World of Warcraft shut down in China

[Venkman]

Blizzard mmorpg is a culture of derivative mediocrity, as such the only thing they have going for them is stability and 5 years of content accumulation.

Lack of innovation is what will ultimately kill WoW, lack of polish from competition is what keep WoW running for now.

Dude, I keep getting the sense you're stuck in 2006. People want sustainability, and the longer they have it, the harder it is to leave. WoW is the EQ1 for a new generation of MMOers whose first MMO is WoW. In a world without WoW, the only game that would have killed EQ1 finally would have been EQ2.

Plus, WoW today is a whole hell of a lot different from WoW at launch. As any aging MMO should be.

[sinij]

In a world without WoW, the only game that would have killed EQ1 finally would have been EQ2.

In a world without Insert_Future_Title_Here, the only game that will kill WoW finally would have been WoW2.

Even during EQ times there was healthy competition - UO, DaOC, AC. They weren't as large and they mostly didn't try to cone EQ.

Historically speaking EQ had more competition/alternatives than WoW, and large reason for that was that while developers tried cloning EQ it wasn't as much of a gospel as it is right now.

As I keep saying, everyone trying to dethrone WoW without WoW's budget (and trying to hedge their risks by RMT and other crap that detracts from their chances to succeed) when they should be developing niche games.

[DLRiley]

Develope niche games with 50k sub goals?

[Count Nerfedalot]

Blizzard mmorpg is a culture of derivative mediocrity, as such the only thing they have going for them is stability and 5 years of content accumulation.

Lack of innovation is what will ultimately kill WoW, lack of polish from competition is what keep WoW running for now.

Blizzard has proven its ability to take a bunch of good ideas from everywhere else and package them together into a polished and relatively bug-free experience.  Disparaging that as "derivative mediocrity" would be a lot more accurate if there were a few more polished and relatively bug-free experiences out there for it to be mediocre among.  As it is now, delivering polished content with a complete working game still seems pretty innovative compared to everyone else.  Now, when WoW2015 comes out, and it's just the same as WoW2013 and WoW2014 except they've reskinned the models, THEN we'll be talking some serious derivative mediocrity!    Unless DIKU = mediocrity, in which case the problem is with the style of game, not the developers of them.

[Venkman]

Yep. Which is why I said as much in the other thread (or was it this one? Can't remember. These topics seem to crop up in different threads concurrently ).

EQ1 was against AC and UO for all intents and purposes. That is the last time the genre was small enough to have three distinct options for the same group of players. They were all "MMO", but they were flavors. And through the subsequent diku clones, and the subsequent attempts to go afield, it was largely the same group of people going from EQ1 to DAoC, AO, Neocron, CoX, etc. Some would stay, most would return. Basically, boomerang players.

Nowadays, the games that are truly different also have different business models and different demographics attached. It's not like Club Penguin is any more an alternative to Eve than Habbo is to WoW. The net has been cast much wider, making "MMO" an umbrella term that covers a bunch of sub-markets. We've known this for years, there just haven't been universally accept sub-market labels yet beyond things like "browser-MMOs", "virtual worlds", "freemium" and so on,

But there are still boomerangs. That's the around-1mil people willing to chance a new MMO like we saw with WAR, AoC and Aion. They don't stick around though, for the same reasons they (even if they're different people) went to the EQ1 descendants in droves but then slowly got pulled back.

All this is to say that even WoW2 wouldn't kill WoW1, because by the time that happens, we'll have all gotten too old to be the significant market of new title chasers. And the tweens nowadays aren't going to suffer big ass diku raids

My guess is that SWTOR will be the self-identified swan song of our type of veteran MMO gamer, when further out people will look back and say it was actually WoW.

Just a guess though.

[Ashamanchill]

This has probably been said, but alot of WoW's current success is it's own popularity and mainstream success. I mean, saying you play WoW to friends or aqquaintances now is like saying you play XBox (or the Sims), it doesn't have any real social stigma at all, unless you want to be 'that guy' at a party and rant on about specific details like gear mechanics and what not. If you bring up playing WAR, or AoC, they'll write you off as a loser because they've never heard of it, nor ever will hear of it.

Every internet spoof video, satire, Onion News bit, or mainstream mention of WoW is money in Blizzard's pocket.

[HaemishM]

When did Geldon steal sinji's body?

[angry.bob]

This has probably been said, but alot of WoW's current success is it's own popularity and mainstream success. I mean, saying you play WoW to friends or aqquaintances now is like saying you play XBox (or the Sims), it doesn't have any real social stigma at all, unless you want to be 'that guy' at a party and rant on about specific details like gear mechanics and what not.

