TL;DR: The MMO world has changed so much since WoW came onto the scene in 2004. Some praise Blizzard's ability to bring in traditional non-gamers and introduce them to the genre. Others, like myself, see it as the beginning of the end for MMOs.

Before WoW, a game with 200k+ Subs could be considered successful. Developers  had the freedom to make their games based on their own ambitions, and once they had a following, molded the game into what they though the players would find fun. This freedom made for a lot of amazing games, each with their own group of people that absolutely loved it. At this time, as long as the game was making money, the investors were happy, as was the management.

This wonderful trend continued until late 2004, when a company that was known for exceptional RTS and dungeon crawlers came out with a game called World of Warcraft. The game was an instant hit. The massive following they had from both Diablo and Warcraft brought in a slew of gamers wanting to experience the world in which they had fought so many battles. What they found inside was very familiar to them. The game's artistic style mirrored that of the Warcraft 3 games, and the people, places, and creatures were all instantly recognizable. This game turned RTS fanatics into MMOers, which is a definite contributing factor to their success. Another factor that lured people in was the interface and controls; Blizzard took the best of other MMOs and stuffed it into their game. To this day I haven't found an MMO that controls as fluidly as WoW.

The mix of successful and luring factors kept people playing, and recruiting others. The game also catered to very casual players; the game had rulesets that made it possible for almost every type of person to enjoy themselves. The problem here was that they ignored the original MMOer...which was now the minority in the game. What started out as a flood of gamers quickly became a majority of casual players and traditional non-gamers. Without the challenge and risk/reward factor that the old MMOer was used to, the game quickly lost appeal for many people. Unfortunately, this "many people" was still a very small amount compared to the total number of people in the game.

WoW was tolerable for the most part throughout the Vanilla version, as the raids did present some difficulty, and world PvP still existed to some extent. Players were somewhat proud to have epics, as they were difficult to come by. At this point, the more "hardcore" gamer at least had a goal to achieve. Then The Burning Crusade hit, and any sense of accomplishment went out the window. Everything that the Vanilla raiders, and BGers had attained was replaced in a few levels by quest gear. Level 70 was woefully easy to achieve, and raiding in TBC was a joke compared to the BWL/Naxx/AQ40 of old. Epics, which were once a small sign of achievement in the game, were handed out like free candy. PvP, which was once on an epic scale, was toned down to duel-in-a-box.

By the mid-point of TBC, and even before, many players were looking for an outlet for their MMO needs. They were trying to find some sort of MMO that was similar to what they had grown up with; unfortunately, they hadn't realized how spoiled they had become. Developers made grand promises for their games, and when the game was released without every last bit of advertised content, it was shamed and tossed aside as people went back to WoW to wait for a new game. Many games had the potential to be great if people had the patience to stay with the game and see it grow; instead, people wanted instant WoW perfection.

Another severe blow to the MMO community was the ignorant investors. Even if a game became successful, the subscriber base paled in comparison to WoW's. Before, a game with 250-300k+ subs would have made investors happy and promised a bright future for the game. Now, the management of the company is pressured by the investors to make more money. The management, pressured by ignorant investors, and having no idea what they're doing, goes down to the Dev team and asks them what is wrong with their game. The Devs, having no acceptable answer, are told by the management that they need to make their game more like WoW. This is where the game goes downhill. They change the game so that is more like WoW, not realizing that people are playing their game because it ISN'T like WoW. The changes go through, people hate the game, and subs drop to the point where the company is losing money. The game is either canceled, or has its Dev team cut drastically.

Basically, there's no way to save MMOs. The only way a game is going to be successful in this post-WoW world is to do the following:

-Release with no bugs

-Have every scrap of promised content

-Have intelligent management that knows that they are never going to be as big as WoW

This is never going to happen. No game releases in perfect condition or with all promised content. Management will continue to make stupid decisions based on pressure from investors. People are spoiled these days; they want nothing less than WoW perfection, and won't play a game unless it has it. I personally think that if WoW was never released, Age of Conan, Vanguard (AKA the true sequel to Everquest), and Warhammer would be immensely popular, and probably more fun to play.

I'm not sure why I typed up this little rant. I guess I'm just bored waiting for the WoW servers to come up.Yes, I am just as spoiled as the next gamer and sit around waiting for something else to come out. I join a new game, instantly compare it to WoW, and either end up frustrated by the lack of fluid controls, lack of content, or numerous bugs. Will I ever be cured of my spoiled WoW disease? Unlikely. Unless a game comes out that is a true sequal to DAOC, or even if DAOC just got more players, I don't think I'll ever find anything to replace WoW. I'm to the point where I'm ready to throw in the towel and just move on to leveling up IRL.

