I see people citing WoW’s decline with excuses such as that the MMO market isn’t there anymore. It wasn’t there pre-WoW. What did people have pre-WoW; everquest? starwars galaxies? They didn’t hold a candle to what WoW became, not even close. If WoW hadn’t come along, the MMO market would’ve just been assumed to be that small. It would’ve been laughable to think there was a subscription MMO that could reach 12 million subs, because it was so unprecedented and so far from the norm. The only reason we know now that those numbers were ever possible is because WoW made it that way, and it wasn’t because there was some MMO market out there in the ether, it was that WoW was just that good that it built the market. It had a strong community that kept people coming back for. It had incentives for improving your character and improving yourself as a player.
WoW doesn’t have what it had anymore, so the market it built is dwindling, although FF14 has been doing a decent job at stepping up. Right now, I believe WoW is simply piggybacking off the success of its previous iterations. If modern WoW’s model existed in 2008, I wouldn’t pretend it would reach the peaks it did.
At the end of the day, WoW just isn’t really a game that bolsters a loyal fanbase anymore. It could be, but it isn’t.
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This is all true.
SWG was one of WoW’s primary competitors and it was only at 500k subscribers. MMOs were considered successful if they had 300k-500k players. The only outlier was Lineage 2 which had 2 million players but that’s based on Asian subscription models which are way different than U.S/Europe.
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WoW expanded the market and commercialized it, but they most certainly didn’t build it.
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They turned it from a niche market to a global market that other genres emulated.
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Imagine how much healthier the MMO market would still be if 500,000 was still considered successful and the market was able to support more games that weren’t all just “WoW but with X”.
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Shoot, EQ, baldurz gate, SWG, Ultima built the MMO genre. WoW came along after with a refined game and already established fanbase.
WoW was opportunistic and blizzard sunk a lot of money into perfecting their formula.
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It started as a casual MMORPG that continued pushing that to expand and draw in as many people as possible. I think opinions on building and carrying can vary wildly, considering how much its changed and how many other games tried to follow it. Also mass appeal tends to correlate with accessibility rather than quality.
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Some people still ride that number line and make a ton of money.
Swtor is still riding that line but that’s largely due to the highly lucrative cartel market and their sketchy packages system
Lineage 2 was another beast. It had hands down the best siege combat and warfare pre Warhammer online which was short lived due to endgame flops.
That’s what I mean. Before you could have just had a regular sub model, 500,000 subscribers and your game was considered successful. Now if you aren’t making that WoW money, you better go free to play and throw in loot boxes because this game is fuuuuudged.
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OP seems to forget that Ultima Online and Everquest where a thing.
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People forget how cutthroat UO PvP was…dear lord it makes wow look like candyland
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I remember watching my mom pvp in that game, she was ruthless and managed to steal a lot of property and equipment from people. Mods eventually had to step in and stop her cause it was just getting unfair. xD
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This was my train of thought as well. Imagine if the norm hadn’t been inflated to such crazy numbers. Now we all live in a world where the modern MMO isn’t considered a success unless it’s pushing millions for their subscriber base.
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You know there is and was a lot boarder market of MMOs than just the everquest, wow, guildwars, FF versions and some of them were F2P and had 20 million players playing them.
MMO is just
an online video game which can be played by a very large number of people simultaneously.
It didn’t build the whole genre. If its predecessors laid the foundations, WoW is the ground floor of the house.
Right?
Thanks to the astronomical heights WoW hit, that became the new standard. Now no MMO can hope to reach that so they end up folding or becoming a disgusting p2w nightmare world in an attempt to at least make WoW money.
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I miss Warhammer online so much
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This.
OP: Completely ignoring actual history completely torpedo’s your credibility.
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what also helped was the expansion of broadband internet. most of you probably have no idea what it was like to play an MMO on 56k dialup, or a 768k DSL… WoW came out at a time when more and more people were getting faster internet speeds, and that helped them alot.
The MMO market was already growing at a fast pace, you had games like UO, EQ, Asheron’s Call and Planetside that were successful, and many others that were coming or making money. Hell, before WoW i probably beta tested 6-8 MMO’s between 2000-2003.
Blizz came along with WoW at the right time, had the right casual focus and captured lightning in a bottle.
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