Aggro Radius

Barely relevant and often uninformed ramblings on whatever the hell bobs to the surface of my thoughts.

Author: ElGuappo

Posted this on the forum as a response to yet another bloody thread predicting the demise of Warcraft.

But developers aren't learning from mistakes of the past; they're repeating them. It's either variations on the WoW theme or niche products; neither present a threat to Blizzard's mainstream behemoth. Their new expansion can only be considered 'new' by the loosest possible definition. Reskin, resize, rename is the design credo behind it and yet the WoW community's chomping at the bit to get in there and do basically the same old shite they've been doing for 5 years.

WoW numbers won't seriously go into a decline until an IP comes along that does something different enough that word of mouth sees it spread like wildfire. WoW isn't a success due to being original (every expansion since proves that); it was a success because the market was ripe for an MMO to come along that would break out. It was the right product at the right time in the right environment. At launch it was as broken as everything else; server queues, imbalances, crashes and bugs but when you got in there it was nothing like any other game on the market; it was the Wii of MMOs - everyone could play it to some degree and Blizzard took the geekiest of genres, the MMO, and made it accessible to all who were inclined to try it. Millions were.

Ever since, people have predicted that such-and-such a game will be the 'WoW-Killer' and they're wrong. Who's closest to WoWs subscriber base and revenue stream? What incoming IPs are going to buck the trend? The likeliest contender recently was Warhammer and that was, and is, a joke. The screwed it up so thoroughly they shipped batches of the game that didn't have a working executable, for God's sake. The 'year on' progress report posted on this site seems to basically be summed up as "it's much more stable than it used to be and almost all of it works to some degree, and we added some new stuff". WoW-Killer? Sure.

And those that say 'yes and that is exactly how WoW was at launch' are quite correct but the point is why, 4 or so years down the road, it's still happening? Modern MMOs seem to launch a beta product and then go into a patching frenzy trying to stop it falling over completely. It's absurd and, sadly, increasingly common. Where, in all this, is cause for Blizzard to be concerned rather than rolling around pissing themselves laughing.

For me, the most likely WoW-Killer will be Blizzard themselves when they release their next MMO. But don't hold your breath for that one because, as all the 'WoW will die' brigade seem to forget, there's the Warcraft movie coming in a year or so.

And what's the betting that'll be timed to coincide with another new expansion and that both will see to it the game gets a second wind.

Plenty of milk in the cash cow yet and there's no-one on the horizon who's seriously going to change that situation.