f13.net

The phenomena that is World of Warcraft (http://www.worldofwarcraft.com) has resulted in a very broad array of people looking at the game, and at the genre. One of the more interesting groups is the folks at PARC (http://www.parc.com/) who, for awhile now, have been gathering and reporting all sorts of interesting data at their PlayOn (http://blogs.parc.com/playon/) blog.

But even a less-played game like Everquest 2 (http://everquest2.station.sony.com) can provide some interesting insights into players and their preferences. eq2census (http://www.eq2census.com/) features search and filter functionality similar to the widely-referenced WarcraftRealms (http://www.warcraftrealms.com/census.php?PHPSESSID=1577ba51ccdd5ffd89db072435bfc692).

The data available provides some interesting insights into the similarities and differences between the two titles. There appears to be a similarity (http://www.darniaq.com/phpNews/news.php?action=fullnews&showcomments=1&id=200) in how players choose "Good" vs "Evil" Races and Classes, while a difference (http://www.darniaq.com/phpNews/news.php?action=fullnews&showcomments=1&id=199) is notable in the population across the Levels, particularly interesting at a time when servers (http://www.darniaq.com/phpNews/news.php?action=fullnews&showcomments=1&id=320) are merging.

I normally would just migrate all the HTML stuff over to here, but it's sorta image heavy, and covers two different topics anyway. Plus I wasn't sure who'd care for something I slapped together because Bat Country EQ2's guild is in limbo pending our server merge :)

Warcraft - 5 million
Warcraft 2/xpack - 3/? million
Warcraft 3/xpack - 3/1 million
World of Warcraft - 5.5 million
Diablo - 2.5 million
Diablo II/xpack - 4/? million
Starcraft/xpack - 6/3 million

I don't know how these numbers stack up with copies of a Battle Chest - which is how you buy pretty much every Blizzard game except for WoW now.

I uh, don't know what to say other than WoW isn't a phenomena in any sense of the word. The Sims was a phenomenon at 16 Million Copies Served in a completely untested genre.

While it's very nice that a lot of people are studying World of Warcraft, the number it has sold and the number of players playing it isn't shocking.For the MMORPG industry, WoW is an anomaly. For Blizzard it's standard fare with a much better opportunity for profit.

Edit: Also, I'm 99% sure that these numbers (from Wikipedia are for America only - except for WoW, maybe they can't get the American only numbers). The Wikipedia list shows AOEII selling more copies than Starcraft, which I know, for a fact is wrong. But anyway, every number there seems low, except WoW which is probably right on the money.

Edit Edit: Nevermind. This is from the same page, which backs up what I just guessed:

Not really the point I wanted to discuss, but I think it's an important one anyway.

WoW is a phenomena in the U.S with having more than double the number of active accounts of any other MMORPG at their heights. It doesn't matter if WoW is 1mil or 1.5mil in the U.S (iirc I think it's 1.5). It's still craploads more than any other game has come close to achieving here. SOE's entire library only hit around 850k, making them certainly a dominant player, but highlighting differences in understanding of the genre and its potential.

Further, it's continued growth throughout 2005 garnered a great deal of press in non-standard/veteran-targeted publications, enough so average people (as in, an aunt I haven't talked to in 10 years) know the name. It achieved household name status faster and more broadly than any other MMORPG outside of the Shawn Woolley incident for EQ.

It's not a phenomenon in relation to other genre. PC Games are topped, by a large margin, by The Sims. Even Myst (the previous top-seller befoe the Sims won out with all of its combined expansions) far exceeded WoW in the U.S. Console games are even higher sellers, with the GTA titles selling somewhere around 2.5 times the number of Sims titles sold. And the console industry is the dominant part of the 10.5bil video game industry.

But within MMORPGs, within the U.S. (and in Europe), WoW has done more than any other title.

And it's fun. And it's built on an established concept with a lot of tweaks. And it's polished with tradiitonal Blizzard reknown. And it has a crapload of players carping about the same shit that melted Lum's servers. Derivation, innovation, little invention, success inspite of preferences and wishes. And I'm playing EQ2 because I don't feel like raiding in WoW and have nothing left to do there until the expansion.

Moving on...

It's not a phenomenon compared to other PC games because it isn't other PC games. It's not a phenomenon compared to other MMORPGs because it isn't other MMORPGs. Anyone coming into the [MMORPG] market thinking - "Hey, I can compete with WoW" better have the words "Rockstar Games Presents..." before their title or Valve software on the box.

