A little over three years ago, a game was released into the wild that took hardcore and casual gamers by storm. Plenty of competitors have come and gone since that day. Some of them have managed to survive with this vicious predator around them, while others lasted long enough to patch their servers a couple times before fading off into the sunset.
The game I’m talking about is of course, World of Warcraft. Every gamer has joked about its ability to eat up your free time, friends, family, work, busy time, sleep time, earth’s resources, Paula Abdul videos… Ahem… There is no denying the fact that Blizzard managed to pack some sort of virtual crack into 4 CD’s that has drawn in millions of hopeless victims. Yet, every big name MMO to be announced has been dubbed the “WoW-Killer” at some point or another.
The million dollar question is: How do you go about killing the billion dollar giant without selling some sort of illegal substance with your game?
The answer is: You don’t. The only way World of Warcraft is going to be taken over in the market is for Blizzard to release their next MMO. Take a look at Everquest, the big dog in the house before Warcraft showed up. The final blow to Sony Online’s pride and joy was Everquest 2, and how many stories do you hear about Norrath’s population rivaling that of half the countries on our planet?
World of Warcraft is here to stay for quite some time. Warhammer Online may provide a good challenge, but the community that WoW has managed to build during its three years of existence isn’t very likely to up and leave and look for greener pastures. I also believe that the next iteration in the World of Warcraft franchise will allow players to transfer their years of work into the updated game, something that also caused the downfall of Everquest 2.
Only time will tell, but as for right now, no one can knock WoW off it’s pedestal. Except for perhaps, itself?
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Was this posted eariler in the day then taken down?. I Could have sworn I say this title in the side bar.
World of starcraft is rumoured to be anounced soon, hopefully that should provide a challenge.
world of starcraft
i still just dont believe it.
Diablo 3 better show up soon
I prefer Guild Wars, which has been going strong for a while now and is free to play. Well, after you bought the game it’s free.
Then there will be Guild Wars 2, which better rock.
I don’t see Blizzard making a sequel to World of Warcraft anytime soon (if ever). It’s still growing and expansion packs will help sustain that growth for several years to come, at least. If there aren’t any mass-migrations to other games that is…
There are quite a few serious contenders for the throne right around the corner. All signs point to “World of Starcraft” being in the making, whereas BioWare seems to be hard at work on their own MMORPG project. Meanwhile games like Warhammer 40K Online (definitely going to be big, very big) and Guild Wars 2 have already been announced.
Out of the lot of them, Guild Wars 2 will likely be the most devastating for WoW’s subscriber figures. Imagine a world like WoW’s, but many times more beautiful, with genuine storytelling, and loads more things to do and see… and all that without a subscription fee: Guild Wars 2 will be that game.
Oh and EverQuest never was a ‘big dog’. It had a few hundred thousand subscribers, while at the same time Lineage boasted 2 million and Ragnarok Online boasted subscriber figures rivaling those of World of Warcraft today. EverQuest was small fry even then.
This was quite an enjoyable article to read cause I actually agreed with it. The best Warhammer will do is be good competetion, but die soon enough.
Does anyone else find that the Bandwagon effect is most noticible in MMOs as of late?
I mean, only so many games can be on the market that CONTINUALLY charge for use. The market is beginning to resemble something of the arcade of yore.
Free to play looks good (less strain on customer end) but even then the market can only stretch so thin.
Of course, Clstirens. Companies see how much money they can make from a subscriber-based system. What they fail to realize, however, is that you need subscribers to hold it up.
There is room for a couple different pay-to-play MMOs on the market, as long as the games are different enough to justify it. Warhammer Online is looking very good, but will it be different enough from WoW to justify A. Someone paying 2 subscription fees, or B. For a WoW player to drop all the work and money they’ve dumped into the game to move over?
Free-to-play is the path companies need to start going. Guild Wars is the perfect example of this. They’ve built quite a community, and has probably made enough profit if a sequel is justified. The market is simply to saturated for a WoW-Clone like LotRO to charge monthly – if they took the Guild Wars route, it might have been more of a success (it’s still “successful” in a way).
To respond to Droniac – I agree with just about everything you said. When I wrote the article, I didn’t take Asian or Free-to-play MMOs into account. So Ragnarok and Guild Wars never came up. Lineage 2 got most of its subscriber base from Asian countries. Also note that Lineage 2 launched in the Americas a mere 7 months before Everquest 2. Everquest was the Big Dog in the west, though it shared the yard with a couple other quite large puppies.