WoW came at a pretty distinct and important inflection point. The early 2000s was crucial to its success. This was a period of time when online gaming was very new to a lot of people at the same time internet access was becoming more common.
It was also just insanely approachable. Other MMOs of the time had archaic, difficult to understand systems. They were very time consuming, with concepts like needing to grind mobs for long periods of time, needing to group for overworld combat, losing experience or dropping items on death. WoW didnât have these things. It was much more convenient to play.
Blizzard also at this time had built up a reputation of producing non-stop bangers. Warcraft 1, 2, and 3. Diablo 1 and 2. Starcraft. They were all huge games with in-built fanbases that would no doubt at least try out this new MMO Blizzard is coming out with. After all, theyâve never made a bad game before, right?
Basically, they were in the right place, at the right time, which is 90% of success.
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Pretty much can be summarised as:
- more accessible (both in gameplay and system requirements)
- Blizzardâs at the time excellent reputation
- also IMHO WoW had better art*
* EQ2 was a little more high tech but the art wasnât as coherent.
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Wow has better IP management.
Blizzard does a good job of promoting wow through its other popular games so it never leaves youâre memory
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Just time, both because of when it released, the stars aligning, and years of development behind it.
If the game released today, even in itâs current state, it would be a hard flop. 1 raid and 8 dungeons for 6 months, no one would stand for it. The game is actually incredibly shallow but itâs propped up by sheer volume of accounts created. There have been well over 200+ million accounts created but a tiny fraction of them actually kept playing.
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Everquest was regressive and punishing. World of Warcraft was built more for casual play and considering you only have to pay gold for repairs on death, it was a leap above.
Also, with its launch you had the nexus of MMO players and RTS Blizzard players. I told my brother it was the perfect storm (he was working at Blizzard at the time).
None of the folks at Blizzard really understood until launch day at Fryeâs when they were calling up employees to bring their extra copies to try and satisfy the crowd that gathered. Still they sold out and a few hundred didnât get the game that night.
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WoW is the real WoW killer
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If they made a Star Wars Galaxies 2 game with updated graphics, it would give WoW a run for itâs moneyâŚ
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Another MMO mightâve had a fighting chance years and years ago, if theyâd managed to iterate huge casual-friendly improvements over WoW.
The problem was that WoW solved at the time, and has continued to solve, the pain points and frustrations that people had with the MMORPG genre in general. Itâs an ongoing process, they crib the best ideas from other games and keep working on ways to keep things fresh and keep people content. And now, after 20+ years, not only would another game need to somehow develop systems that were light years ahead of WoWâs, theyâd have to be good enough to overcome the decades of time, effort and money that people have invested in WoW. Itâs where all their stuff is.
Some games have, but theyâre not in the same genre. Other games have quick drop in, drop out matches for shorter attention spans, some games focus on a tight, non-multiplayer narrative, some games make it extremely easy to have a game night with your friends with a very low skill threshold for entry. But WoW has always managed to stay on the bleeding edge of improvement on a MMORPG instead of resting on their laurels and staying beholden to Classic forever.
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Blizzard is the WoW killer, and if they arenât, then Microsoft itself will be. They did acquire the company to cannibalize it and remove competition after all, because if they wanted to see it thrive, then a big portion of people on the team today would simply be let go, and they would stop with the over monetized slop not just in WoW but all of their IP/games.
Even then, the concept of a dead game is pretty simplistic when you give it any true thought. A game is dead when it no longer gains new players and is essentially on a path to recycling content while never doing anything else. I donât know if WoW fully fits such a definition just yet but it will always get far too close to that reality with each passing year.
The only fixes they can do are to stop rereleasing stuff through classic(and certainly abandon any idea of a âclassic+â), they would have to remove m+, remove mythic raiding entirely, remove 90% of every class passive/ability in the game(probably even remove spec trees), remove certain race/class combos that were added(you can get a free race change, itâs not the end of the world). And probably stop trying to homogenize the gameâs core identity by removing factions and giving things from the Horde to Alliance players when they never deserved it in the first place.
After all that, the game might be acceptable again because we can focus on story and lore and building upon the 30 year foundation rather than fully scrapping it and continuously trying to remove it to appease a bunch of whiners who never liked WoW to begin with and like the current dev team, would rather see it fully destroyed instead.
The clock will always be ticking though, that is reality. We can pretend like things are fine for so long before it finally catches up and itâs too late(weâre kind of already at that point even with Housing on the horizon, unfortunately, thatâll probably be ruined too).
Oh and special shoutout to the awful community they fostered over the years, nothing can fix that particular issue and that will always drive away new players, which are necessary for the game to survive.
WoW was fun but challenging. I started playing just before the Naxx event and people I knew also played it. You could solo level when no one was available and the game was intuitive.