One of my roommates said something interesting the other day, that Blizzard games are a save point for whatever genre they invade. As in, Blizzard decides when to release their game and that's where the genre is saved. Like in a regular game. You can come back to that save point to play the pinnacle of that generation/type of game, and it's nostalgic and perfect and just how you remember it. But you can't just walk forward fro that save point. Paths diverge. Adapt. Change. But that save point is what Blizzard does. They are the mile markers before exits on a highway. Trying to compete with a Blizzard game is fruitless. They're the only ones who can make save points. In other words:

                                                    ,-------------o-------->
                                                   /
---------o------------o-----------o---------O<----Blizzard
                                                   \
                                                    `------------o-------->

Calling a Blizzard game a phenomena is missing the point entirely. Whenever I say this, I'm not trying to knock WoW. I'm trying to knock the pundits that clump WoW in with the rest of the genre.

I'm sorta confused, but I think we agree. Maybe phenomena is the wrong word. But then if I didn't use it, we wouldn't have "save point" either :)

The thing that we can't forget is that what WoW did for MMORPGs for the general public is not really comparable to the save points in RPGs and RTSes of the time. Sure, some of people talking about WoW the way they are is based on much more available public collaberation than has existed years past. But this is still about hundreds of thousands of people playing a new game alongside hundreds of thousands that have played analagous ones, collectively drawing even greater awareness to a genre that otherwise would not have gotten so much of it anytime soon.

The phemomenon, to me, is that awareness (and, on a minor side, how it proved so many people, including myself, wrong).

And yes, it raised the bar. Like EQ1 did, and UO before it. Other games have come since and created their own comfortable niche. The important thing for any new company to realize is the true scope of the undertaking. But you don't need 40mil (or 80mil) to make an MMORPG. You need "enough" to capture "enough" people to make "enough" profit to continue expanding a game. Given the realtime and persistent nature of this genre, and the rather linear/focused nature of the WoW experience, there's now as there always has been room for more developers and publishers to come along with new ideas.

Because of this, a point I keep making is that WoW has helped the genre (as any success would) simply by bringing more people in. Someone will eventually migrate from WoW through other titles to land in Second Life. WoW (as any success would be) is an ambassador (http://www.darniaq.com/phpNews/news.php?action=fullnews&showcomments=1&id=194) of sorts to these games. Not everyone who buys it will like it forever, and some of them will leave for the genre at large. Like we all did from earlier big successes (relative to the competition of the day).

Ok, I'll clear it up. It isn't a phenomenon because Blizzard consistantly goes this. But they don't consistantly bring people to a genre, not anywhere near the numbers they rack up at least. All they do is soundly thrash a genre whenever they enter the arena. I mean, I guess you could argue - though we won't know until Tabula Rasa comes out (or some other equally big MMOG - not DDO or Auto Assault) that WoW has brought people to the genre. But it's certainly not 5.5 Million people. It's probably more around 5-10% of that genre. But as long as Blizzard releases the Burning Crusade and starts work on the release of their next game (diablo 3, starcraft 2, whatever) fast enough, I would say the number that will retain in the general MMORPG market will hover between 5% and 15% of their total sales. In other words, the MMORPG market grows like it does every year and everything except WoW has been forcibly niched.

Hehe, and not to derail a derail, but I can't see Tabula Rasa having anywhere near the "instant get" easy messaging that helped WoW. Garriot's known to be sure, and NC Soft is not me using my checkbook, but the game itself is not something I've linked with "big" yet. And I say that as a fan of both forms of it. I could be way misinformed or just not seeing it the right way, but I'm going to be particularly interested in seeing what they show, if anything, this E3. Thus far, it's relied mostly on its unique gameplay components, chunks of which were redesigned from the ground up last year anyway.

The next "big" MMO has to, like WoW, come with much more than just a cool game idea. It needs a huge marketing push (like a budget equal to what most spend to develop and publish), the sort of name that makes that messaging easy, ideally a many-market near-concurrent launch, or one that builds upon itself, and even more ideally, an existing fanbase. Movie tie-ins maybe. Co-branding maybe. Licensing, I wish not, but it works. But a game sold only on its innovative gameplay components? Not sure it could be that big.

