What happens if "Old Republic" Fails?

[Nomanslander]

If that happens, though Bioware might become smaller, instead of what they're doing right now, producing 3 games at a time, possibly more that we don't know about (DA2, ME3, TOR)
We might go back to 1 every few years, like they were when they were making Mass Effect, Jade Empire and KotOR.

To be honest, this might be a good thing. Too much success usually leads developers, hell people in general, to become careless and a little too assure of themselves.

Mass Effect 2 just might have been Bioware's peak, and I'd hate to see the developers begin to really sell out, which would lead to the quality of the game to suffer.

Honestly, I'm not to sure I want to see every three months, Bioware putting out multi-player map packs for Mass Effect 3, which cost $14 a pop...I don't want to see Bioware ending up going down that road....-_-

 

[Random Name 4]

Ok, a similar situation to this is Square, they released a movie and it tanked, and they ended up being brought by Enix despite having the extremely successful Final Fantasy series.

 

[Computer-Noob]

Not much will change, if anything. WoW will still be the fuhrer of MMOs in the eyes of most gamers, people will continue to rage and QQ on forums about how expensive it is and how much WoW sucks, and yet, slowly the number of people playing it will increase.

The most notable change will be the increased lack of faith in a new MMO being successful, nevermind being able to top WoW.

 

[Indecipherable]

He said "any market"

monopoly is not the natural (or healthy) state for any market

Totally off topic, but also totally wrong.

To educate yourself try searching two quick terms:

Natural Monopoly
Economics of Scale

Natural monopoly is that absolute answer to why what you write is wrong. There's a darn good reason why you don't have 5 sewage companies with 5 lots of different piping under every home in a city. Or why you don't have 5 different power companies all providing their own underground/aboveground cabling and supply to your house so you can choose.

having worked most of my life in an electrical distribution company which went from a state owed monopoly to a private company while i was there i understand these terms better than you know.

they do not apply to an entertaiment medium where customer choice is the only deciding factor.

Blizzard do not own the infrastructure that supports their product nor do to they benefit from economy of scale. they only thing they have is good cashflow to reinvest into development due to high numbers of customers and a lack of any really viable competition.

as a result there is little market preasure to innovate or update the product outside their own desire

the fact remains monopolys stifle innovation and are bad for consumers and the industry as a whole.

if you love WoW (and there without doubt a few fans in this thread) you should pray for viable competition.

why ? well for one thing your Orc (or whatever orginal race) would probably not be running around with the same number of polys as a Quake 2 model weilding swords that look like they where made by Fisher Price fighting the same 40 or so Identi-Kit model enemys over and over again for 85 levels nor would the company be likley to have reneged on as many development promises as it has in recent years or slowed to the point you are playing one major content patch for 10 months...

He said "any market".