Which kinda mirrors the community here. Not as bad, but not far off either.
This is a silly expectation. That would imply that the only reason anyone plays anything other than WoW is Blizzard’s incompetence, which is utterly ridiculous. People play things other than WoW because it is ridiculous to expect one development team to make a game that is the best at everything. What happened to WoW was not a result of incompetence, but rather a result of inevitability.
Let’s posit something here:
Two roughly equally talented development companies.
Company a makes a game and tries to do everything.
Company b makes a game and tries to focus JUST on making a game that gives players agency.
Company A will probably have a bigger audience total if these are the only two options, but company B will COMPLETELY monopolize the audience of people who specifically enjoy agency, right?
Now imagine there’s also the following:
Company C who focuses purely on making the most exciting and action-packed gameplay they can.
Company D who focuses primarily on creating the best narrative they can.
Company E who focuses primarily on creating the best pvp they can.
Company F who focuses primarily on creating the best graphics and visual environment they can.
Company G who focuses on making the best social features and cooperative content they can.
Company A suddenly doesn’t have as much of an audience if they’re trying to be a generalist, because there’s no way they can compete for the audiences of B through G - they just don’t have the time to do EVERYTHING better than the specialists.
That is basically what happened. WoW was company A. At the start, WoW had 80-90% of the audience because, well, they did everything and nobody really even tried to compete.
But over time, companies B through G have emerged, creating specialized games that specifically target ONE audience. One type of player. And thus the ~5-15% of the playerbase who likes each of those facets have gradually migrated towards those other games… leaving less people without a game that SPECIFICALLY caters to them for WoW to target.
It’s possible I’m giving Blizzard too much credit here, but I imagine they started seeing this somewhere around Mists or Warlords, and, being smart enough to know a generalist can’t compete with specialists, started looking into how they could create their own niche… and saw that most of their remaining players were focused on competition. So they started pushing towards that.
And thus do we have WoW as the specialist competitive MMO in a sea of other focused, targeted MMOs who each do their own thing well and have their own stable audience.
Blizzard DOES still have nostalgia, because nearly every MMO player came through Blizzard at some point in time, so when Blizzard releases a new expansion, many of its former players decide to come back temporarily to revisit the nostalgia… but the nostalgia is, naturally, unsustainable.
I skimmed, you’re not telling me anything new here.
WoW is failing because Blizzard has mishandled the game to the point that it has fallen this far and Activision keeps milking this dying cow.
You are not going to teach me anything about how companies work here, try not to be so patronizing over a difference of opinion.
No. WoW is not failing. WoW is simply settling into a stable audience after an unsustainable high.
You have unrealistic expectations built on the idea that no competent developers exist outside of Blizzard entertainment.
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Yes, I’m serious. A million~ stable accounts of competitive players who reliably subscribe and enjoy what the game is… is a sustainable audience. That’s a healthy audience. 10 million is not needed to run an MMO. Sure it’d be nice if every MMO had ten million, but that’s not what you need in order to be ‘not dying’.
Yes, it’s fun and hip to say ‘WoW is dying’. But it’s not realistic.
Sounds like denial to me, but agree to disagree.
I’m one of the players who came back for nostalgia. My sub ends in… a few weeks.
I have no horse in the game for WoW’s success. I’m just simply reasonable enough to recognize that what the game was in Wrath… was unsustainable. And that, now that I’ve gotten past my initial emotional, visceral response of ‘wtf is wrong with this game? Why is there nothing for me to do here if I’m not interested in competitive gameplay… why is this not the game I remember?’, I took some time and thought about it logically and realized that… well… there’s no room in the market for a generalist. Every mmo needs to have a niche. Just like every MOBA needs a niche, every shooter needs a niche, etc. etc. etc.
And once I realized that… well… I stopped trying to fight it and just let my sub run out. I might resub down the line because the guild I found in my brief time back with this game is great and I’d like to play more with them… But I also realized that Blizzard doesn’t NEED me. I am not their target audience, and their target audience seems pretty content… and pretty sustainable, regardless of the forum complaints.
MMORPGs are an insanely hard market to break into and have -any- sort of staying power. People gobble up content so fast that you need to provide a lot of evergreen content while also having a steady release schedule.
A lot can go wrong. I imagine they’ll get a lot of league players, and many wow/ff14 players will try it, but I doubt it’s going to have long-term longevity like either of them.
We’ll see though.
The current dev team is already hard at work killing this game.
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Lol, true. I do think it’s a little difference because the 16-bit console wars were more like a sports rivalry with each side rooting for their team.
As someone playing MMOs since 1996, I was firmly convinced that eventually some new game would supplant WoW because that’s how the period between 1996 and 2004 played out. And I don’t think many people - even at Blizz - expected WoW would still be a juggernaut in 2021.
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No, it won’t.
The only thing that can kill WoW is WoW. So many MMOs have released over the past 17 years, all of which players have claimed will ‘unseat the king’ and kill WoW. None of them have. None of them.
This upcoming MMO, along with Ashes of Creation, New World etc, will ultimately fair no better. They’ll make a big splash, and sure some players will likely jump over to try the new hotness, but it still won’t kill WoW.
The term “WoW Killer” is almost as old as WoW. It needs to be retired. Perhaps replaced with “WoW retread” or something.
Obviously Ghostcrawler is very experienced and familiar with MMOs, having worked on WoW, and presumably kept a close eye on how it moved and changed over time, and what mistakes were made along the way. He’s been reported as saying that not everyone will like aspects of it, so at least he is being honest. As per the old quote - “You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time”. Just how that will work out will define what kind of player will enjoy it.
I personally don’t care what company makes a new MMO; all that matters is whether or not I would enjoy it. The only MMO I have come close to liking as much as WoW is Elder Scrolls Online - if they could design a game as good as that but without the flaws that create a critical annoyance point for me that has me stop playing after a time, it would be a winner for me.
I’ve lost track of all the dozens of WoW-killers that have come and gone over the last 16½ years.
All I know for certain is that an awful lot of people don’t seem to understand that to be a ‘WoW-killer’, at the very least, the game needs to outlive WoW.
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Yeah but this time it’s for real.
What MMO? If it’s not high fantasy I won’t be into it. Just wana see what it is.
no WOW is best game
did u try shadow land ! is funs
WoW’s killer will be time. MMO’s aren’t as popular as they used to be 10 or even five years ago. As WoW veterans grow older and lose interest in the game, there probably won’t be enough replacement subs from younger, new players to cover losses and maintain or grow revenue.
And if subs fall precariously enough, the game will go into maintenance and eventually just shut down when it’s no longer profitable to keep it going.
Not sure why people are even talking about Riots new MMO like it’s a great thing… so far there has been zero proof of concept. And yes I know… GC is heading it… Well there was another Legendary name in the MMO mix several years back. Richard Garriot. And his new MMO died on launch day, Tabula Rasa was it’s name. Read about that one.
Now… what do I think about a company that’s probably going to focus heavily on the PvP side of things with a MMO… well good luck but I’m not interested. For me PvP is a side game that doesn’t hold my attention for long because I don’t really care for it.
Ashes. No. New world. No. Riot. Probably.
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