What could be big? Not sure really. So many titles now, there'll probably remain a few big front runners with a huge number of niche titles. And again, that's not a bad thing if those niche companies scaled their business appropriately. It's easier for Vivendi to get listing at GameSpot, but Andrew Tepper can still pay his bills.

What's needed? Consoles.

The PC realm is owned by Blizzard for the next 3-5 years minimum.

Man I hope not. I am too old to get used to those controllers  :-P I have a 360 at the office though. Keep thinking of trying some gaming on it with my wireless keyboard mouse.

Blizzard's a dominant player to be sure, but there's still more people playing games on a PC that aren't Blizzard than those that are. In the near term, I see a movement more to aggregation rather than single-title or platform-exclusivity though. Pogo, Miniclip, license-based sites, stuff for cellphones and mobile platforms, that sorta thing. The amount of online gamers in the U.S. is actually pretty huge, many orders of magnitudes larger than WoW. They're just not playing MMOGs, for fairly common-sense reasons (dedicated time and theme alienation mostly I'd think).

Doubt it. Gamers are fickle, even frothing Blizzard fanbois. Between Warcraft II and III they played all sorts of crap, the bulk of them didn't sit on B.Net playing old games. A lot of folks did, but not the bulk of the WCII players. Blizzard have brought a bunch more people into MMORPG gaming, and those folks are going to try other MMORPGs if they enjoyed WoW- there's already evidence that some established titles are getting a second wind from bored WoW players. Just as most Warcraft players didn't aspire to get to the top of the B.Net ladders, so most WoW players won't aspire to raid every night through all Tigoles content. For these people, the game ends earlier. They'll return for expansions and new release, but between times, they're easy pickings.

However, the thing that's going to have to change post-WoW to capture some of the new MMORPG gamers are the graphics. It doesn't matter that the models in about every other game are technically better than in WoW. The WoW graphics are bright, vibrant, attractive and work on crappy computers. More MMORPGS need to simultaneously reduce the polygon count and tart up the palettes if they want to make a good first impression. Because shiny first impressions count when you're trying to attract fickle gamers.

You need to fix the links on your site. This one (http://www.darniaq.com/phpNews/news.php?action=fullnews&amp;showcomments=1&amp;id=320), for example doesn't work. Neither does this one (http://www.darniaq.com/phpNews/news.php?action=fullnews&amp;showcomments=1&amp;id=199) (from this page (http://www.darniaq.com/phpNews/news.php?action=fullnews&showcomments=1&id=200)). In your EQ2 and WoW: Race and Class (http://www.darniaq.com/phpNews/news.php?action=fullnews&showcomments=1&id=200) article you don't really talk about WoW so the title seems a bit misleading (where's the evidence of similarity?).

My online life tends to circle around more sites and boards that serve my primary interests, film snobbery mostly.  And I have a lot of people I consider dear friends who think video games are for mouth-breathing palm-draggers.

They know about Leroy Jenkins, they've played WoW.  They would never admit it in public.

You know, I had some problems with that yesterday. Not sure how it went so fubar, so thanks! Fixin' processin'.

Righ,

I would say the graphics are going to be 40% or so.. honestly, one thing Blizzard nailed to the post with WOW was the interface.  No game has one has an interface nearly as neat as WOW's.  DDO looks like it was birthed from the mid 90's compared to WOW's...

An amazing thing about World of Warcraft's numbers is that every 3 months or so, each account generates a full box sale's worth of revenue.

So, 5 million active accounts in a year's time is worth roughly 25 million box sales of a conventional title.

Now, I wonder about the operating margins of this revenuecompared to the margins for releasing a  standard big budget hit game. With the gigantic economies of scale that Blizzard is leveraging, profits must be bananas.

Back to the original point:  I wish the game manufacturers would release more census type information. Unfortunately, it's pretty juicy proprietary marketing type data that any smart game company would hoard.

You mean Horde. The smart games companies play shamans.

I've disagreed with you on this before and I disagree with you now.  If you go read the EVE newb boards there is a sizable chunk of those posts that start off with, "I just came over from WoW and..."

It doesn't fucking matter what Blizzard has done before. FOR THE MEDIUM OF MMOG'S, WOW IS A PHENOMENON. Shit, even Korean MMOG's haven't sold this well when you look at overall numbers. It is an aberration, certainly and since it was Blizzard and yadda yadda yadda, there are reasons it happened above and beyond it being an MMOG. But for the medium of MMOG's, it is a phenomen, just like Diablo was and just like Warcraft 2 was. It's big and it needs to be paid attention to.

