It’s probably too early to be calling Warhammer’s time of death, even though Electronic Arts has reportedly laid off 40% of the Mythic staff, including 90% of the development talent. Mythic is responsible for Ultima Online, Dark Age of Camelot, Warhammer, and has an advisory role with Bioware’s Star Wars: The Old Republic. The inset picture is of the rock star programmers of EA’s biggest early hits.
None of those early games were MMOs, btw, though Dani Bunten’s M.U.L.E. was a fun party game.
Anjin of Bullet Points writes that games keep trying to compete with WoW and failing, leading to their lingering demise. The problem is that they are trying to compete at all.
Simply put, World of Warcraft is not part of the MMORPG genre. To WoW, any other subscription game’s subscriber base is a rounding error, even though with the loss of their Chinese player base, you don’t hear that magic 11 million number much any more (and never will again, if the Blizzard Pet Store is any indication as to Blizzard’s financial state).
WoW is the caterpillar that turned into a butterfly and flew off on its own adventures. The caterpillars left behind shouldn’t ignore their leaf munching to leap into the air as if they had wings.
Back in the heyday of the MMORPG genre, the early part of the decade, 500,000 subscribers was seen as a wild, market-dominating success. 250,000 was still really successful. You could still run a profitable company and release expansions at 150,000 subs, and anything less than 100,000 was a niche title, but could be sustained if you kept up a regular update schedule with a small team.
Fact is, those numbers haven’t really changed. WoW didn’t end up growing the market for MMOs a bit, once you’ve taken that one title out of consideration. LotRO and EVE are reportedly sitting at about the 300K subscriber level as the genre’s two current stars. This is about what you’d expect from a genre that has been maturing slowly for a decade.
New AAA high production value MMOs should budget for a user base of 150K and hope for 300K. Budgeting for a user base of 1 million plus subscribers is just going to end badly. If Bioware (given its huge IP and history with Knights of the Old Republic) plans to be a market dominator at 300K subscribers, I can’t see how it can fail. If it plans to rock the world at a million or more subs, well, I expect we’ll be hearing sad stories about SW:TOR a year or two after its release.
Aside from us few MMO fanatics, remember, people have never even HEARD of most of the games we play. Except WoW. When I read news reports about a computer virus that steals MMO passwords, it means it steals password from WoW players. When I read about general issues with MMOs, they more often than not mean issues with WoW.
To the general public, the MMORPG market consists solely of WoW. To us the MMO players, the MMORPG market must consist of the genre games that are NOT WoW.
13 thoughts on “World of Warcraft did NOT kill the MMO market”
Comments are closed.
I agree, but with an important things that shouldn’t be overlooked: WoW changed expectations.
If you go try to find investment for an MMO (and I have), a lot of people will point to WoW and ask how much it will cost to repeat that. It doesn’t matter that you can’t follow WoW’s act, they still see the number, so the (incorrect) math, and want the big prize. If you’re honest (“it will 10 years of well-funded, top-notch game development experience to build a history then take another $100 million”), you don’t get many return calls. This is why Warhammer Online had to swing for the fences, and why EQ2 was often considered a “failure” despite surviving all these years.
On the player side, expectations changed as well. We still have a tendency to worship the biggest. A game with “only” 150k subscribers is seen as a failure even though it could still be wildly profitable with proper management. I like to point out that Turbine had about 125k players at peak for AC1, and that allowed them to grow to where they are today with landing two big licenses (D&D and LotRO), and despite having a game launched that they later closed down. But, player measurement of game success is skewed by WoW.
This has changed how MMOs are made and measured, for better or worse.
That’s the real challenge, isn’t it? If you manage to convince investors that MMOs shouldn’t be measured by WoW, I imagine they’d lose interest rather fast.
Maybe we should call WoW the only MMO, and call every other similar product something else, like Multi-Player Stories.
Anyone for a good MPS?
“Simply put, World of Warcraft is not part of the MMORPG genre. ”
Quote of the day Tipa.
Hmmm, it’s almost like the dot.com explosion, where everyone thought they were going to get rich online.
Perhaps it is the wording, as you say, that makes people draw comparisons. If wow is ‘massively multiplayer’ and lotro is ‘massively multiplayer’, then the one with the most players is the most successful, the one with fewer players, a failure.
You don’t get soft drinks that are called massively multidrinkers! No, they usually actually get evaluated for their taste. That’s actually another thing – what’s so great about ‘massively multiplayer’ anyway? How many people does anyone actually interact with or even just see in wow, even after years of play? Probably only a few hundred. As long as any new game has you interacting with and seeing as many other players as you do in WOW, it’s providing what wow does anyway. The whole massively multiplayer thing is just a big woop that’s irrelevant to user experience of the game, really.