It is the end of the MMO world as we once knew it. WoW will reign supreme until WoW 2 comes out, or Blizzard releases another MMO.

WoW is an anomally, get over it.

I agree with you 100%, a new MMO by blizzard sounds like "WTF this is gonna be the best", and indeed it'll, a company with such a monthly incoming will always give us awesome, save from bugs, with best costumer support, game ever, like WoW.

Originally posted by n00bit

Before WoW, a game with 200k+ Subs could be considered successful. Developers  had the freedom to make their games based on their own ambitions, and once they had a following, molded the game into what they though the players would find fun. This freedom made for a lot of amazing games, each with their own group of people that absolutely loved it. At this time, as long as the game was making money, the investors were happy, as was the management.

And this is exactly the model that successful MMOs are going back to as more and more devs realize that WoW was an anomoly that can never be repeated.  Release WoW was a very good game but it was the massive amount of Diablo II and Warcraft III players from Battle.net that made it instantly huge, and all that free word-of-mouth publicity, along with an ever-strengthening casual focus, is what kept the ball rolling (and getting ever larger)

Of course, all those subs meant mad $$$, so for the next few years all we got was crap that was trying to out-WoW WoW and failing miserably, but upcoming games seem to realize that the core MMORPG crowd is still here, hasn't changed much, and by and large isn't really satisified with WoW anymore.

Games like EvE that never lost their focus have done very well during the WoW era.  Games like LOTRO that started out as second-rate WoW clones have reinvented themselves reverse-SWG style to focus on a specific segment of the MMO market have also garnered loyal followings.  Darkfall is most definatly NOT targeted at the mainstream and is virtually guaranteed to do well because of it (though I'll be the first to admit I fully expect a rocky launch).  I could go on but I won't :P.

TLDR: The sky isn't falling, good MMOs are still around and still being made.  WoW has actually been a very positive force in the MMO community by brining in so many new people, some of which go on to play other games with a tighter focus on what they prefer.  More games is good.

I agree with a lot of the facts you put up there. I was a long time Everquest player before WoW, which meant that I had to dedicate my time to gearing my character, before all the silly expansions of course.

I came to WoW because it was familiar, and being an MMO fanatic I couldn't pass it up. I played WoW religiously for the first 3 months. I quickly got to level 60, joined a raiding guild a'la EQ style, and started to equip my character.

After a year, I quit. What happened? I got tired of it. This was before BC ever came out, but I tired of the game. The raids were fun yes, but I was too compelled to play Everquest 2. As soon as jumped on Everquest 2, everything seemed to fall into place. This was more of the style of MMO that I like to play.

Blizzard has made WoW what it is, a casual game. There are no hardcore raiders in my opinion, because a group of random people can all gather up and do anything. It's not hardcore at all, because if you release an expansion and within 5 days all the content in that expansion has been completed, you are not hardcore. I base that on the information I read on the internet of the guild which cleared all WOTLK content within a week of it's release. WoW is too easy. Catered to the masses of people who want to only dedicate a little time and get a lot of gratification.

I never got back into WoW, though I tried for the sake of some of my friends. I hold true to Everquest 2, until I find something to please me.

Yes, every game is trying to be more like WoW and less unique. Yes, the investors are probably all looking to score millions of subscribers like WoW. Fact is, if you're gonna be LESS like WoW and more like something different with a lot of offer, then you can probably score those million subscribers.

People get tired of the same redundant crap. I do. So even though I've played EQ2 for many years, I still won't hesitate to try something new and stick to it.

Anyway, I'm ranting on. Blizzard is working on another MMO, I hope it's nothing like WoW. I don't care if it has bugs, so long as you address them in a timely fashion.

My 2 cents: Don't play WoW just to follow the crowd.

I would argue that a new MMO from blizzard would have the same problems of all other newly released MMOs. players would say "yea...but it isnt WoW". I dont believe WoW's dominance of the market is the end of MMOs but demonstrates the potential these games can have when done well

Super Mario Bros. sold 40 million copies.  It wasn't even that good of a game.  Among other things, the physics was wrong and you couldn't backtrack.  The only other games to sell meaningfully over 20 million are Tetris and Wii Sports.  (Note that WoW isn't even remotely close to that.)  Yet it didn't herald the end of platform games; indeed, it ushered in an era in which platform games were far more common than before.