No, companies should not try to compete with it, and that's a good thing. Its numbers may be the one thing that make investors sit up and realize they don't have to be the biggest thing on the block to make profits with MMOG's.

For clarification, this is the definition of phenomenon I'm using:


No one thought it would reach 5 million subscribers, not even Blizzard itself. Hell, I thought it'd settle at 300k. I was wrong. That it would succeed is not unusual or surprising. That it would succeed so much is.

Does it become a phenomenon at 7 million subscribers?  Should we wait a few weeks and see? 

I'm fully expecting Earth's first extraterrestrial encounter to occur in a local computer game store when someone walks up to the counter with 8 boxes of WoW, one in each hand.

Not for schild. It will never be a phenomenon to him, because he contends that this is just another wildly popular Blizzard game like the rest and even a moron would have known a Blizzard game would be this popular. It isn't an MMORPG, it's a Blizzard game. You people calling it an MMORPG or MMOG are pissing him off.

Everyone is ascribing the wrong meaning to "phenomenon." The word simply means an occurrence. Starting my car every morning is a phenomenon.

Just because I was curious the other day and wanted a chance to say "I told you so," I give you:

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=1577.msg40800#msg40800

It is always fun to look at everyone's predictions for WoW sub numbers.  I seriously thought the maximum would be 1-2 million, but I didn't count on the Asian countries jumping on it like they did.

Edit:  Haemish said 200k!  Lollerskates!  :-D

Edit-Edit:  Whoa, my estimate remembrance was way off. 1-2 million more likely.

I was wrong as well.  I was deluded into thinking that people would see through WoW as being yet another dikuclone with new shiny. 

Time for me to revive the pet rock!

I'll be damned, I thought I said 300k. Oh well. I also thought EQ2 would settle in at about 150k (I think) and I'm not sure I wasn't overestimating there.

Either way, I was WILDLY wrong about WoW's numbers, just as much as everyone else was.

I gave EQ2, Tabula Rasa, and Guild Wars WAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY TOO MUCH CREDIT.

Do you think Blizzard would have made the game if they couldn't at the very least sell as many copies as their past games? I'm just taking a piss in the wind here, I mean who would ever want to repeat history.

As Nebu said above, he thought a lot of people would just see it as a dikuclone. Well, it is a dikuclone and 5,000,000 people are retarded. Maybe I just don't want these people fucking up the genre with their lowest common denominator herdery. Yea, I just made up a word.

Blizzard was willing to do this game at lower box sales than earlier games because of subscription revenue stream.

They were coming from an environment where their online play was free. They were entering an industry where the big dogs were measured in thousands of subs.

WoW's results had to surprise them as much as us.

If you think big company investment and accounting is as simple as ($Box = $Box else NO) then it's probably a good thing you run a free internet msg board.

For most companies I'd say no. But for a company like Blizzard that has a much longer than normal production time and ridiculous costs (if that $80M number holds any water), yea, there has to be a cerain guarantee on how many they think they'll sell at the very least. Though they may have been conservative and said 2-3Million. I highly doubt they could have gotten all that money had they said 500,000 and actually thought that.

Income from WoW (a subscription based service) did not need to equal the sales of ANY of their previous games to be shown as a worthwhile investment of their income.

Your too fixated on the box numbers; over a 5 - 7 year time frame sales of 1/10 the number of boxes as sold for Diablo II would equal a greater net profit than Diablo II ever did.  I guarantee you that was taken into account when the greenlight was given for the game.

They compared investment strategies and saw a benefit in making WoW, some of that benefit was probably also counted even though it was intangible and in the frame of experience and methodologies and has no 'real' dollar value at all (though it was undoubtedly given one by an actuary.)

*Note the spell checker changed Diablo II to Doable II - a game I think I would much rather play...

From a finance perspective, there's such a huge benefit of securing future revenue streams from customer. It smooths out your business cycle, locks in a level of run rate revenue, and allows you to just milk an initial capital investment. Even better, it funds the hell out of future hits.

Try this exercise: If the average WoW purchaser subscribes for a total of 6 months, you could conceivably view each box sale as this:

Box Revenue:  $50
Deferred Subscription rev:  (6x$15) = $90
Total Rev per box:  $140

Not a bad business to get into, eh?

