I don't think WoW is in the decline stage yet. No significant growth there for quite a while because the game is most likely in its maturity stage. However, don't mistake the maturity stage for the decline stage.
There is no info on Titan. What do you expect to base our opinions on? Cause most of the people who will post in this thread (I haven't read anything past the OP's post ) will form their opinion based on their own goddamn biased opinion, aka Blizzard haters and Blizzard fanboys. Haters will talk about how Blizzard have no talent whatsoever to do a good game, WoW fanboys will say that it is Blizzard so of course Titan will be amazing.
Do we need that sort of useless meaningless crap?
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
So I know Blizzards next mmo is likely pretty far off but what effect do you think it will have on the soon to come releases such as GW2 and SWTOR? Assuming one of these new titles does really well and builds a substantial subscriber base, will Blizzard just snatch them right back with their new release?
I guess what I am asking is do you think a game like GW2 (if it becomes successful) will have enough pull to keep players from leaving? I personally think that Blizzard's influence is simply too strong for these newer games to compete with even if they do end up being very good games, but what does everyone else think?
I dont think any MMO will ever dominate in the way that WoW has. I think by the time Titan arries GW2 and SWTOR will be quite old. Titan is also supposed to be first person & I suspect it will be sci-fi not fantasy so it may not appeal to former WoW players on either of those fronts.
Whatever the case may be Blizzard will have to really adjust their thinking on where the MMO market is now & where it will be by the time they launch their new product because I think the days of subscriptions (or at least the days of $15 subscriptions) are really coming to an end with so many B2P and F2P titles around and more coming out all the time once you sort the wheat from the haff there really is something for everyone either here now or on the horizon.
I am sure Diehard Blizzard fans will be waiting with baited breath but the change of game type to FPS is somewhat puzzling since this is a studio used to creating predominantly RTS and third person RPG type games.
Actually Wow was one of the smoother launches. There weren't very many bugs or server crashes, just an annoying loot bug. The biggest problem was the queu.
i am going to laugh when blizzard makes the mmo and you all see their *real talent* for yourselves. Then i betcha u wont be singing that are the best anymore :-P
Yeah you mean like the best selling RTS of all time, best selling MMORPG of all time (with three record-breaking expansions), and one of the universally hailed masterpieces of PC gaming (Diablo II)?
Yeah those Blizzard guys are just terrible at their jobs. People don't know what they're doing, man.
Exactly.
Blizzard is the fine restaurant. They actively focus on making good food, capitalizing on all food-making knowledge the food industry has garnered.
Whereas other companies seem to value new types of food, regardless of whether the new thing is high quality. (And since it's experimental and innovative, it usually isn't.)
Then Blizzard capitalizes on the wasted efforts of other companies by figuring out which new types of food have potential -- and they make a high quality version of that type of food.
So it comes as no surprise that when all the MMORPG restaurants charge the same price, customers have seemed to strongly prefer one restaurant over the others.
Blizzard are rather competent and do know what their fans want from them.
But the MMO market is very different now compared to how it was in 2004. Wow was at the time the only MMO with top class programming and it had 8 times the budget of Everquest and 6 of Everquest 2, the game people thought would be the competition.
Titan will go up against games like TOR (Bioware), GW2 (ANET), WoDO (CCP/White wolf) and a few others. There are also a few other AAA studios working on MMOs, like Zenimax (Bethesda) and Zombie labs.
So I think the competition will be harder in 2014 than 2004.
Wow were up against EQ 1 & 2, SWG, Eve, GW and DaoC. Several of those games were pretty fine but not a single of them were close to to Wow in budget, Wow cost 60M$ launch and I don't think even one of the opponents cost more than 10M$ when they launched. And only ANET had a really experienced crew at the time of the opposition.
I am sure Titan will do fine, but I don't think it will be the next Wow. There is just too many talented and experienced devs with good funding out there now. I think Wow was an exceptionand that we never get another game that dominate the genre in the same way again.
Of course, anything can happen. Maybe Blizz pull it off again or maybe it fails completely. Most likely is however that several games will share the top in the future.
I don't think WoW is in the decline stage yet. No significant growth there for quite a while because the game is most likely in its maturity stage. However, don't mistake the maturity stage for the decline stage.
Blizzard did for the first time report that Wow had lost half a million players a week or 2 ago (they reported it 2 weeks, the decline took 6 months), so some decline is happening. A game like Wow wont loose all it's players in a week, it will slowly bleed players unless a game launches that attracts a lot of players from it fast, and that just hasn't happened yet.
