It would be an understatement to say that the online game World of Warcraft has been a success. Over 11 million people are current subscribers, representing more subscribers than all other pay-for-play online role playing games combined. It has more subscribers in each of three continents than any other such game has in the entire world. Annual revenue for Blizzard Entertainment is well over a billion dollars. The game utterly stomped its original main competitor, EverQuest.
How long’s it going to be around?
EverQuest is still kicking nine years along. Can WoW last ten more years? Twenty? Will my grandchildren be playing it in 2040?
So long as people are willing to pay $160 million a month for the ability to play, I’m assuming they’ll manage to keep the servers running somehow. However, a lack of new content has been the death of many games before this, regardless of how much fun they were to play. There are already rumors in the works for the next expansion.
More importantly is the question, what’s it going to take to replace the game? It needs to do everything WoW is currently doing well, and it needs to do those things at least as well as WoW (if not better), it needs to not suck at any particular thing, and it also needs to provide something new. These are non-trivial assignments. We may see that in the KoTOR game being promoted, or if Blizz releases a World of Diablo or World of Starcraft. Warhammer Online is reputed to be a mighty fine game, but it doesn’t seem to be causing people to leave WoW in droves.
I imagine it will keep going until the next killer MMO comes out, and even then it’s got such a huge share of the current market right now that I expect it will endure as Everquest has. MMOs last as long as they’re profitable, and then for a few months to a year even after they’ve stopped being so.
WoW’s a license to print money. The infrastructure’s in place, and as long as they add new content on a semi-regular basis the cash will keep coming in. Even if the development team eventually wants to stop working on the game, the executives are going to want it to stay alive for as long as they can turn a profit on it.
Frankly, I’m not sure that anything can kill WoW for the next several years. I’m not going to guess that it’ll be around in 2040, but I frankly wouldn’t be surprised. As much as I’ve avoided it up until the last few weeks, I can readily admit that it is a good game. It’s polished, attractive, and it makes you want to keep spending money to play. I’ve nearly said “screw work in the morning, I want to keep playing” a couple of nights last week, which I never thought once while playing City of Heroes (still have a subscription, taking a break during the I13 furor).
I’ll go a step further than Ethilrist; a WoW-killer not only needs to be as good as WoW, it needs to be good enough to overcome the inertia that keeps people in their subscriptions. It has to be able to convince folks to leave their level 80 PVP gods behind. They have to be willing to leave a game they’ve played for years for a new one. I’m not saying it can’t happen, but it won’t happen any time soon.
The only other options are that Blizzard implodes in some way or there are enough MMOs out there good enough to each draw a portion of WoW’s playerbase away. That last is the least likely IMO, that enough smaller games would convince everyone to jump ship. Part of WoW’s appeal is that it is so mainstream and popular.
That’s true; if Blizzard pulls a Star Wars: Galaxies and does something galactically stupid which kills the buzz for 10.9 million players, yeah, we’re talking tumbleweeds, here.
Yep. Of course, they’ve been doing something right so far, so they’re unlikely to screw up at this point. There’s always the potential for turnover in management or the dev team, though. If something does happen in the next year, Warhammer Online is going to find itself overwhelmed very, very fast.
I have yet to see a company come through with the attention to detail and almost eerily good sense as far as what is fun as Blizzard has.
Each expansion to WoW has been a huge step up; Outlands included flying mounts and lots of 5-man dungeons and interesting reputation rewards. LK expands on that, with mount-based quests that are awesomely fun, fast-paced 5-man dungeons, and dozens of quests that break the whole “kill 5 podunks, come back for reward” template.
In between expansions, they release free content - anything from revamped PvP scenarios to new areas/dungeons (ie, Isle of Quel’DanIcan’tspellit) to small things like the pet/mount tab that frees up inventory space and lets you have as many pets/mounts as you like.
And all the little things: from wolves that hunt the bunnies in the woods in the level 1 areas to the male boars in Howling Fjord who attack each other over their herds of females, Blizz has it right. How many times have I burst out laughing listening to NPCs talking to each other, or giggled at various quest lines (D.E.H.T.A., I’m lookin’ at you).
They’re also keeping a close eye on FUN. This is where EverQuest broke down (at least as long as I played it) - everything kept getting harder and more time-consuming. Blizz keeps making WoW fun & easy to play. Dungeons are getting faster. Achievements are nice little rewards for doing silly things. There’s always some reputation that you can work towards that gives you some reward (I just got my Penguin! woohoo!). So even if you’re not a hardcore raider, or just want to pop on for 30 minutes of fun, there’s something to do.
Add in the smoothness of play, support for lower end machines, and buckets of money for ongoing development, and Blizz is gonna be hard to beat. None of the other MMORPGS even come close.
