
While the above isn’t a real photo from Titan’s surface, such photos DO EXIST. (You can even hear the actual winds from another world). We can DO stuff like that. When reality is so amazing, how can mere games possibly compete?
That’s the dilemma Blizzard faces as it ramps up the publicity machine for its next MMO, code named Titan. Leaked in a not-so-secret memo last month, Destructoid cornered a Blizzard exec who admitted that Titan would be the long expected follow-up to the world’s most successful MMO ever, World of Warcraft.
Four possible outcomes that I can see. The best case scenario for Blizzard is that Titan does for space-based MMOs, let’s say, what WoW did for fantasy MMOs — utterly dominate the field, and bring in zillions of new players who have never heard of EVE or Jumpgate Evolution or Star Wars Galaxies or Star Trek Online and after playing Titan, wonder why anyone would ever want to play anything else? Additionally, EVE & co would lose most of their players.
Failing that, by the time Titan comes out five or six years from now, it will be well positioned to take up the slack as WoW nears the end of its popularity.
Bad news for Blizzard would be if WoW continued to be insanely popular, and Titan is only a modest success. A million players would be wildly amazingly fantastically super with any other MMO. For Blizzard, only a million players would be seen as an abject, utter failure.
Worst case scenario is that WoW declines in popularity, and since the MMO genre has become synonymous with WoW to most people, nobody really has much interest in Titan. That’s unlikely, to be sure, but it would kill the company.
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Tipa
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