I would say that Wow been at a stagnation stage forthe last 1 or 2 years and seems to just entered the decline stage right now, even if it still is somewhat early to say for certain.
Wow have been in the maturity stage for several years now, it is after all 7 years old now and that is pretty ancient for a computer game.
It still is the largest game and will continue to be so for at least another year, what happens after that is anybodys guess but I have hard to see it gains a lot of new players again. On the other hand have I hard to see them have less than a million subs before Titan launches as well, MMOs usually loses player slowly over long time.
If I know Blizzard right have they already put a few people working on Wow 2, after all do Blizz love sequels and they have the money for such a project.
Well, it would be nice if there was actually an "official announcement" about this alledged "Titan" game.
I have had alot of fun playing WoW on and off for the last 7 years and will definitely take a look at any mmo blizzard turns out in the future.
Over the past few years there has been nothing but disappointment from the games that have been launched, eventually one of these games will have to be good, right?
I'm sure it's already been pointed out, but the fact that Guild Wars 2 is free to play forever once you buy it means that even if some people leave the game to go try out Blizzard's new baby, they can always go back and play anytime they want.
There is a nice collection of information currently known about Titan over at titanproject.net.
After going through this I have a few observations.
Blizzard will surprise a lot of people with their new MMO. Their executives are talking about this game as if it will open up an entirely new audience for the MMO genre. I think they will break the standard MMO mold and try to make a game that is approachable by non-mmo gamers.
It's pretty obvious the game will not be high fantasy. Why would they want to compete directly with WOW. In keeping with my first comment I think the setting will be either historacle or post-apocalyptic. These settings would appeal tot he widest audience.
The gameplay will not be as narrow as WOW. There will be entirely different styles of gaming available, again to appeal to a wide audience.
Titan will take social interaction to levels not seen before in an MMO. I'm sure Blizzard has looked at the 600 Million users on Facebook and they have learned a thing or two from it.
Personally, I can't wait to see what they come up with. Betting against Blizzard has never been wise so I'm guessiing it will be another huge success.
By the time Titan comes out I doubt WoW will have even close to the number of subs they have now. WoW peaked at 12 million and I doubt it will ever go higher. The only thing we have seen is that their subscription numbers have gone down since the launch of Cataclysm. Sure, the expansion sold like hotcakes and beat all previous records, but that does not mean much. This expansion came out much closer to the holidays so more people had a chance to play it initially, and I doubt many of the people who bought it were not playing already.
When Titan comes out WoW will be roughly 10 years old. That is an extremely dated game, and with people quitting mere months after an expansion and the next one being atleast a year away..with about 3 strong looking MMORPG titles on the way, I cannot forsee the decline changing.
The truth of the matter is that people have been bored of WoW for a long time, but for many, it is the only option. You can tell people want something new to come out that takes them away from WoW as they usually take a temporary hit any time an MMO comes out. All it takes is one of those titles to actually be able to backup the hype with a quality game and WoW will lose more subscribers. It may not be much, but every MMORPG has a chance to nick at the beast. That will add up over time, especially by the time Titan comes out.
The success of Titan is undoubtedly going to be strong, but not as strong is WoW's at its peak..maybe not even close. WoW came out when the MMO genre had tons of untapped potential, not when the market was as fleshed out as it is today. While there is still tons of potential out there for strong and successful MMOs, by the time Titan comes out we will have seen atleast one or even two of them.
If there is not a huge hit (over 2million subs, lets say) by the time Titan comes out it will probably be a much bigger success. On the other hand, even if a combination of titles go to the million subscribers mark, Blizzard will have a hard time prying those people off already established games -- similar to the issues other MMO developers have prying subs from WoW.
Actiblizzard are now run by wall street types. Project titan will be facebook linked with a cash shop and DLC content "prior" to release.
Besides the fact if they keep pissing off there fanbase the way they are , on top of some decent games coming out over the next 1.5 years (archage, ToR, GW2 etc) they might just release project wallmart to a fanbase holding their middle fingers up.
Did you enjoy having lan taken out of starcraft2? Did you enjoy buying it knowing that you now have to buy 2 more "expansions" for what used to be ...you know buying the whole fukn game at release. Do you think they arent gonna "capitilize" and "monetize" Diablo 3 - 20 differant ways?
Those FPS CoD guys are "thrilled" it sounds like about the new "subscription" system going into place for a FPS console ........... You know for the metrics lol...
The head honcho there doesn't give a shit. Show me the money. As long as he can keep adding gimmicks to bank off the playerbase he could care less about the long term effect. MAX out the profits. Strip the company of anything value wise and move on to the next thing we can milk to death / rinse repeat. Look at wall street. Same shit.
