Asehujiko said:
Blood_Lined said:
It really depends if WAR gets of the ground with its population problem or not.
I highly doubt it considering they went from 800k to 300k in a few months.
But how much of that was WoW tourism? I'd say a significant number. Mythic and EA goofed by releasing the game ahead of WoTLK to grab at subscription numbers, and paid for it. This, combined with a flub of opening way too many servers at launch, as well as the usual bugs/issues/problems plaguing MMOs are the reason for WAR's subscription dropoff.
That being said, WAR is in a much better place than AoC, mostly because of the financial support EA has committed to them (reports show WAR carried a significant portion of the revenue, despite the dropoff) and the slightly better connection its developers have with the community.
You might think that as someone who works for one of the major WAR fansites I have a terrible bias in favor of the game. In some respects I do, but I've always been balanced about my feedback and understand the game has issues that need to be fixed. It's making progress, though, and a casual-friendly PvP mechanic and some interesting new content, including a PvP/PvE dungeon, have more players coming to our forums and asking/inquiring about the game, resubbing, or otherwise trying the trial out. I think we'll see in the next quarterly a small uptick of subs. If our site traffic is any indication, WAR is far from dead or dying, and will take a good solid place in the MMOs currently out.
As for the original topic (whoops), WoW is at the place where EQ was before that and UO was prior - top dog resting on its laurels. Rarely are MMOs really "killed off" and the majority of them continue to maintain subscription numbers. Blizzard's formula has simply succeeded for MMOs, by making a highly accessible, developed-to-be-addictive, everyman's game. Their millions of subscribers have become an anomaly in the MMO market and while that's a good thing for MMOs, it's a bad thing for MMOs too, as constant, unfair comparisons to WoW and predicting MMOs to be "WoW-killers" are attributed to every MMO out there coming out.
I played WoW for quite a few years. The way I see it, WoW is the McDonalds of MMOs. It serves up content anyone can participate in, it has a critical mass of people that patronize it on varying levels, it's an established player. But it also suffers from a lack of quality and originality, a blandness that is made up of other systems it has cannabalized/mass marketed so as to be baby fed (WoW's achievement system is a shadow of WAR's Tome of Knowledge and XBox 360 achievements, yet people gobble it up), and a disturbing development direction that both A)has given up on gathering any meaningful feedback from its community, re: terrible forums and B)keeps people hooked with carrot-on-a-stick mechanics that invalidate loads of character progress with one sweep of the hand. WoW can continue to serve its happy meals and pre-processed burgers to people because it's easy and profitable.
Millions and millions patronize McDonalds, but wouldn't call it particularly good food. That's why there are alternatives that thrive in the restaurant business - and MMOs are no different. People just need to realize that.
