Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Will any MMO ever be as successful as WOW?
velmax
Member UncommonPosts: 224
We all know the most successful MMO was WOW, with 12 million players at it's peak , its nearly impossible for another MMO to reach this number, in my opinion. Were starting to see a pattern here withe every new MMO, tons of players at launch, then it lowers down again untill it goes F2P. Another reason i see it impossible, is because of the number of MMO's out their, their's over 1,000 mmos and the number is growing, so if 1 mmo steals all thoses subs or goes over 5,000,000+ its highly rare. Indie games are going crazy in the market, look at Minecraft and Dayz, Indie games are getting more attention adding a new group of players. My last reason, is the decreaseing of subbed based games, years ago in the good days, all you saw was subbed based games, so it was either sub or not play at all, when now adays we see a vary of different types of paying options. Overall, i would like to know your opinons on this topic.
Comments
True!
No. WoW was the first MMO developed by a big name company with a huge following, the first MMO to have a massive marketing budget and a year long advertisement campaign that spanned almost every site on the internet, and it was the first MMO aimed exclusively at the casual audience.
Being the first gets you far. There will never be another first for any of those. Right now momentum is singlehandedly carrying WoW, because it is such a mainstream name. Other themeparks fail because they can't attract enough people to make up for all the people leaving after burning through content. WoW is a big enough name that it'll always have new people joining. What's more, it was the first MMO for a lot of casual gamers, and when in doubt you always return to your first MMO.
WoW was a very VERY lucky game. The circumstances that led to its success cannot be repeated any time soon. Most of us realized that 8 years ago, but publishers are only started to accept that now, after 8 years of failed themeparks and WoW clones. The gameplay was never the thing in WoW that made it successful.
I doubt it, if it does happen it will be many decades away.
Ever is a long time. I'm sure someone will come out with some kind of social media super MMO that'll probably have hundreds of millions of users, and no one will ever go outside ever again, then we'll all start living our lives in this MMO, we'll forget about the real world, robots will take over, or something to that effect.
But seriously, I think Titan will be the next MMO to be as successful as WoW.
I think you nailed it pretty much. At least in regards to classic MMO games.
Too much competition and a seeming decline of interest in subscription based games all mean a WoW type phenomenon is out of the question.
Doesn't mean someone won't come up with something completely new.
http://lyrics.iztok.org/verse/Lynyrd_Skynyrd/Simple_Man/80615
It's pretty silly to think so. Blizzard have shown they have no idea how to design an MMORPG. They just got lucky the first time by copying EverQuest, and then screwed it up again and again over the years. If it wasn't for their momentum and brand name, they wouldn't have gone anywhere.
I think we will never see an MMO as big as WOW, not even TITAN! obviously imo. By the time were in 2020 they're will be double the amount of mmo's, making the players in the market spread around every mmo, plus most people are leaving MMORPG'S and going to indie, moba type games.
+1
WoW was a polished product launched at the right time to pick up the millions, there is nothing about WoW that is so far ahead of the competition, it relies on inertia and familiarity.
Yes. Of course there will be mmos that will match and surpass WoWs financial success. It would be naive to presume we have already seen the pinnacle of the mmorpg genre. There will be a time and a place for another mmo to come along and dwarf even wows success.
I think it is more than luck when a game goes not being able to get a million subscribers for 2 years to having 10+ million subscribers a few years later.
Yet WoW hit 1m subs in about 6months.
I don't think you understand how the genre works..
You know what I find very telling... ATM I can't afford a new comp and my current rig is 5 years old, meaning I will have alot of touble playing most modern mmos. Yet I can run WOW flawlessly with all settings as high as the game would allow me (alot of graphical options are greyed out however).
For this reason I keep going back to WOW, LOTRO was my primary MMO but they beefed up the system requirements with isengard, meaning I can't zone into those areas without crashing.
There's probably a TON of people like me who can't afford rigs for modern mmos, for us it's either spend 600$ or so bucks on a modern comp, or spend 15$ with the best casual mmo on the market.
Frankly unless some revoluionary new game comes along, I'll choose the later.
But WOW pretty much had EVERTHING going for it, an untapped market, a loyal fanbase, a brilliant marketing team, a proven IP, legendary developers, and a VERY friendly game engine.
It will be a long time before such stars align again.
+1
Mathematically no,simply put WOW/Blizzard was extremely lucky and to be frank that is how the real world works.Tons of people in this world strike it rich on luck,they never in their wildest dreams imagined becoming rich.Look at Facebook or Google tons of other ideas that got rich from ,iterally nothing.
What happened during the Wow era was DSL/Cable,before that it was 56k and not many young kids had it.Sure it was kind of mainstream a couple years before WOW but it was not yet fully implemented everywhere and people were still warming up to the added cost.By time Wow was released EVERYONE was using DSL and were looking for things to do with it.It is no different than when all these new cell phones come out,people have to have the NEW/IN thing and start buying all kinds of apps and crap to use on it.
When Cable first came out,people were outraged at an extra 50 bucks on top of their already cable bill for television.Now people spend 2/3/4x that on cell phone packages.