The more I read about this the more I feel like I am reading about Goldman Sachs or Bank of America and their "monetary devices"and "derivative's" Get ready for the new wave. You will be paying a fee to fucking breathe in project walmart /DiabloFee/Feecraft/and Battlefee.
So I know Blizzards next mmo is likely pretty far off but what effect do you think it will have on the soon to come releases such as GW2 and SWTOR? Assuming one of these new titles does really well and builds a substantial subscriber base, will Blizzard just snatch them right back with their new release?
I guess what I am asking is do you think a game like GW2 (if it becomes successful) will have enough pull to keep players from leaving? I personally think that Blizzard's influence is simply too strong for these newer games to compete with even if they do end up being very good games, but what does everyone else think?
We don't know anything "for sure" from Blizzard on what Titan will be.....other than it NOT being a part of Blizzard's current IP, and it more than likely being a FPS MMORPG.
IF its a FPS MMORPG, I don't see it competing in the same space as GW2 or SWTOR. These are very different games for different crowds. The First Person View is a very polarizing game mechanic for many gamers. Personally, I could have stomached most of DarkFall and Mortal Online's bugs and issues if it weren't in First Person View. So despite how Titan turns out.....if its FPV only, then I don't think Titan will be competing directly against GW2 & SWTOR.
I think Blizzard feels that WOW still has enough legs under it to carry them on in the "Fantasy based, Linear Themepark" space of MMO gaming and will probably kick something off that will be the next generation MMO to GW2 & SWTOR a few years after its release.
Actiblizzard are now run by wall street types. Project titan will be facebook linked with a cash shop and DLC content "prior" to release.
Besides the fact if they keep pissing off there fanbase the way they are , on top of some decent games coming out over the next 1.5 years (archage, ToR, GW2 etc) they might just release project wallmart to a fanbase holding their middle fingers up.
Did you enjoy having lan taken out of starcraft2? Did you enjoy buying it knowing that you now have to buy 2 more "expansions" for what used to be ...you know buying the whole fukn game at release. Do you think they arent gonna "capitilize" and "monetize" Diablo 3 - 20 differant ways?
Those FPS CoD guys are "thrilled" it sounds like about the new "subscription" system going into place for a FPS console ........... You know for the metrics lol...
The head honcho there doesn't give a shit. Show me the money. As long as he can keep adding gimmicks to bank off the playerbase he could care less about the long term effect. MAX out the profits. Strip the company of anything value wise and move on to the next thing we can milk to death / rinse repeat. Look at wall street. Same shit.
The more I read about this the more I feel like I am reading about Goldman Sachs or Bank of America and their "monetary devices"and "derivative's" Get ready for the new wave. You will be paying a fee to fucking breathe in project walmart /DiabloFee/Feecraft/and Battlefee.
If you look at the leaked project schedule for Blizzard, Diablo is set to completely release over the course of 3-4 years. I'm sure they will take a page from WOW's book and offer up paid service for vanity pets, etc. As a gamer, I'm PO'd as much as you...but from a business aspect, they are just finding their price point.
The gaming industry is one of the few anomolies that haven't suffered as much during these bad economic times. Even though people have less income and are spending more on food and services they need.....people are STILL buying up games like nothing ever happend.
So if your the game company and you see that millions of people are buying your stuff without blinking an eye......as a publicly traded company, you have a responsibility to your shareholders to maximize your profits. Look up pricing point. The value of something (in this case, Blizz / Activision games) is determined by what the market pays for it. There is no magic man sitting behind a curtian setting prices for Big Macs in Moscow, and Call of Duty in South Korea. The company charges what they think the product is worth. If they over estimate, then they lose money because they've alienated the majority of their customers. If they charge too little, then they've lost money because your product is worth more on the market than you charged.
Comments
I don't think WoW is in the decline stage yet. No significant growth there for quite a while because the game is most likely in its maturity stage. However, don't mistake the maturity stage for the decline stage.
There is no info on Titan. What do you expect to base our opinions on? Cause most of the people who will post in this thread (I haven't read anything past the OP's post
) will form their opinion based on their own goddamn biased opinion, aka Blizzard haters and Blizzard fanboys. Haters will talk about how Blizzard have no talent whatsoever to do a good game, WoW fanboys will say that it is Blizzard so of course Titan will be amazing.
Do we need that sort of useless meaningless crap?
