BloatedGuppy said:
Sure they do. TSW and GW2 are examples of games offering new mechanical wrinkles. Even sad retreads like TERA are differentiated enough from WoW to be fundamentally different mechanical experiences. So playing them and then immediately grousing that there's only a few raids and WoW has 50, and then with the same breath complaining the industry is stagnating because everyone copies WoW...it's seriously cutting off your nose to spite your face. People need to be a little more patient. WoW had nothing on EQ, depth wise, when it launched.
Mostly though even though their mechanics are different they still have the same skinner boxes of either quest-reward-next quest whilst levelling and raid raid raid when you hit the cap. That's something that
also needs to change before anyone really pays attention to a new MMORPG.
What you mean to say is that you are finished with the genre. Don't be one of those bloviating doomsayers on the internet who proclaims entire genres have died because you've lost interest in them. The games are still doing fine.
They're puttering along, but the era of growth (Everquest had more players than UO, WoW had more than EQ) is over, and new products are launching that are having an increasing amount of trouble making back their budget. Despite having more interesting quests than anything else that
aren't punching 20 wolves no-one wanted to play it. Or, at least, pay to play it. When people left EQ they picked up WoW, but people aren't leaving WoW to a new MMO, they're leaving MMOs completely, WoW has bled something like 5 million subs from its peak, but they haven't gone to any
other MMOs.
Surely there's a lot of room for innovation in this genre, but we've reached a serious stumbling block. MMOs are huge investments. Even small games are very, very costly...tens of millions in most cases, if not more, and that's for games that launch relatively content light. If the ongoing whine the moment they hit market is "Why isn't this more like WooooooooW" then you're going to see an innovation level of exactly zero. No one wants to gamble with tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars. They're going to make the most conservative, market-proven games possible, and any innovation is going to be in the form of baby steps.
Yep. And we're repeatedly seeing that that just isn't working well enough. EA/Bioware spent basically
infinity money on ToR shooting for WoW's market and haven't captured it. They may get
some return on investment from it, but it's going to be nowhere near what they wanted and it's
really going to sour people on the idea of spending all that money again. The big players are going to look at ToR and think "it's not worth it". That's why the genre in its current form has reached it's end, the huge investment required to make and launch a MMORPG does not pay the kind of returns a major publisher is going to want for it.
You say there's not going to be "another WoW", but there's another dimension to that, WoW's massive playerbase is actually an added value of that game, it means that there's always someone to play with, there's always a guild there that fits the style of play and level of commitment that any player is willing to put into the game, it populates the auction houses and keeps the economy moving, means that the world and instanced PvP always has matches going, etc. A massively fragmented market of many smaller MMOs simply will not have that value.
It's
possible that the market will develop in the direction seen in Halting State, (and also maybe For The Win, don't remember that detail) where your account is actually transferrable between games, so that the value you have in your level 90 in WoW is actually mappable to another game and you can move as freely between games as you can now between servers on a specific game. (There is going to be some level of interconnectedness between Wargaming.net's range, certainly at an individual level, probably gold and maybe free XP will transfer between World of Tanks and World of Warplanes/Warships when they come out, and maybe also in clan wars)
AoC, DDO, and LOTRO are all like, 5 years old. STO is almost 3 years old. You already have industry pundits discussing whether or not the subscription is dead. Games are going to launch with FTP models built into the back end to make a smooth transition, at the very least, and most will likely have elaborate FTP trials to haul in as many initial players as possible. It's a very crowded, competitive market out there now, and most of the competition is "free". We're going to come to a point where it's go free or go home.
Yeah, though we have Secret World and Tera launching with fees. TSW at least is not doing well, despite not being as hugely boring as Age of Conan was at launch people don't think it's worth a sub.
Turbine doesn't have a fraction of TOR's playerbase, and they turned a handsome profit with their FTP model (and TOR is at about 10% of LoL at present time). This isn't going to be LoL 2 or anything, LoL is a genuine phenomenon (that tends to happen when you're early to the party in a burgeoning genre). But I'm pretty sure TOR is going to make a good buck. Heck it already makes a good buck. The problem is the game was so damn expensive it needs to make a great buck.
Again, Turbine have a
good F2P model, ToR
doesn't, and even if they get a spike from going F2P they won't keep it because the free model is so restrictive and terrible that it will actively drive players away. (Also, EA would kill to have 10% of LoL's numbers, LoL has
12 million unique active players per day on 35-40 million accounts). World of Tanks has about 4 million weekly and they're starting to actively court the chinese market (LoL gets a massive chunk of its playerbase in southeast asia, where the paradigm of gaming is different and F2P is much bigger).
