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5.5 Million WoW Players, Lunar Festival
Gamasutra reports that World of Warcraft has hit another milestone in subscribers, with One Million European players and 5.5 Million players worldwide. From the article: "The figure of 1 million customers is more than four times the previously estimated size of the entire European MMORPG market. According to data from Media Control and GFK panels, plus internal studies and account data from Blizzard itself, the company is also claiming that World of WarCraft was the best selling full price PC game in Europe last year." All those players will have a new world event to look forward to at the end of the month, as RPG Vault gives a preview on the Lunar Festival due to be released on January 27th.
It's kinda funny that Vivendi-Universal is doing so poorly with that kind of userbase on one of the products they publish...perhaps they aren't getting a very big cut of the service profits or maybe none at all? If so...good for you Blizzard ;D
5.5 million users * between 12.99-14.99 per month * 12 months = A shit-ton of money! And that's not even counting the box cost... sure there are development and maintenance costs...but I'm sure they don't even compare... WOW indeed.
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
Play Vanguard. You can be as masochistic there as you want. You just don't get to have the sadistic glee of seeing others suffer with you just because they have no choice of playing a game that better suits their own play style. I played old school UO for years and old school EQ for a while, and I'm glad that WoW gives me the option to be a (little, virtual) hero on a mere two hours a night a couple of times weekly instead of a sheep to be slaughtered by the self-annointed elite. (Granted, after I hit sixty I joined the raid game and my play sessions are now longer than two hours twice a week, but a raid in WoW still takes less time than getting a bubble of experience in EQ did around level *15* or so where my interest in the game died its final death.)
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
either way, 5.5 Million copys sold is still a huge aceivment for MMO games... I suspect that EA can say the same thing about UO, but thats only because they have released an update to purchase every year, and sometimes twice yearly.
WoW probably stil has the biggest currently running subscriptions for a Western (non-asian) MMO.
EQ2 had only the punishement of having to go get your spirit shard while suffering reduced stats. The XP debt was no problem, fighting your way back to your spirit usually took care of it. There is no decay or other penalty, now even the shard has been removed. Neither do team members share in your xp debt anymore.
WoW has been a real wakeup call to the MMORPG industry. Do you know that pre-wow people talked about the market having been saturated and that any new game could only hope to lure existing players away from other games? Kinda proved that wrong. WoW showed that instead a good game can create its own market.
Of course smedley seems to think this means that the way to be successfull is to make every game into a WoW clone. I predict that the same will happen as with PC games in general. A over abundance of simple FPS games with more specilist titles surviving in the margins. There are still hardcore flightsims to be found, just not on the shelves, you gotta search the net for them.
Same with hardcore MMORPG's, they will continue to be produced but they will be a niche market. The mass market will go for the WoW angle. It is what sells. You can hardly blame game publishers from wanting to make a profit.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
These games aren't being dumbed down. They are becoming more accessible to a greater number of people. WOW succeeds because more people can do well in the game. Regardless of what game you play you will always find "asshats" and the like. UO not easy? Ah, come on now. The only time it wasn't easy was when it was first released and even then the biggest impediment to playing the game was the stability of the servers. There were asshats galore the first year and still are.
There is nothing wrong with games where when you die you get looted. The problem is that those games attract the very same or worse "asshats" you claim to dislike. Throw in perma-death and you will find a whole new world of asshats - roving gangs of them who will seek no other purpose other than to destroy the play of others. They won't do it for any in-game reason, they will do it because they can. I know, the argument is that the risk will keep them in check but that is never the case. They will find every little exploit that prevents their loss leaving the victim to fight with the game company to prove they didn't deserve the loss they suffered.
That is too hostile of a game world to expect players to stick around in. There have been many "PvP" centric games and if they truly did offer better game play then why haven't they succeeded? WOW succeeds because not only do they offer a world full of adventure they offer a controlled PvP that doesn't become unfairly hostile to the people participating.
As I replied to another, there is nothing preventing YOU from imposing the same restrictions you espouse for others on yourself. If you want perma death then do it! Otherwise your nothing more than a X-wing politician pontificating about the evils of the other side while blithely brushing over your same transgressions.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
One of the reasons I loved UO and play FFXI now is because its NOT easy, its infact somewhat hard to play.
I never played UO, but I have played both FFXI and WoW. WoW is much harder to play well than FFXI. FFXI is easy. You mindlessly use the same three abilities. (Basically, FFXI is like WoW endgame all the time - mindnumbingly easy, and mindnumbingly boring. Except unlike WoW, there's no need for Teamspeak, because it's easy.)
WoW did a lot to make MMO's accessable to the masses, but Im starting to wonder, do we really want L337 Sp34k asshats and just about everyone getting the best armor possible with little to no effort?
Gee - this reminds me of - drumroll - FFXI. Try collecting the PvP armor if you want a real challenge. Nothing in FFXI comes anywhere close to the challenge of getting a PvP armor set.
Maybe Im just too oldschool I guess, I miss the days of when you died it really ment you where dead, your body was looted and you started from scratch.
And senile, there was no PvP in FFXI. (And, no, their ball game version of Battlegrounds doesn't count.) When you died in FFXI, you were teleported back to your bind point. No corpse run or anything. In fact, it became known as "Warp 4" (the Warp magic spell did the same thing, but without requiring death) because there was so little penalty for death.
From what I've heard about UO, you might have a point about UO. But FFXI is an easier game than WoW in all aspects - especially because there's no PvP, so the only danger comes from mobs.