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
I dont think any MMO will ever dominate in the way that WoW has. I think by the time Titan arries GW2 and SWTOR will be quite old. Titan is also supposed to be first person & I suspect it will be sci-fi not fantasy so it may not appeal to former WoW players on either of those fronts.
Whatever the case may be Blizzard will have to really adjust their thinking on where the MMO market is now & where it will be by the time they launch their new product because I think the days of subscriptions (or at least the days of $15 subscriptions) are really coming to an end with so many B2P and F2P titles around and more coming out all the time once you sort the wheat from the haff there really is something for everyone either here now or on the horizon.
I am sure Diehard Blizzard fans will be waiting with baited breath but the change of game type to FPS is somewhat puzzling since this is a studio used to creating predominantly RTS and third person RPG type games.
One thing Blizzard will do for sure is deliver a polished product. Lets hope that Activision doesn't force them not to
It was better, Queues were worse though
Blizzard is more like McDonalds.....
Blizzard are rather competent and do know what their fans want from them.
But the MMO market is very different now compared to how it was in 2004. Wow was at the time the only MMO with top class programming and it had 8 times the budget of Everquest and 6 of Everquest 2, the game people thought would be the competition.
Titan will go up against games like TOR (Bioware), GW2 (ANET), WoDO (CCP/White wolf) and a few others. There are also a few other AAA studios working on MMOs, like Zenimax (Bethesda) and Zombie labs.
So I think the competition will be harder in 2014 than 2004.
Wow were up against EQ 1 & 2, SWG, Eve, GW and DaoC. Several of those games were pretty fine but not a single of them were close to to Wow in budget, Wow cost 60M$ launch and I don't think even one of the opponents cost more than 10M$ when they launched. And only ANET had a really experienced crew at the time of the opposition.
I am sure Titan will do fine, but I don't think it will be the next Wow. There is just too many talented and experienced devs with good funding out there now. I think Wow was an exceptionand that we never get another game that dominate the genre in the same way again.
Of course, anything can happen. Maybe Blizz pull it off again or maybe it fails completely. Most likely is however that several games will share the top in the future.
Blizzard did for the first time report that Wow had lost half a million players a week or 2 ago (they reported it 2 weeks, the decline took 6 months), so some decline is happening. A game like Wow wont loose all it's players in a week, it will slowly bleed players unless a game launches that attracts a lot of players from it fast, and that just hasn't happened yet.
I would say that Wow been at a stagnation stage forthe last 1 or 2 years and seems to just entered the decline stage right now, even if it still is somewhat early to say for certain.
Wow have been in the maturity stage for several years now, it is after all 7 years old now and that is pretty ancient for a computer game.
It still is the largest game and will continue to be so for at least another year, what happens after that is anybodys guess but I have hard to see it gains a lot of new players again. On the other hand have I hard to see them have less than a million subs before Titan launches as well, MMOs usually loses player slowly over long time.
If I know Blizzard right have they already put a few people working on Wow 2, after all do Blizz love sequels and they have the money for such a project.
Well, it would be nice if there was actually an "official announcement" about this alledged "Titan" game.
I have had alot of fun playing WoW on and off for the last 7 years and will definitely take a look at any mmo blizzard turns out in the future.
Over the past few years there has been nothing but disappointment from the games that have been launched, eventually one of these games will have to be good, right?
WoW subs are so big cause it's all gold farmers..
I'm sure it's already been pointed out, but the fact that Guild Wars 2 is free to play forever once you buy it means that even if some people leave the game to go try out Blizzard's new baby, they can always go back and play anytime they want.
There is a nice collection of information currently known about Titan over at titanproject.net.
After going through this I have a few observations.
Blizzard will surprise a lot of people with their new MMO. Their executives are talking about this game as if it will open up an entirely new audience for the MMO genre. I think they will break the standard MMO mold and try to make a game that is approachable by non-mmo gamers.
It's pretty obvious the game will not be high fantasy. Why would they want to compete directly with WOW. In keeping with my first comment I think the setting will be either historacle or post-apocalyptic. These settings would appeal tot he widest audience.
The gameplay will not be as narrow as WOW. There will be entirely different styles of gaming available, again to appeal to a wide audience.
Titan will take social interaction to levels not seen before in an MMO. I'm sure Blizzard has looked at the 600 Million users on Facebook and they have learned a thing or two from it.
Personally, I can't wait to see what they come up with. Betting against Blizzard has never been wise so I'm guessiing it will be another huge success.