EH!..most mmo's are compared to WoW already, i like to see a mmo where, like WoW did is take the best of whats out there and use it in the game and some of the newer mmo's are taking that into effect. As the mmo market grows, many changes are inevitable and as games get older the companies try to make their mmos more casual to the newer suscribers that join.

Within the next 10 to 20 years i expect to see many more changes from what i know now in mmo's already, so this does not really suprise me. One thing that any mmo company should look into is not become a WoW clone but present its own type of originality as some have already done.

Originally posted by Quizzical

Super Mario Bros. sold 40 million copies.  It wasn't even that good of a game.  Among other things, the physics was wrong and you couldn't backtrack.  The only other games to sell meaningfully over 20 million are Tetris and Wii Sports.  (Note that WoW isn't even remotely close to that.)  Yet it didn't herald the end of platform games; indeed, it ushered in an era in which platform games were far more common than before.

Oh, I doubt it will ever be the end of MMOs, it's just going to be the end of anything innovative that veers too far from WoW. Look how many games have perished in the wake of WoW's dominance: Games that had great potential like AoC, Warhammer, and Vanguard are ghost towns. In this post-WoW world, it is very rare for a game that started out bad to become profitable, even if they reinvent themselves. AoC is looking a lot better last time I checked, and Vanguard turned itself into an amazing game, but it's too little too late. I'd love to be proven wrong, to find a game that is brave enough to be unique, and polished enough to retain customers. I have high hopes for Darkfall; it's a chance at playing UO in 3D. The question is, will it come out polished enough, and have all of it's listed features? If not, I don't think WoW-spoiled gamers have the patience to wait it out.

Guild Wars came out after WoW, and with more than 5 million sold, it's done quite well.  Quality games will still do well in the long run and mediocre ones won't.

I think you see a lot more potential in Vanguard, Age of Conan, and WAR than I did.

After searching through Vanguard's site, I came away thinking that the game not only hadn't released, but wouldn't in the near future--and later found out it was well over a year after release.  If you try not to sell people a game, they probably won't insist on buying it anyway, and the quality or potential of the game won't matter.

As for Age of Conan, that suffered from R-rated movie syndrome.  An R-rated movie could be really good, but it's probably not going to do very well at the box office.  A lot of people will automatically not go see a movie just because it's rated R, which means that they're trying to draw from a much smaller potential audience.  Well, the same happens with M-rated games.  That may not deter that many single guys in their 20s buying a game for themselves, but you'd better believe that a lot of parents won't buy AoC for their kids, no matter how good the game is.

Regardning WAR, a leveling game based around open world PVP doesn't have that big of a potential market, either.  It's the nature of such games that you're going to have higher level (or renown) players beating up on lower level players.  The lower level players will only take so much of it before they quit.

Originally posted by Quizzical

Super Mario Bros. sold 40 million copies.  It wasn't even that good of a game.  Among other things, the physics was wrong and you couldn't backtrack.  The only other games to sell meaningfully over 20 million are Tetris and Wii Sports.  (Note that WoW isn't even remotely close to that.)  Yet it didn't herald the end of platform games; indeed, it ushered in an era in which platform games were far more common than before.

These games were originally bundled with the system, thus they have really high numbers.  It's a bit unfair to use statistics based on that reason.  Based on games that weren't bundled with the system Nintendogs and Pokemon (Red, Blue, Green) all have over 20 million copies sold.  Over 10 million copies sold is highly successful too which all of the top 20 have achieved.

Not everyone uses their PC for gaming, but you can bet everyone who owns a console is going to use it for gaming.  1 million games sold is considered very successful for a PC game.  By comparison the top 5 PC games sold are:

1.  The Sims (16 million shipped)

2.  Lineage 2 (14 million shipped)

3.  The Sims 2 (13 million shipped)

4.  World of Warcraft (11.5 million subscribers)

5.  Starcraft (9.5 million shipped)

Note that WoW is using SUBSCRIBERS, not shipped units.  The actual number of units sold would probably put it well over the 20 million mark making it as successful as the other games on console.

Also Super Mario World is a bad game because it has bad physics?  It's not even set in our universe - why would it employ our physics?

The problem all those 'wow clones' have is not that they tried to copy WoW but that they copied it badly.  They try to copy the model but fail to copy the parts that make the model work.  If the game is bad it does not really matter if it is a clone or 'original'. 

The reason for WoW's succes is not that they made playing a MMORPG 'easy' but that they made it comfortable.  You can get the fun of playing a MMORPG without many of the annoyances and distractions that plagued the earlier games. 