Blizzard probably worked the numbers for a two year plan: X dollars from launch, Y dollars from fees, Z profit from a cumulative total of both, knowing when their expansion was going to hit.  Nobody in this genre calculates on a month-by-month basis. They need to have a solid estimate well before launch. This is why I laugh whenever I hear "they love gamers and only release stuff when it's ready". Nope. Not when box distribution is required. You don't just turn on distribution to thousands of retail locations overnight.

For the game jumping I've been since November, this actually has appeared with some degree of frequency in all of them. There's too many MMORPGs (and for some, just too many games) for everyone to stick exclusively to one. The average length of an account in months has been reducing for years. No idea where it is now, but if it's above 5 months across the genre, I'd be surprised.

That's relevant for initial launch. 14 months later they still have a metric fuckton of players far beyond even the most aggressive predictions of 2004 and prior. You can grab a ton of people with creative advertising. You can't keep them interested in a game in that quantity for that amount of time without something solid to experience.

(and like so many admitting they miscalculated: in January 2005 I had a bet with someone that WoW wouldn't be 1mil by Christmas 2005, for reasons of content consumption and boredom. Then they announced plans for launch in China. Then they hit 1mil in just the U.S. alone. And shit, at E3 2003 I wrote the game off as derivative schlock with limited and unsustainable interest).

Somewhere in here used to be a discussion about census data. Guess it wasn't as interesting...

It only takes about a month or so after a game has "gone gold" for it to appear on retail shelfs. This applies even to A+++ titles like Half-Life 2 (gold October 18, 2004, released November 15, 2004). MMOs are a bit different in that you can make the retail discs before the game has actually "gone gold" since everybody playing has to have an Internet connection so you can keep making changes all the way up (and through) release day. That being said, Blizzard clearly had pressure applied to them to release the game before Christmas given the dire financial performance of VUGames at that time. E.g. Hunters were added near the very end of the beta testing as were the talent trees for a number of classes.

Darniaq, I read a lot of that census data a couple days ago.

My big problem with census data in MMORPGs is that it often:

A) Is profound bullshit.
B) COMPLETELY speculative bullshit.
C) Complete misinformation.
D) Not based in a land we like to call reality. If you're asking players directly, they'll often lie about sex, age, etc. If you're looking at character sex male and female means NOTHING. More males probably play females than females do. Male and female shouldn't even be considered seperate races in MMOGs anymore. It should just be boobies or no boobies. Also, no MMOG is going to release that much information on a game. Well, maybe some niche ones would, but that'd be more important to their business (we have 5,000 females out of 7,000 players!) rather than actually interesting or representative of the genre. Also, discussing census data is more often than not a circlejerk guessing game. I leave it up to the blowhards over at Terranova and Nick Yee's House O' Random Graphs to do that. :)

Edit: Exhibit A:


(http://blogs.parc.com/playon/archives/graphs11/image007.png)

Shocking. A world full of dorks, males are better connected, except for priests because dorks think priests are a pussy class. Do I a degree to do this shit?

I'm not knocking you Darniaq, on the surface it's interesting, but really, Blizzard would need to give away a LOT of information they're just not willing to give.

You may not need a degree to do something, but you can get a degree in just about anything. The study of MMORPGs is fairly mundane and sane. Some American woman who went to Glasgow University bequeathed an endowment on the University on the condition that it created a course in parapsychology.

I personally think they planned to hit Christmas time all along, at least as early as March 2004. The speed to go from Gold to Shelf is not that important. The infrastructured needed to move a half-million boxes from a replicator house to those thousands of places it needs is where the complexity is. It's not like Blizzard had a bunch of tractor trailers idling in the parking lot waiting to go. Whichever company they worked with had to schedule replication and distribution into their overall workflow many many months in advance, after working out planogramming and shelf stocking with so many different retailers (and stocking in late November requires a lot of pull, since most Christmas stock really wants to begin appearing on shelf around September/October). There's only so much "just in time" that is possible in distributed-hard goods.

If we were all forced to talk in pure fact, there'd be no forums. Of course it's speculative bullshit. But it's fun speculative bullshit. And you know as we all do how much decisions made in this genre are made more on faith and educated guesswork than unassailable fact. There's some real qualitative research that drives quantitative research, but it's still much more "art" than "science".