By the time Titan comes out I doubt WoW will have even close to the number of subs they have now. WoW peaked at 12 million and I doubt it will ever go higher. The only thing we have seen is that their subscription numbers have gone down since the launch of Cataclysm. Sure, the expansion sold like hotcakes and beat all previous records, but that does not mean much. This expansion came out much closer to the holidays so more people had a chance to play it initially, and I doubt many of the people who bought it were not playing already.
When Titan comes out WoW will be roughly 10 years old. That is an extremely dated game, and with people quitting mere months after an expansion and the next one being atleast a year away..with about 3 strong looking MMORPG titles on the way, I cannot forsee the decline changing.
The truth of the matter is that people have been bored of WoW for a long time, but for many, it is the only option. You can tell people want something new to come out that takes them away from WoW as they usually take a temporary hit any time an MMO comes out. All it takes is one of those titles to actually be able to backup the hype with a quality game and WoW will lose more subscribers. It may not be much, but every MMORPG has a chance to nick at the beast. That will add up over time, especially by the time Titan comes out.
The success of Titan is undoubtedly going to be strong, but not as strong is WoW's at its peak..maybe not even close. WoW came out when the MMO genre had tons of untapped potential, not when the market was as fleshed out as it is today. While there is still tons of potential out there for strong and successful MMOs, by the time Titan comes out we will have seen atleast one or even two of them.
If there is not a huge hit (over 2million subs, lets say) by the time Titan comes out it will probably be a much bigger success. On the other hand, even if a combination of titles go to the million subscribers mark, Blizzard will have a hard time prying those people off already established games -- similar to the issues other MMO developers have prying subs from WoW.
Actiblizzard are now run by wall street types. Project titan will be facebook linked with a cash shop and DLC content "prior" to release.
Besides the fact if they keep pissing off there fanbase the way they are , on top of some decent games coming out over the next 1.5 years (archage, ToR, GW2 etc) they might just release project wallmart to a fanbase holding their middle fingers up.
Did you enjoy having lan taken out of starcraft2? Did you enjoy buying it knowing that you now have to buy 2 more "expansions" for what used to be ...you know buying the whole fukn game at release. Do you think they arent gonna "capitilize" and "monetize" Diablo 3 - 20 differant ways?
Those FPS CoD guys are "thrilled" it sounds like about the new "subscription" system going into place for a FPS console ........... You know for the metrics lol...
The head honcho there doesn't give a shit. Show me the money. As long as he can keep adding gimmicks to bank off the playerbase he could care less about the long term effect. MAX out the profits. Strip the company of anything value wise and move on to the next thing we can milk to death / rinse repeat. Look at wall street. Same shit.
The more I read about this the more I feel like I am reading about Goldman Sachs or Bank of America and their "monetary devices"and "derivative's" Get ready for the new wave. You will be paying a fee to fucking breathe in project walmart /DiabloFee/Feecraft/and Battlefee.
We don't know anything "for sure" from Blizzard on what Titan will be.....other than it NOT being a part of Blizzard's current IP, and it more than likely being a FPS MMORPG.
IF its a FPS MMORPG, I don't see it competing in the same space as GW2 or SWTOR. These are very different games for different crowds. The First Person View is a very polarizing game mechanic for many gamers. Personally, I could have stomached most of DarkFall and Mortal Online's bugs and issues if it weren't in First Person View. So despite how Titan turns out.....if its FPV only, then I don't think Titan will be competing directly against GW2 & SWTOR.
I think Blizzard feels that WOW still has enough legs under it to carry them on in the "Fantasy based, Linear Themepark" space of MMO gaming and will probably kick something off that will be the next generation MMO to GW2 & SWTOR a few years after its release.
If you look at the leaked project schedule for Blizzard, Diablo is set to completely release over the course of 3-4 years. I'm sure they will take a page from WOW's book and offer up paid service for vanity pets, etc. As a gamer, I'm PO'd as much as you...but from a business aspect, they are just finding their price point.
The gaming industry is one of the few anomolies that haven't suffered as much during these bad economic times. Even though people have less income and are spending more on food and services they need.....people are STILL buying up games like nothing ever happend.
So if your the game company and you see that millions of people are buying your stuff without blinking an eye......as a publicly traded company, you have a responsibility to your shareholders to maximize your profits. Look up pricing point. The value of something (in this case, Blizz / Activision games) is determined by what the market pays for it. There is no magic man sitting behind a curtian setting prices for Big Macs in Moscow, and Call of Duty in South Korea. The company charges what they think the product is worth. If they over estimate, then they lose money because they've alienated the majority of their customers. If they charge too little, then they've lost money because your product is worth more on the market than you charged.