When I played my first MMORPG (Earth and Beyond) I was instantly hooked because the experience of playing in an online world blew me away.  Before WoW I had a few MMORPGs under my belt and none of them recreated that level of amazement I had when I played E&B.  WoW was the only one that managed to give me that 'kid for the first time in an amusement park' experience again. 

For any future game to become more than a 'WoW clone' or a niche game it has to being a new level of amazement to the players.  It has to create an experience that will blow people away and not marely rehash old ideas. 

End of MMOs? Dont think so... but, hopefully a well deserved break from all these Fantasy MMOs. This year and the next a lot of cool non-Fantasy MMOs are coming. Personally I am really tired of fantasy games... Men, elves, dwarves and priests warriors and mages, feels like the same thing but with a different name in most games.

AoC and WAR failed because they sucked, had nothing to do with WoW....however their development might have been different if WoW was never made. Its bad on the dev's part for being slow at development, rushing the game, unfulfilling promises, broken features, etc...If they had finished the game, both would be doing a lot better.

And Lineage 2: 10 million bots banned :)..I think those figures might be sales of Lineage 2 and Lineage 1 together, Those games are extremely successful, its a shame people never recognize them, they talk of the best and biggest MMO's as WoW, then immediately to games like EvE, LOTRO, WAR, EQ who haven't had a fraction of the Lineage franchises' success. Lineage released back in 98 before EQ. When EQ had 100k subscribers, Lineage was already at the 1 million mark (the first MMORPG ever to do so)...yet it gets almost no recognition.

Originally posted by Quizzical

Guild Wars came out after WoW, and with more than 5 million sold, it's done quite well.  Quality games will still do well in the long run and mediocre ones won't.

I wouldn't really add in Guild Wars for comparison since it has no monthly fee. I mean all the Free/Cash Shop AZN grinders have millions of players, but they can't really be compared to a subscription-based MMO since their sales fluctuate based on how much people feel like buying from their shops.

I think you see a lot more potential in Vanguard, Age of Conan, and WAR than I did.

After searching through Vanguard's site, I came away thinking that the game not only hadn't released, but wouldn't in the near future--and later found out it was well over a year after release.  If you try not to sell people a game, they probably won't insist on buying it anyway, and the quality or potential of the game won't matter.

Vanguard was a victim on two fronts, first, it shipped horribly buggy and nearly unplayable for many people. Second, it was under the umbrella of SOE, notorious for riding the failboat. The game was immensely popular and had a huge following up until it's release and 75% of the people wanting to play couldn't get it to run.

As for Age of Conan, that suffered from R-rated movie syndrome.  An R-rated movie could be really good, but it's probably not going to do very well at the box office.  A lot of people will automatically not go see a movie just because it's rated R, which means that they're trying to draw from a much smaller potential audience.  Well, the same happens with M-rated games.  That may not deter that many single guys in their 20s buying a game for themselves, but you'd better believe that a lot of parents won't buy AoC for their kids, no matter how good the game is.

There's nothing wrong with having an M-rated game. A lot of gamers are over 18 nowadays and from what I've seen, most parents don't really care what their kids do as long as they shut up and leave them alone(ie, video games, computer games, and television). If anything, AoC drew in more immature and young gamers who abused the lack of rules. Age of Conan also had a massive following and was thought of by many to be able to compete with WoW; unfortunately, it shipped without its advertised features,  and had a lot of bugs. The game is better today, but people didn't stick with it and now the entire company is nearing closure.

Regardning WAR, a leveling game based around open world PVP doesn't have that big of a potential market, either.  It's the nature of such games that you're going to have higher level (or renown) players beating up on lower level players.  The lower level players will only take so much of it before they quit.

This is the exact same model as DAOC, and it did really well for its time. Yes, the game has died down today, being older and lacking recent expansion or updates, but it was definitely one of the better MMOs that have come along. The rewnown system is no different than in other MMOs where once a person hits max level they have to catch up in gear. In WAR, instead of amazing gear, you had renown.

 If WoW hadn't come along, I really think all three of these games would have had a shot at being great.

Originally posted by n00bit

Originally posted by Quizzical

Guild Wars came out after WoW, and with more than 5 million sold, it's done quite well.  Quality games will still do well in the long run and mediocre ones won't.

I wouldn't really add in Guild Wars for comparison since it has no monthly fee. I mean all the Free/Cash Shop AZN grinders have millions of players, but they can't really be compared to a subscription-based MMO since their sales fluctuate based on how much people feel like buying from their shops.

I think you see a lot more potential in Vanguard, Age of Conan, and WAR than I did.

