MMO developers sound off about World of Warcraft's dominance

I'm looking forward to Multiverse of Blizzardcraft.

Your close. I think what you meant was the Universe of StarWARS :P
The Star Wars: Knights of the old republic is the only thing I think that has a remote chancing computer out within the next year of beating wow. Even then, its a mayyyyybe at best.

It depends on the quality behind Bioware's title. It needs to either bring something a bit new or bring something 'more' to the table that wow, or copy everything wow does but do it that 10% better. Beating wow in graphics shouldn't be overly hard considering the cartoony graphics keep looking worse and worse.

I stopped playing wow for a while to go play Dragon Age on a high end pc and when finished, I went back to wow and it was more a bit difficult to get used to the uglyiness of wow compared to Dragon Age. If wow doesn't upgrade it's graphics by next year, I think I'll be drawn away by a immersive, beatiful single player world for the pc and NOT want to come back. Mass Effect 2 is quite beautiful also and can't wait to see how great Mass Effect 3 for the PC is going to look on what will be a high end pc in a year or two's time.

More like..

Dimenson of Diablo

The MMO that'll topple Universe of Starcraft

More like "Dominion of the Lost Dwarves", that will kill all MMOs both past present and future for the next 100 years.

Ultraverse of Nebucraft.

@Wes

I have a pretty high end machine and WoW can still slow down quite a bit when I'm in a heavily populated area. Not a HUGE amount but it sometimes drops to 20-30 fps. I can't imagine what performance would be like on a demanding engine.

11 million worldwide with 6 million chinese accounts. Last I heard WoW was banned in China..

2.5 million NA at the maximum. Either way, you play on a server with 15,000 people, others really don't matter.

I can get behind that idea. I think MMO's are like a person's favorite ice cream. Self destructive and a guilty pleasure, they won't switch for fear of losing the comfort they know they get from getting stuff they know.

Plus, switching MMO's is an admittance that you ostensibly played continuously only for the fun of it, and not to hoard rare items, since you can't take those with you. Many people obsessed long and hard over their pretend things and would think twice to give them up.

Don't forget, 100m in customer fees a month buys a whole lot of developers. Even if they're only spending 5 million a month on content / support / etc, that 60 million a year represents far more than most game's entire development budgets.

Agreed. One of the problems with playing an MMO, and--I suspect--developing one, is that you become really attached to it. Many people come to the MMO party for the human interactions, and I think in all MMO's, the value of those interactions eventually exceed the merit of the game design.

When you let the fun of those interaction obscure your ability to appraise your own game, you accept (and possibly develop) a crappy game. I've got a pretty short attention span, and I've played a good half dozen or so MMO's (WoW, Everquest 1 & 2, Matrix Beta, Star Wars Galaxies, Star Trek Online beta.. Lord of the Rings beta), and except for WoW, they were all horrible. Some had horrible controls, others had horrible UI's, others had mind numbingly dull story progression, most had a combination of all of those flaws. WoW was like a more-fluid, massively-multiplayer Elder Scrolls: Morrowind, which is (I think) high praise.

All those games I just called sucky had their merits, some aspects of them were amazing, but implementing one or two revolutionary features into a crappy game will not make it successful.

err, btw.. I mentioned the my attention span because I think it is an asset in defending against developing an attachment to a flawed game. If a game is crappy, I'm not willing to slog through it in order to justify my purchase. I'll just go "oh well" and move on. WoW was the only game that was able to grip me, thanks to its great overall design. Guild Wars, too, although I'd hesitate to put GW into the same category.

You're assuming that World of Warcraft earned its success by being content rich and bug-free at release. Nothing is farther from the truth. WoW suffered the exact same problems other MMOs have at release, regardless of Blizzard's incredibly strong development team.

@TwistedBishop:
But WoW didn't have WoW to compete against. Compared to what was on the market at that time... WoW was still better even with all it's problems.

It's still setting up an impossible standard. If the game industry's perfectionist development studio can't release a finished MMO, you won't see it from anyone. WoW took the initiative in capturing a fledgling market by releasing an extremely accessible game. The reality of MMO development and the very nature of the genre means people will never leave WoW for a more polished game (more polished and content rich than six years of a multi-billion dollar game?) or a game where they will have to start over from scratch and throw away years of investment -- not if they're still having fun. The people who leave WoW are simply sick of WoW. Play any other MMO and you hear that time and again. That's what Blizzard can't fight against: player burnout.

Blizzard touts that every competing MMO release sees 75% of the players who leave come back to WoW. An impressive number, but what they don't focus on is the other side of the statistic: players are draining away over time.

It used to be Blizzard was announcing another million player milestone every few months. Those days are past now; WoW plateaued a couple years back. Blizzard is still seeing new subs, I'm sure, but the momentum has turned against them. Now they seem to be in a holding pattern as their playerbase gets slowly chipped away by rival MMOs. The typical number seems to be a permanent loss of 300,000 players after the initial boom fades off. Certainly not enough to topple WoW, but significant loss nonetheless, and one which ensures those MMOs will be around for a long time -- barring utter failures like Hellgate London and Tabula Rasa. Although, given MMOs with tiny subscriber bases -- such as DDO and Vanguard -- have remained open for years, this might speak more to the parent company's internal policies rather than a lack of profitability from even small-scale MMOs.

This is a long way of saying I can't see WoW ever being replaced. People will either scatter and move to games appealing to their particular interests -- which we're already seeing -- or they'll cling to WoW until the servers go dark like the Ultima Online and Everquest people still do. As a former EQ1 player who thought the day would never come where that game faded from popularity, I can only say this:

Nothing lasts forever.

This really didn't stop people from leaving games like Everquest before WoW. The only thing that will topple WoW is when the developers piss off their user base enough that they want an alternative. Everquest was the king-of-all for quite a long long time, but as the developers started to go against the players, putting in ridiculous time sinks with broken rewards, putting in awesome items and then taking them away the next month, on and on.. People were ready to move on, even though they LOVED the game, and all the people, the developers were just evil. It was no surprise that when some of the top players in the top guilds (Blizzard Employees were EQ addicts) decided to make a new MMO that was "done right", it would eventually be what people were looking for. So here we are with WoW being designed from the group up from a bunch of top tier guild EQ addicts.

Not much will change until the people behind WoW either move on, lose vision, or just become mean angry people.

I'm waiting for a Borderlands MMO, THAT would kick any other MMO ass...

there was one similar to what you're describing called Huxley.

seemed that it had some good potential but that was like 4-5 years ago...haven't heard anything about it since.

huxley has had some coverage in the media over that time period, but not much.

I'm looking forward to Planetside 2 for this reason.

For the time, I think Star Wars Galaxies did really well, actually. Until that combat update. All I hear is that it was amazing, and then they did the CU and everything was destroyed. lol

right now no game can surpass WoW.. on how they make their marketing strategy to have 11 million subscriber. AION is doing well but long way from what WoW achieve.