My first MMORPG was Star Wars Galaxies, I started a month before the CU launched, there we times it was fun but it was mostly work, incredibly grindy just killing stuff for leveling so you could kill more stuff.
WoW just did it better. The later competition were just half assed clones with little staying power . WoWs supremacy is more an accident than by design. WoW is the BEST because everyone else is terrible.
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Many tried. Or at least, the press tried to push them as such.
I think the first one was Warhammer Online, with itâs reliance on the Warhammer mythos, giant PvP spectacles and a narrative that was friendly to the original material, it was posed to be a giant threat to the Warcraft behemoth.
But it was during Wrath, which is commonly thought of as âa good timeâ. It didnât stand a chance. Especially since it also brought along it giant PvP spectacles in the form of Wintergrasp which remains the best Epic BG to this day.
WoW always is adjusting and adapting, while their opponents run into some sort of snag and then end up stagnating. Wildstar especially comes to mind. And, while it adapts, WoW takes the scraps of the fallen and applies it to itself, like WoW adopting the Wow Token which was first brought around by Wildstar.
Really, thinking on it and how it was, WoW has made so many quality of life improvements and trying to make the experience more newbie friendly over the years. I donât think that can be understated.
WoW was almost the WoW killer.
Back in Shadowlands.
A lot of people jumped ship for FF14 (at least for a while), which was also concluding their Shadowbringerâs ark (arguably the best story theyâve ever done).
WoW is pretty much perfect as far as themepark MMOâs go. There isnât much more they can do to improve the game that isnât also going to damage the game in some fashion.
Like trying to improve PvP will always hurt the PvE community. Unless Blizzard completely split off PvP into its own separate mode, with classes that doesnât resemble their PvE counterpart. But that would just make PvP harder for casuals to get into since they favorite class now plays completely differently.
Improving Delves will end up hurting other end game pillars (as we have seen with M+ this expansion). Likewise, making M+ too good will end up hurting raiding, which we can look to the past for evidence off.
I suspect housing will have a similar impact. In that its inclusion is going to end up damaging some other pillar of the game by proxy.
Riot and other MMO developers realized this a long time ago, that it is practically impossible to improve on the WoW formula. And even if you could, WoW carries 20 years of inertia and sunkcost, making people hesitant to move to a new MMO, even if it was strictly superior in every sense.
As people say, the only thing that can kill WoW is WoW.
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Thereâs something magical regarding retail warcraft, as long this game stands: it will always scratch the fantasy itch. Wildstar was a fantastic close second to scratching the fantasy itch.
It hasnât failed because there has been no worthy successor yet.
I played SWTOR for a while before the f2p change, but I realized that wasnât the kind of fantasy I was looking for.
I like WoW for its primary focus on medieval high-fantasy with a bit of steampunk technology and very little sci-fi.
Iâve also played FF14 a bit, but the long GCD is a huge turn off, and the PvP is laughable.
WoW also has a very pleasing graphical style, and excellent combat gameplay - Itâs hard to top that.
Being too realistic is actually a turn off in some cases, specially due to sensory overload.
Many MMOs fail because they are way too flashy on their special effects, or the combat gameplay is just too clunky.
If anything, I think only an stylized MMO (characters looking like LEGO, Clash Royale or something closer to WoW) with a modifiable environment (like Minecraft or something more modern) or similar would topple WoW if they could nail the combat gameplay/encounters.
WoW is far from perfect, but to me, itâs the best offering out there, and that is true to such a broad range of players that it keeps the spot as the king of MMOs.
Wall of text 
A combination of things:
MMOs can be pretty expensive to produce but even if you have a large company behind the project itâs not a garantee of return, therefore, is pretty risky to make a MMO, see New World for example.
MMOs need time to grow in lore, in class balance, in class fantasy. Most of them donât survive long enough for that to happen.
WoW had a solid backbone, the Warcraft universe, so it was easier to gatter attention. Blizzard was becoming the GOAT in the game industry, they already had immense sucess with Diablo 1 and 2 and other tittles.
The times were different. The internet was ânewâ and people were hyped with the idea of finding a community, make friendsâŚback then it was so much cooler to be able to talk to people via voice inside a game. The social aspect and how new it was to us contribute significantly to WoWs sucess.
WoW had incredible graphics and smooth gameplay for that time.
Lord of the rings the movies, were released a few years back, the first one in 2001, then in 2002 and 2003. Fantasy was in an all time high. And then BOOM!! WoW in 2004 with playable elves!
After all of these things, WOW just kept getting better and itâs hard to pull people away from something theyâve already invested so much time in.
I could go on and on 
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Like who in particular do you think would get this
EverQuest was never big enough to âkillâ