After searching through Vanguard's site, I came away thinking that the game not only hadn't released, but wouldn't in the near future--and later found out it was well over a year after release.  If you try not to sell people a game, they probably won't insist on buying it anyway, and the quality or potential of the game won't matter.

Vanguard was a victim on two fronts, first, it shipped horribly buggy and nearly unplayable for many people. Second, it was under the umbrella of SOE, notorious for riding the failboat. The game was immensely popular and had a huge following up until it's release and 75% of the people wanting to play couldn't get it to run.

As for Age of Conan, that suffered from R-rated movie syndrome.  An R-rated movie could be really good, but it's probably not going to do very well at the box office.  A lot of people will automatically not go see a movie just because it's rated R, which means that they're trying to draw from a much smaller potential audience.  Well, the same happens with M-rated games.  That may not deter that many single guys in their 20s buying a game for themselves, but you'd better believe that a lot of parents won't buy AoC for their kids, no matter how good the game is.

There's nothing wrong with having an M-rated game. A lot of gamers are over 18 nowadays and from what I've seen, most parents don't really care what their kids do as long as they shut up and leave them alone(ie, video games, computer games, and television). If anything, AoC drew in more immature and young gamers who abused the lack of rules. Age of Conan also had a massive following and was thought of by many to be able to compete with WoW; unfortunately, it shipped without its advertised features,  and had a lot of bugs. The game is better today, but people didn't stick with it and now the entire company is nearing closure.

Regardning WAR, a leveling game based around open world PVP doesn't have that big of a potential market, either.  It's the nature of such games that you're going to have higher level (or renown) players beating up on lower level players.  The lower level players will only take so much of it before they quit.

This is the exact same model as DAOC, and it did really well for its time. Yes, the game has died down today, being older and lacking recent expansion or updates, but it was definitely one of the better MMOs that have come along. The rewnown system is no different than in other MMOs where once a person hits max level they have to catch up in gear. In WAR, instead of amazing gear, you had renown.

 If WoW hadn't come along, I really think all three of these games would have had a shot at being great.

GW's was great, and the other two made several bad decisions which limited their potential. WOW is not the villain here, other than in the context that if people were not given the choice to play it (the better made game) these 3 would have had higher numbers. 

Winning by forfeit is not a real win.

Originally posted by Magnum2103

Also Super Mario World is a bad game because it has bad physics?  It's not even set in our universe - why would it employ our physics?

And you don't even know what game I'm talking about.  Super Mario World was a great game, and without the problems I cite.

The controls in Super Mario Bros. were off.  Try to run and jump a particular height or distance and it doesn't do what it seems like it should.  It's hardly the only game to have this problem; StarTropics had a really bad case of it.  It's seems to be a less common issue now in commercial games (though it can still be pretty bad in some flash games), with faster hardware, so that merely getting the game to run is no longer such an accomplishment.

Originally posted by n00bit

I wouldn't really add in Guild Wars for comparison since it has no monthly fee. I mean all the Free/Cash Shop AZN grinders have millions of players, but they can't really be compared to a subscription-based MMO since their sales fluctuate based on how much people feel like buying from their shops.

Have the free to play/item mall games had millions of people pay for the game?  Guild Wars has, and not just a trivial sum, either.  I guess it depends on what you buy and where, but you're likely looking at paying at least $40 just to get started.  I'd bet that Guild Wars has much smaller server hosting costs per player than WoW, too.

If Guild Wars isn't such a commercial success, why are they working on Guild Wars 2 right now?  Did I miss the announcement about Dark and Light 2 or Roma Victor 2?

WoW is just a phase. A very long phase, but still a phase nonetheless. For example, when Everquest first came out it was incredibly popular. Sure it was most likely due to the fact that it had very little competition, it was still really popular during its time. WoW will eventually die down just like Everquest eventually did, and something else will take its place. It may not end up having almost 12 million subscribers, but eventually WoW will lose its popularity and something else will take it's place as "most popular MMORPG".

I'm hoping that the game companies will realize that people are starting to get bored of WoW and create a fantastic game that isn't as easy and dumbed down as WoW.

Originally posted by Magnum2103

4.  World of Warcraft (11.5 million subscribers)

...

Note that WoW is using SUBSCRIBERS, not shipped units.  The actual number of units sold would probably put it well over the 20 million mark making it as successful as the other games on console.

Not entirely correct, I believe. Chinese MMOG players do not buy the games - they only pay for gaming time. That's apparently the business model in China.

If we consider about half the subscribers to be in China, that's 5.5-6 millions in other regions. How many boxes were sold to gain that, I won't speculate in.