I guess the truth is you can never say never,if some smart developer comes out with an incredible gimmick,everyone will flock to it ,just to try it out.The difference however is yo uwill never again have the "FIRST TIME" gamers,not 10+ million of them all looking at 1/2 or maybe 3 games to play.Now there are tons of choices for gaming.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
No.
No mmoprg will be such behemoth dwarfing everything else in western market.
The entire idea of the MMORPG will die off when WoW dies off. I don't like the game, but it's the last there will ever be.
That said, this forum is supposed to be about non-MMO games.
Uh what? MMOs existed long before WoW. In fact, the best MMOs to date all were made before WoW. Once WoW dies off we may finally have good MMOs again. The answer to this question, for those who missed it :
"No. WoW was the first MMO developed by a big name company with a huge following, the first MMO to have a massive marketing budget and a year long advertisement campaign that spanned almost every site on the internet, and it was the first MMO aimed exclusively at the casual audience.
Being the first gets you far. There will never be another first for any of those. Right now momentum is singlehandedly carrying WoW, because it is such a mainstream name. Other themeparks fail because they can't attract enough people to make up for all the people leaving after burning through content. WoW is a big enough name that it'll always have new people joining. What's more, it was the first MMO for a lot of casual gamers, and when in doubt you always return to your first MMO.
WoW was a very VERY lucky game. The circumstances that led to its success cannot be repeated any time soon. Most of us realized that 8 years ago, but publishers are only started to accept that now, after 8 years of failed themeparks and WoW clones. The gameplay was never the thing in WoW that made it successful."
First WoW was not the first of anything, it perfected things much like microsoft did with its OS.
Second. Yes, there will be a more successful mmo. It will feature full terraforming like minecraft with better graphics
City building like shadowbane, with minecraft/lego style blocks allowing custom city designs
UO style house placement and customization
Sandbox elements in every aspect of gameplay
completely player driven economy
complete crafting customization system with player developed content
FFA full loot
Full seige system with Full diplomacy system
Safe zones
player cities can have custom rules
meta game crafting system that is a game in and of itself
people want to customize their own content, allow them to do so. Players making quests for other players sort of like geocaching in real life
its crafting systems and diplomacy systems will transition seemlessly to a meta game that you can still keep up with and continue playing on your phone or tablets, prolly the auction house type system too.
on and on.
There are so many unexplored ideas i could talk about this forever tbh, wish someone would hire me...
Do not go into the light
Well people tend to have no clue of time so saying nothing will surpass Wow is rather silly.
Evidently many here seem to be able to know the future. Humans could very well be playing video games for 100's of years and seeing how everyone will have portable gaming devices more powerful than gaming pc's now in 10 years or less I'd say online games will do nothing but grow.
There will be an uber mmo of some sorts replacing Wow. Wow will age too much for Bliz to bother to update at some point and true virtual games will appear with entirely different user interfaces than what we use today. We will like see games fully integrated with the mobile tools we require at some point that it won't be 10 million signed on but a hundred million and more. Not saying this will be soon but it will happen. In fact I can see your online choice being so highly fought over that eventually yet another monopoly will form sucking most people into it offering both light/casual or hardcore/fulltime interaction.
God help everyone around us then as nobody will be able to interact with anyone in the real world without distractions. There will need to be laws put in place disabling such things automatically for things like driving.
You stay sassy!
Basically this. Some crazy shit that we havent even thought up yet is going to be at the right place and time and make WoW look like chump change. It'll probably be after this genre is dead and gone. After all, you cant make a comeback if you never go away.
Think you're missing the point. People most people by "ever" mean mmorpg's in current shape and not some virtual reality games using diffrent technologies.
ALSO does not mean that there won't be a game that have more than 10 millions regular users. There already are and were games like that in China that never touched western ground. Dungeon Fighter Online in China had 3 million concurrent users, 3 million people playing at one given point in time. That mean that there were way more than 10 million people playing regurarly / month. Althrough it can be debatable whenever that is mmo or not. To put this into perspective Aion that had at it's peak over 4 million subs (wildly successful in Asia esp. Korea) had concurrent users peak around 0,5 mln.
What I mean by no is that no mmorpg will be able to dominate over whole market like that.
When you talk about some kind of "true virtual games" then you're talking about some new genre or even whole new kind of games that might come in future and not about mmorpg's or even mmo's anymore.
You're talkiing about future online games.
I believe the most successful MMO was called Maplestory, an asian one, don't know a whole lot about it, but reading stuff I've seen one quote of 39 million user accounts and 8 million global accounts, but there could be 2-3 versions of the game as they made localised versions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MapleStory
There's the wiki info about it, look under financial reception
― Terry Pratchett, Making Money
Blizzard brought a smooth, fun, easy, polished game at the perfect time when everquest was becoming extremely popular only for everquest 2 to fail horribly. No game will even come close to the success of WoW as it is the Mike Tyson of online gaming. Mmo's in general are dying as they are all becoming way too familiar and failure is about 10 times more likely then success.
Hopefully console RPG's bounce back cuz if GW2 is supposed to be our MMO savior go ahead and shoot me now.
You should make a new thread with all your criteria attached. The op asked a straightforward question and the answer is yes. Your addendum makes it a no, so we either need op clarification or a new thread entirely