MMO Report Tips World Of Warcraft As Leader

Thanks to VE3D for reprinting details of a new online gaming report discussing MMO trends and estimated game popularity. According to the excerpts from the Themis Group's report, online gaming will grow from $960 million revenues in 2003 to $4.10 billion in 2008, and the chart estimating "expected popularity of new persistent worlds... in descending order by projected subscriber base twelve months after launch" is headed by Blizzard's World of Warcraft, followed by Sony's EverQuest 2 and Turbine's Middle Earth Online. The report also suggests: "Success with a license challenges developers to find a way to implement the license's core appeal into an MMG-style game - a challenge which Final Fantasy Online met, but Star Wars Galaxies did not."

Comments

Virtual Property &Real World

[leoaugust]

FAST FORWARD TO 2014: ..... Virtual property will emerge as a major driver for gamers and game companies.

Reminds me of a discussion recently held at /. Will Virtual Economies Affect Real-World Economics? Maybe the author of the article discussed there, Edward Castronova, could use some numbers from the report mentioned in the current discussion to give more concrete shape to his ideas. Would love to continue the discussion then ....

Expected and undeserved

[theefer]

I really don't expect much from WoW. Blizzard is a great game company, and I'm still a big Starcraft lover. They make nifty, well polished games, but WoW sounds just so unoriginal. Yes, the design is quite cool, and so are the races, and the spells ... But does it really sound an RPG ? No. Can you expect to have a really interesting roleplay with orcs and humans and the other races available ? I don't think so, and it does not seem to be the point. Does it bring MMORPG to new grounds ? No. Is it gonna be a hit ? Probably.

Reading the latest big report on the games seems to bring two main conclusions : (1) the gameplay is still open and under discussion, (2) the gameplay is plain unoriginal. They are building a well thought game upon the existing basis, but there is really no risk taken whatsoever, nothing that could really make it the next generation MMORPG.

As an amateur MMORPG game designer myself, I have found that there are an incredibly large amount of possibilities in that genre, but as always most commercial products stay in the same area, ever perfecting one type of game without risking to discover new ones. Too bad Blizzard did not dare to try though, they'd probably have done it the right way.

For my part, I'm waiting for Ryzom, not because it has a much more original gameplay than WoW, not because of its gorgeous graphical design (probably the best out there for an MMORPG), but becauses it dared to leave the traditional fantasy field to explore a new, fresh and tribal universe that is simply fascinating. The objective is more to carry the player into a dream-like original place than put him in front of monsters to fight.