I only mentioned the PARC stuff so I could draw reference to looking at EQ2 and make my own bullshit speculations :)

well, I will sit at the big-boy table for just a moment.. long enough to say that IMHO, any game that is so combat-focused as WoW will never have the long term appeal as a game with several strong elements. This is why people get bored of WoW and go do something else for a while. Its combat=its boring. 4 different game devoted to content might keep one hard-core gamer happy, but not one. After powering through the game (aka "beating it"), they move on till another expansion or the other games they play release an expansion. But sicne they like to sell boxes, this doesnt seem to be a problem to them. I dotn understand it, myself. It seems to me that they would want players to pay that monthly fee for a looooong time. Especially now with digital downloads becoming more prevalent. WHy bother a big retail box push when you just use some bandwidth and let the player burn their own cd?

But why is leaving a game a bad thing? If they worked their business model around a certain duration of retention, then it's all good.

Further, the games with the longest-term appeal have also been traditionally those with narrower appeal. Part of this is based on the quality of execution of course. Another part is the inability for any one company to actually hit that panacea of deep crafting, awesome combat, repeat-play acquisition-based encounters (raiding), dynamic zones, relevant PvP with holdings and loss, and resource collection system. Too many systems requiring too much work and too much time for any one company to give a shot at.

And that's only after a company thinks it's worth doing in the first place, which apparently the bottomless-wallet like Blizzard did not, probably because they thought it'd be too narrow of appeal.

Blizzard makes populist games. They work towards the lowest common denominator and thats what ultimately makes them so successful. Lots of ppl like that, some of us don't.

Agreed.  Has SOE posted their data yet?

Those boilerplate "About SOE" parts of press releases contain the total number of subscriptions across all of their titles (was about 850k). As of now, I believe the only title they post online players now is Planetside (though I can't recall MxO and never knew about ToonTown). They never did for SWG nor EQ2. And they haven't done so for EQ1 since DAoC beta, saying at the time, quite rightly, that there is no real benefit to posting numbers.

There really isn't. Most other games don't either. Basically, there's no benefit to the company for posting numbers to players. They'd rather players make decisions on their experiences rather than some arbitrary and uninformed impression of total player count. Player count does not communicate per-level density, and it's density that is more important than whether there's 1,000 or 10,000 other people you'll never see in zones you'll never get to.

The density is a combination of count and world design. AC2 for example always felt empty. I don't think having 500 or 5,000 people concurrently logged in per server would make much of a different either. The world is simply too large. It's also the reason I couldn't care less about the DnL world size. Unless they are confident they can fill key areas in the world, the larger it is, the more spread players are, the more likely they'll quit because they think the game is "dead".

The impression of deadness is more important than the fact of deadness. Not reporting players online removes the ability to draw a pre-game immediate impression, leaving the quality of the game design to stand on its own. At the very least it requires players make more informed impressions from direct experience. And I'm a firm believer that people should go out and exercise their curiosity themselves rather than wait for others to do so for them.

SOE stopped listing their total sub numbers in their press releases other than a vague mention of "hundreds of thousands" last year:

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=5634.msg138952

Thanks for the update. Been apparently a very long while since I read that :)

A game like WoW which is "easy" and more combat-centric is likely to lose more people, but also to attract more people.

Then you have games like FFXI. There are people that have been playing that game for years and years and show no signs of slowing. The most recent expansion was so damn long and hard that most people estimate that only 1/10 US owners have actually finished it!

Of course, a game like that loses plenty of people along the way as well as it becomes too frustrating. I'm not sure that the average retention rate of a game like FFXI or EQ is longer than WoW, although the high end of the scale is probably larger. By that I mean I don't think many people will still be playing WoW 5 years after release, while that isn't true for a FFXI or EQ. But average retention probably isn't that far off. And even if WoW is a bit behind in that area, their huge volume much more than makes up for it.

If I want a game that is purely about combat I'll just play Phantasy Star Online or the new one (Phantasy Star Universe). It has a more video-game feel and WoW feels pretty video-gamey to begin with.

I realize my point here is not widely shared - nonetheless * Steps on to wooden crate*

Because the graphical appeal of the game is based on style rather than the latest polygon count possible in a game - the visual appeal of WoW may last a longer than any other game.

The only thing that could mitigate against this is if other games adapt its style over polgon philosophy.  For now, it is not only differentiating, it is insenstive to technology cycles for the foresseeable future.

I think FFXI and Lineage / L2 are tastes for us in America of how the rest of the world has felt. It cost them virtually nothing to bother to sell them to us, but really, they could care less whether we buy or not. We're just those odd foreigners who can bring in some extra money for them. And if not, there's no real cost anyway.