Pretty much this. My neighbor of 5 years came over to ask me for help with a PC problem. He had a WoW icon on his desktop, had never mentioned it. The guy who bought the place across the street? Plays WoW. I told them both we should have spent the summer drinking and playing WoW in my den instead of doing yardwork.

[Draegan]

All this is to say that even WoW2 wouldn't kill WoW1, because by the time that happens, we'll have all gotten too old to be the significant market of new title chasers. And the tweens nowadays aren't going to suffer big ass diku raids

I still say you're wrong with this.  There isn't going to be any major generational shift in the next 4 years of gaming where it shuts out WOW and creates a significant new market. 

Tweens these days are playing Warcraft just as much as teenagers, and people in their 20s 30s and 40s. Just ask my girlfriend who happens to teach 8th grade.

I have no idea how you think the market is going to change so significantly in 5 years.  Shiny loot and dinggrats has survived years and years of reiteration.  It's not going away.  Just look at FPS games getting more and more RPGish with talent poitns etc.

[Mrbloodworth]

Blizzard mmorpg is a culture of derivative mediocrity, as such the only thing they have going for them is stability and 5 years of content accumulation.

Lack of innovation is what will ultimately kill WoW, lack of polish from competition is what keep WoW running for now.

lolz!

[Venkman]

All this is to say that even WoW2 wouldn't kill WoW1, because by the time that happens, we'll have all gotten too old to be the significant market of new title chasers. And the tweens nowadays aren't going to suffer big ass diku raids

I still say you're wrong with this.  There isn't going to be any major generational shift in the next 4 years of gaming where it shuts out WOW and creates a significant new market. 

Tweens these days are playing Warcraft just as much as teenagers, and people in their 20s 30s and 40s. Just ask my girlfriend who happens to teach 8th grade.

I have no idea how you think the market is going to change so significantly in 5 years.  Shiny loot and dinggrats has survived years and years of reiteration.  It's not going away.  Just look at FPS games getting more and more RPGish with talent poitns etc.

I didn't want to get all wordy about it, but effectively, your final sentence is where I'm headed with this.

There are MMO conventions that every demographic has adopted already. From the dinggratz/rares of Treasure Madness on Facebook to XP/unlocks in the CoDs, we're moving away from there being an MMO "genre" and into a realm of MMO treatments applied to other games because the concepts make sense. WoW itself is transgenerational, but except for some Eastern titles specifically for the Eastern audiences, I can't think of any MMO for us that's also for the kids. Unless there's a strong contingent of adults in Runescape that aren't posting here? I honestly don't know.

No, the MMO market isn't going to dry up. But the MMO market is going to be harder to define as a specific entity unto itself. This is an age of FPS games getting RPG mechanics and MMOs becoming more single-player RPGs.

[WindupAtheist]

Dude, I keep getting the sense you're stuck in 2006.

To be fair, that's a huge step forward for him. 

[Sjofn]

People have been saying that for years.  Still hasn't happened.

If they say it enough times, it will come true! Just you watch!

[Draegan]

No, the MMO market isn't going to dry up. But the MMO market is going to be harder to define as a specific entity unto itself. This is an age of FPS games getting RPG mechanics and MMOs becoming more single-player RPGs.

I agree.  I see the market trending towards more and more online content vs. single player content (I.e. Dragon Age).

[sinij]

When did Geldon steal sinji's body?

Sorry my bad.

WOW IS CIRCLING THE DRAIN!!

[sinij]

I see the market trending towards more and more online content vs. single player content (I.e. Dragon Age).

What I am curious about is what made this generation of gamers prone to play mmorpgs and if/what going to change with time. We grew up on PC titles, A LOT of them being adventure/RPGs. Younger generation grew up on consoles. Even younger generation growing up on Tweeter, Wii and texting.

Are mmorpgs going to be a casualty to generations redefining what computer gaming is?

[Venkman]

Yea, that's what I'm wondering as well. I was just talking with someone today about this too in fact, in the context of MW2. The PC port of that game was gimped to be on par with the console game, to a state that in my opinion, makes it not a worthy followup to the fantastic COD4, which was a very good PC game.

At the same time, if no PC users buy it at all, it isn't going to matter a whit to the business success of the franchise. Therefore, you've got a business decision that has fundamentally impacted the game play because the one platform in which those gameplay elements matter isn't worth the budget. I could even see COD7 not even be on the PC.

I then look at RTS games, and how they keep trying different versions on consoles with mixed success, while there's fewer and fewer tries at the PC at all. And then there's the big budget RPGs which don't even need to be PC except us PC users are probably a core demographic for that old school fun.

So to me, it isn't so much that MMOs will become a casuality of redefined computer games. That's already happening with the browser-based (and browser-launched thin-client) ones. I think that MMOs could eventually be completely redesigned for consoles, and therefore not even worth doing on PCs.

