In the same day I received emails from two separate MMO developers encouraging me to come back to their respective games.
Funcom is promoting some kind of AR game around The Secret World, an ambitious concept for sure, and strikes me as a gamble which probably would not have been taken had the game met performance expectations. Of course, providing any actual details on what they plan to do would spoil it, but my mind goes to the 2001 game Majestic. So presumably they'll start by revealing that all those reports of poor subscriber numbers were actually a giant conspiracy. Interestingly, no active TSW subscription is required to sign up for the AR game, which cements it in my mind as less of a value-add than an advertisement.
EA Bioware has of course been laying on the spam fairly thick recently to promote The Old Republic's new "not worth paying for" tier of access. I guess if it helps the game it's probably a good thing. The good bits in that game; art design, atmosphere, many storylines, space battles, interesting combat mechanics, a solo game which doesn't bend over backwards to ensure the player is never ever challenged, are well worth saving. Also, they have true blue actual Australian servers located in Australia. -sigh- I would be so all over that shit if I didn't already play WoW.
It's a bit funny to think back on all that speculation that every MMO released in the past two years might "kill" WoW. Yeah. Those was some good times.
Eight years. WoW has been running for eight god damn years. Video games have only really been a thing for around forty years. MMOs have only really been a thing for around fifteen years.
What I find interesting to think about is how historically significant World of Warcraft will be, no matter how long it runs past this point... and ten million players is a hell of a lot of momentum.
Funcom is promoting some kind of AR game around The Secret World, an ambitious concept for sure, and strikes me as a gamble which probably would not have been taken had the game met performance expectations. Of course, providing any actual details on what they plan to do would spoil it, but my mind goes to the 2001 game Majestic. So presumably they'll start by revealing that all those reports of poor subscriber numbers were actually a giant conspiracy. Interestingly, no active TSW subscription is required to sign up for the AR game, which cements it in my mind as less of a value-add than an advertisement.
EA Bioware has of course been laying on the spam fairly thick recently to promote The Old Republic's new "not worth paying for" tier of access. I guess if it helps the game it's probably a good thing. The good bits in that game; art design, atmosphere, many storylines, space battles, interesting combat mechanics, a solo game which doesn't bend over backwards to ensure the player is never ever challenged, are well worth saving. Also, they have true blue actual Australian servers located in Australia. -sigh- I would be so all over that shit if I didn't already play WoW.
It's a bit funny to think back on all that speculation that every MMO released in the past two years might "kill" WoW. Yeah. Those was some good times.
Eight years. WoW has been running for eight god damn years. Video games have only really been a thing for around forty years. MMOs have only really been a thing for around fifteen years.
What I find interesting to think about is how historically significant World of Warcraft will be, no matter how long it runs past this point... and ten million players is a hell of a lot of momentum.
Dear Coreus,
ReplyDeleteI agree with everything you say, but I'd also like to add some perspective. WoW came about at a time when there was very little competition, did an amazing job at advertising itself, and brought with it a large fanbase of players from their earlier RTS series. It was poised to be a success, and rightfully was.
Since then, though, the market has gotten more and more flooded, and now, with tons of F2P options, new games are often having a hard time getting enough of the player share to make money, let alone "kill WoW." At some level it's not even fair to compare games to WoW any more, with an exception for EQ and EVE, perhaps, which were its only real competitors back then (yes, DAoC and a few others were out there, but those were the big 2).
At any rate, I completely agree, but I also don't like comparing WoW with other newer games. It's a new market, totally different than what WoW entered.
On a completely separate note, if you don't have a thing for keeping up the captcha check before posting a comment, I'd kill it. Old people like me can't read those damn things.
Sincerely,
Stubborn
That's correct. The point I was trying to make is how silly expecting new MMOs to compete with WoW seems now, as compared to even a year ago when a lot of people genuinely though that Star Wars had a good chance to do so.
Delete[I had no idea my comments were behind a captcha, and have removed it now.]