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MMOG Market Mutterings
In the past few days there have been several new developments in the Massive Gaming market. Jessica Mulligan's departure from Turbine now has an end destination, with the announcement that she'll be the executive producer for Nevrax's Saga of Ryzom. In a swashbuckling tie-in, Disney announced they'll be adding to their Massive Gaming portfolio, with a Pirates of the Carribean MMOG joining Toontown Online sometime next year. The always excellent CNN Money column Game Over has word that Sony Online is planning a new Action MMOG, a possible strategy title, and some new non-mmog titles. From the article: "Though the numbers for massively multiplayer games aren't bad, they remain a niche in the gaming industry. To expand SOE's potential audience, the company will soon announce smaller puzzle games for two and four players. While those games won't be massively multiplayer or have any sort of persistent world, it's not out of the question for the long term." Finally, there are many stories over on Gametab discussing the "I'm cancelling because of the WoW Honor System" thread on the official World of Warcraft boards. They were likely sparked by this Kotaku post about the thread. I just want to put in my two cents and state that this isn't news. Forums are not an accurate way to get a picture of a game's user base. Doom may be coming to Blizzard's game, but the subscriber charts are the only real way to know for sure.
If I were a statistician and cool I might have some kind of real data to suggest that every new product endures some kind of fallout after the initial enthusiasm. But since I am neither a statistician or cool, I'll just suggest it without the data in an uncool way:
New TV shows always seem to have a drop-off in ratings, a cliff in the number of watchers. If the show is decent and watchable, then it'll climb from there at a steady rate. I have no doubt that Blizzard in their infinite wisdom foresaw this, and is probably bidding good riddance under their breath. If WoW is worth its weight in gold (get it, gold?), then it'll begin to slowly accumlate more users through word of mouth while at the same time perfecting the game for upper-level players.
You DO NOT have to PVP.
The reason the MMORPG is a nich genre is because nobody in their right mind is going to subscribe to more than possible two titles at a time, whereas most people wouldn't think twice about buying another FPS, even if they already own a few.
Give me a break. These people who are "quitting" (yeah, sure) are all people who consciously CHOSE a PvP server and are now complaining that they can't quest because people are participating in PvP. Here's your sign.
This will have zero impact on the big picture.