There are translations costs.

FFXI had good reason to be localized. It was costly and seems to have been worth it. At least on the PC Side. Probably not on the PS2 side, but if one is translated it's probably just a conversion job. It was also a way to pimp the PS2 hard drive that HAPPENED to fail. Shocking, I know.

As for Lineage 2 - simply a bad call by NCSoft. But they seem to be on a run of bad calls lately. Webzen, save us, you're our only hope. Or sommat.

That would be a great point if not for the fact that FFXI has a higher polygone count and a better style.

And even if that weren't true, nobody is going to play WoW (or any other game) for 5 years because the graphics still look ok. Bad graphics might get you to stop playing but good graphics aren't going to keep you going for a half decade.

Maybe I wasn't clear. I meant the same people won't be playing WoW 5 years after release. That's what I meant by max retention.

I don't know about that. It's a big mix, and it also depends on how you're defining the "genre". I'm an ex-eq'er and so are my closest friends who play WoW, but I've also met a lot of people who are, as you say, the Blizzard fanbois, of living on Diablo 2 for years. Then there's a lot of others I've run into who'd never played one of these games, or may have played WC/SC/Diablo but didn't live them. There's a lot of people who are playing WoW who never would have touched the genre before, simply because WoW is so accessable compared to others in the genre. Well, at least the 1-60 part of the game. At 60 it's just Everquest 1 on easy mode but with fewer interesting raids and even worse faction grinding..

I logged onto EQ1 for a few minutes about 6-8 weeks ago, for the first time in months. the familiar hotkey interface of:

1 2
3 4
5 6
7 8
9 10

had been replaced, by - you guessed it - 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 along the bottom of the screen. There were more changes, but I didn't stay online long enough to really check them out or remember them now. By the same token, I can say that as someone who'd played EQ for 5 years, it'd royally suck to have to completely remap and relearn your controls simply because the devs decided to try to mirror WoW's interface all of a sudden one day 5 years into the game..

It's not the first overhaul of the Interface EQ has done, though. EQ players are on the 4th interface design at this point. (Original, Velious, Luclin, and now the one you mention.)

Plus, with as many skins as people were running when last I played, what the devs make the default interface look like is a minor technicality anyway.

True, but the previous upgrades to the interface kept the sme feel as the original as they went along, despite adding more functionality and user-customisation. With this one they've changed the default "look" of EQ from what it had been for 5 years in order to make it more WoW-like. I never liked screwing with the custom UIs anyway, they were a headache to me, and always seemed to break with each patch. It was more stable and familiar to just resize/shape the default one to my liking..

I heavily endorse this product and/or service. It also can't be discounted the sound and music work they did on the game. Topshelf stuff there. Very self-consistent with the graphics.

People spend a lot of time on these games, and they don't want to be depressed about it. There may be some universal rule about graphics and ambience and breadth of appeal or something, but I don't know it. I feel though that more peope want stylized pretty graphics than grungy unhappy ones.

Now, people do like differences. Eastern Plaguelands and Stratholme are not carnival atmospheres. But it's a place people visit, a highlight of the talent in world design. Some people are affected by too much time there. Others couldn't care any less. But ask a thousand people where they'd build a house or spend their day crafting, and I'd bet very few would say EP, and even fewer would actually live and craft there permanently.

Conversely, EQ2 is generally not a world of universal appeal. It has some highlights that I've seen, but in general, as we've all discussed, it's a gray only-semi-stylized world trying too hard to be realistic. The real world doesn't have floating wisps and light tinkling bells in the middle of a forest. This is fantasy! Act like it!.

I very much agree.

As an aside, I love Gothic, which some might find depressing - but EQ2 is a bit depressing visually and it is not remotely Gothic to me.

In WoW - I love the atmosphere of Trisfall glades and the undead zone.  Great execution, and if you don't like it as a player - you can always be an Elf :)

Music is certainly important - but I guess it will be awhile before we have smell  :wink:

Most of the games I play already stink.

As has been said, yes. I'm pretty sure the investment meeting went something along these lines.



I mean, shit, if you had millions playing Diablo II on Battle.net for free, and you got 25% of that to pay a subscription, you'd still have been as successful if not more than EQ1. And that's with not selling as many boxes. Recurring revenue is a beautiful thing, especially when you have the following these guys do.