I do think at some point they’re going to have to abandon the “gain 10 new levels with each expansion” model. Maybe they can come up with some compelling things for a character to do as he levels from 190 to 200, but I doubt it.
But if they do stop giving out new levels to reach, that breaks a big part of the food-pellet system that keeps players hooked (working on level 73 now, so certainly I’m not claiming superiority here). Anyway, it will be interesting to see how they try and convince their installed player base to switch to WoW II (or World of Diablo or whatever).
If subscriptions do start to dwindle, there is a slippery slope–they’ll only be able to keep the game going if they consolidate players onto the same servers, i.e., if half the people leave the game, they need to shut half the servers down in order to pay for what the remaining gamers need. This means mandatory server transfers for millions of players and tens of millions of characters, with all the drama that would ensue. Plus, that would make the Server First achievements less meaningful (first lvl 80 rogue, first level 80 draenei, etc.). Think that’s trivial? Look around for threads whining about how people lost their Charter Member status or their post count, and then multiply that by a very large number.
This I definitely have to disagree with. WoW’s strong appeal is that it is a jack-of-all trades game. For customer support, smoothness of releases, subtleties & nuances of the story and game world, Turbine’s LOTRO is a generation ahead of WoW. It will never reach WoW’s subscriber base because of its niche appeal. What WoW does well is appeal to an enormous cross-section of MMO gamers.
Interestingly, WoW Achievements are pretty much a direct copy of LOTRO’s titles and deeds.
WoW will exist for the next 50 years in some form or another. Certainly not as the behemoth it is now, but that long from now there will, at the very least, be a emulated server up and running.
WoW achievements = X-Box Live achievements = Steam achievements = LOTRO titles and deeds (presumably, I don’t know the game to know the mechanic that well). They all started popping up around the same time, and it’s become rare to see any popular game without them. Heck, even City of Heroes has badges.
WoW achievements are very recent–probably from the last couple months or so (I haven’t played in almost a year, but I sometimes check the news to see what’s going on, out of curiosity). XBox achievements have been around since the platform was launched, I think. So WoW achievements certainly didn’t come first.
Personally I think WoW isn’t going to last as long as predictions here suggest. What you need to remember is that when Blizzard says “there are 11 million players” that actually means there are 11 million accounts. Many of those are no longer active, and some people–probably a good chunk of the player base, based on what people on fan sites say about themselves–have more than one account. A lot of people have quit lately. Over half the people who were playing in my guild at the time I quit have themselves quit. When the latest expansion came out there was a raft of “I can’t face leveling my characters to 80, I quit” posts on WoW Livejournal. It seems like even many long-time players have had enough.
I don’t think there will be a WoW-killer, I think there will be a lot of MMOs people start playing instead. Some of my former guildies went to LOTRO, some were looking forward to Warhammer. Then I think a lot of people (like me) just decided playing MMOs just wasn’t fun, period.
Actually, when Blizzard cite their own numbers regarding accounts, they cite it as “Active” accounts - as in paying their dues. Other than that, I got nothing. Quit WoW a month after BC launched, had a few sojourns afterwards but didn’t have the time to commit. (And, regrettably, the Doper Guild is on an american server.)
From what I’ve come to understand, any expansion or update will cause doom among a certain portion of the playerbase. The forums for City of Heroes have been shrieking nonstop for the last two months: PVP is getting an overhaul, so the PVPers have been going utterly insane and going on about how the devs have gutted the game; the method by which you receive rewards for Task Forces (the equivalent of WoW instances) is being altered, which led the folks who play the market to cry about how the devs are screwing it over; supergroup bases are getting less love than was originally hinted at, leading the base designers to piss and moan…
It goes on. You can introduce something new to a game, and no matter how inoffensive it is, someone will complain about it. Not only that, but the people who have a problem are more likely to speak up than the people who don’t. Those folks are actually playing the game instead of posting on LJ.
That said, I can understand the fatigue at seeing more levels get tacked on and at feeling like you have to keep working to stay competitive. It’s on Blizzard to gauge when enough’s enough and take a different tack for the next expansion. (I’ve been searching out WoW webcomics because I’m a damn geek, and I’ve seen at least one do a couple of gags like “I did it! I finally leveled all classes to 70! I WIN!” “…At least until the new expansion comes out.” “WHY WON’T YOU LET ME STOP PLAYING?!” Sentiment’s definitely out there, but hey, it’s an MMO. There’s not supposed to be an end to it.)
ETA: I should add, at least for the City of Heroes updates, viewed as dispassionately as possible, most of the changes actually appear to be positive ones. It’s just that people don’t like change, especially when they’ve ‘mastered’ the game as it currently exists. Changing it means they’re no longer the masters and they have to compete again.
Funny, I always thought they were copying the Kingdom of Loathing Trophy system. Does LOTRO have an achievement (or deed/title whatever) for eating weird food?