake? In my case, I must sheepishly admit it goes back much farther than that.

Wolfenstein 3D was my first truly compulsive gaming experience – sneaky sessions on the office 486SX during lunch breaks. I’m not really that old – I started work when I was five. Honest.

It was obvious even then that PC gaming had huge potential – and huge potential to take over your life. The PC games industry has made huge leaps forward in the intervening decade and a half. It now points the way forward for entertainment in general, in particular the idea of paying monthly for an ever-evolving game experience.

The billion dollar question

Wolfenstein 3D was shareware. Its success propelled its creattors, id Software, into the game-developing big time, and the chance to sell bucket-loads of retail-boxed games. But in a recent report, the NPD Group calculates that the online subscription market for PC games has just topped $1 billion, surpassing retail PC games, which have been declining.

Only a few years ago, the online gaming business was worth a third of what it is now. Back in mid-2004, the Yankee Group estimated the annual value at $352 million, but predicted that online games would hit $1.1 billion by 2008 – which has proven to be absolutely spot on, looking at the NPD figures.

Where once it was sneaked FPS sessions during work breaks, now the majority of PC gaming income is derived from all-night sessions on a Massively Multiplayer Online Roll-Playing Game (MMORPG).

The top entry on the NPD list will surprise nobody - World of Warcraft. Try playing that during your work lunch break and you would soon be out of a job. And a girlfriend. And your ‘real life’ friends...

Apparently, there are 11 million monthly game subscribers. This actually isn’t that many when you consider there are now around 1.5 billion people worldwide using the Internet. So online interactive entertainment clearly has a huge growth potential ahead of it.

Being social makes all the difference

It became blindingly obvious when the first network-capable games arrived, like Doom II, that this was a very different gameplay to single-player.