Great article. This message is clear: If you are investing now into MMORPG because of World of Warcraft, you are already late to the game. You’ll end up being a part of the video game “bubble” that has already started busting. It probably goes without saying that late investors probably don’t play video games, if the expectation is to “copy” Blizzard’s success and get rich.
Investors probably really want to be at the leading edge of innovation, just as Blizzard was when WoW took off. The challenge, then, is what’s the next big thing?
Polishing an existing experience is what Blizzard does best. Anyone who remembers when Warcraft: Orcs and Humans came out will probably remember thinking “Huh. Nice fantasy Dune 2 clone”. Diablo didn’t invent the whole rogue like/”get loots in a randomly generated dungeon” genre. However, these games took the existing structure and ran with it.
The single largest difference between the big time MMOs and WoW, when wow appeared on the scene, was that a casual player could jump in and actually play it. You could solo in WoW. Bottom line. People who played EQ or FFXI, or ever EQ2 in the early days will tell you that you HAD to group to do anything. This meant time spent forming and maintaining a group. WoW allowed more casual people, or people with time constraints the ability to jump in and jump out while making meaningful progress. A casual player might be enamored with EQ at first, but quickly they would see that a large chunk of your time was spent seeking a party and traveling to your destination at which point you would sit in the same spot all night, killing mobs pulled in from a short distance away by the puller.
I can’t honestly say that I don’t sometimes MISS those camping parties, but Blizzard saw that that style of grind and treadmill gameplay was costing games TONS of casual players who wanted a more exciting style of play while retaining the social aspects of the MMO game. Now, after the fact, game companies are looking at that and either making their own game as casual friendsly, or in the case of EQ2, completely changing their existing game to get in on that casual action.
Blizzard made/makes a killing precisely because they take a familiar design that people like, and make small improvements that will have a large impact on the player. For someone to come in and just COPY WoW shows that they are not only unwilling to try and innovate, but that they also fail to learn exactly what Blizzard did to be so successful in the first place.
I’m with Tipa and the question from ‘Shut up we’re talking’ about what game you would un-make, my personal answer was WOW. WOW is a great game and there’s no question in my mind about that point. However, we’re continuing to live in the fallout of that success – some good, others very negative. I’ve come to the point where I would have rather seen more small games (small populations) games succeed than the monster that is WOW. Granted, it’s certainly not Blizzard’s problem that they made a insanely popular MMO whose population dwarfs everything else in comparison. It’s the very false expectation and size of the market that has been skewed.
As others have said before, they’re isn’t an 11 million player market out there for other games to capture. It does NOT exist. That’s WOW’s market based on the timing, execution and unique combination of content they put in vanilla WOW, when it was first released. It’s not going to be repeated any time soon. I’m disillusioned by games that insist on trying to match that mark, failing and leaving another blight on the genre in general. WAR sized and designed for 300K players would have been a whole different situation I believe.
Gotta agree; one of my co-workers plays pretty much every MMO that comes out. He was late to the WoW bandwagon but when he did try it he only played for a couple months, then it was off to Age of Conan or whatever was new at the time. He’s played pretty much everything and it’s always fun to hear his experiences while everyone else at work is still playing WoW…
I would not be surprised if SW:TOR is the last MMO to chase WoW numbers. How many overpriced lessons do VCs need before they realize the size of the real MMO market and start planning accordingly. There is still a TON of money to be made in the genre, but copy/paste WoW design is not the way to go about it.
“WAR sized and designed for 300K players would have been a whole different situation I believe.”
Agreed. Devs need to focus on what they are bringing to the table, not what WoW already *has* on the table. As much as I dislike Darkfall personally, I think they are a good model of appropriate planning, since they wholly embrace what they offer and unapologetically cater to their audience. EVE, Wizard 101 and Puzzle Pirates do the same thing; they do *their thing* and leave the WoW gorilla alone.
Because Blizzard totally isnt donating 50% of the proceeds from the Pet Store to the Make-a-Wish foundation.
“New AAA high production value MMOs should budget for a user base of 150K and hope for 300K.”
Spot on.
@Callan I was thinking later on that instead of saying WoW was not part of the MMORPG genre, it would have been more accurate to say that it had made it’s OWN genre, and these days you have MMOs which are trying to be part of the MMORPG genre, and others that are trying to get into the WoW genre.
@Anorii That’s right, it isn’t donating 50% of the proceeds from the Pet Store to the Make-a-Wish Foundation. Just 50% of the proceeds from sale of the Pandaren pet. And that pet is now “sold out”, so they’ve finished donating.