But this is years, years, down the road. Mostly because while it's hard to build a working MMO for the wide variety of PCs out there, it's easier than finding the right business model and partner in the monopolized console space.

[Sheepherder]

I'd suspect by that point that major engine/SDK publishers will be trying to standardize porting UI and controls in a manner that plays to each system's individual strengths.

[Mrbloodworth]

With the availability of broadband, and accounts being the best DRM system, and multiplayer becoming more and more of a standard. I think we may soon see very little in the way of single player games anymore, and perhaps the terms offline/online will simply be rolled into "game".

Gaming is becoming less and less of a solitary pastime.

[DLRiley]

With the availability of broadband, and accounts being the best DRM system, and multiplayer becoming more and more of a standard. I think we may soon see very little in the way of single player games anymore, and perhaps the terms offline/online will simply be rolled into "game".

Gaming is becoming less and less of a solitary pastime.

yes and no. I see co-op becoming the console standard as far as multi-player concerned. I don't think many developers will go to design robust multiplayer system first, single player game second or not at all. But as we all know today's consumers are asking for mmo's to have basically robust and sustainable single player experience. So the idea of single player games disappearing is a meh. I see the term massive multiplayer being watered down to accept games that are basically co-op games by our standards.

[Mrbloodworth]

With the availability of broadband, and accounts being the best DRM system, and multiplayer becoming more and more of a standard. I think we may soon see very little in the way of single player games anymore, and perhaps the terms offline/online will simply be rolled into "game".

Gaming is becoming less and less of a solitary pastime.

yes and no. I see co-op becoming the console standard as far as multi-player concerned. I don't think many developers will go to design robust multiplayer system first, single player game second or not at all. But as we all know today's consumers are asking for mmo's to have basically robust and sustainable single player experience. So the idea of single player games disappearing is a meh. I see the term massive multiplayer being watered down to accept games that are basically co-op games by our standards.

Its the other way around. There are already many many games being made where multi is primary, and single player is a tack on.

[Rendakor]

I think it's largely genre-specific. FPS, Fighting, and RTS games, for example, are very heavily multiplayer; the single player experience for some consists of little more than a tutorial before you go online to play the "real" game. However, there are still plenty of single player genres out there that would not be served well by focusing more on multiplayer. How would God of War play as a multiplayer game? 

[Venkman]

In the same way that online accounts are the future for PC titles, they will be even more so for consoles (they already are for the core gamers, but it's no 100% tie ratio between owners and online accounts yet). Because, it is the best DRM right now, in an age where there's a huge overlap between core gamers and broadband.

I don't think this means that co-op will become the default for console games though. Split/shared-screen multiplayer is appropriate for only a few type of games. And as far as I've been able to tell, less people play games this way than they do online.

Unless it's the Wii. But they're behind the curve on a few important fronts with regards to core gamers anyway, having instead created something of a new market.

[Draegan]

I think you'll see eventually that all consoles and PC version will look and operate the same and all the lines will be blurred.  Xbox players will play against PC players etc etc.

I don't think the types of games will vary much in the future as the evolve.  You will still have RTSs, RPGs, MMOGs, Fighters, and FPSs.

[DLRiley]

Split screen? No.. especially with duel monitors getting cheaper. But play with your buddies over xbox live style? Most defiantly.

[Draegan]

Split screen what?  I think you'll be playing Warcraft from your couch with a wireless keyboard/mouse on your Xbox with your buddy on his PC.  That's what I meant.

[Venkman]

Split screen what?  I think you'll be playing Warcraft from your couch with a wireless keyboard/mouse on your Xbox with your buddy on his PC.  That's what I meant.

I'd like to believe a wireless k+m/console future. But we've had the tech now for two generations and it hasn't happened yet. Kids are getting used to controllers. I want them to get used to k+m!!

[Mrbloodworth]

Split screen what?  I think you'll be playing Warcraft from your couch with a wireless keyboard/mouse on your Xbox with your buddy on his PC.  That's what I meant.

I'd like to believe a wireless k+m/console future. But we've had the tech now for two generations and it hasn't happened yet. Kids are getting used to controllers. I want them to get used to k+m!!

I use a KB and mouse with my ps3.

[Venkman]

For an FPS?

[Mrbloodworth]

Its not the hardware that's the issue, the ps3 can recognize just about any USB/Bluetooth device.. Its the game software that is the issue. The game has to support it. There are only a handful of titles I know of that do, such as UT (and by proxy and Resistance?). I would assume, MMO's will become more common with the support, and there are already devices that are adons to the controller that expand it for keyboard, so I would also assume it would accept USB keyboard input.

However, a middle ground is this device: SplitFish Gameware

And of course a K+M can be used for most console things like the browser and text entry stuff.


EDIT: I also just found this little device. that makes the software support issue moot.