World Of Warcraft Crushing PC Game Industry?

simoniker writes "Age of Empires co-creator and Iron Lore co-founder Brian Sullivan has been discussing his studio's first game, Titan Quest, but along the way has openly wondered whether World Of Warcraft's success is part of the reason for the decline of the PC retail game market. Sullivan commented: 'For retail PC games, I think the biggest problem is World of Warcraft... It is such a compelling MMO game that it sucks up a lot of money and time that would normally be spent on other retail PC games.' Does WoW's growth actually mean that PC games in other non-MMO genres may sell fewer copies?"

Comments

Re:Actually, not..

[Durrok]

Problem with TQ is that you basically play the same game through each time. Mobs are the exact same place with each character, maps are the same, etc. In D2 it was kind of like this but the randomization of the maps added a lot of replay ability.

There is also WAY too much loot that drops in that game. There is no real money sinks so you just keep getting more and more money with nothing to spend on it. I've started not picking up items that aren't green or blue because there is simply no point. Speaking of items, there is no "chest" or something equivalent to it to store your items. This means if you are trying to collect a set of something you have to keep it on your person all times. Not a real big deal but it just annoys me, especially early on in the game when space is still a commodity.

Lastly, you can bring your single player characters into multiplayer so there is going to be rampant hacking.

Other then that, yeah, it's a great game. :p

WoW can be played casually

[andi75]

Many people complain that WoW either sucks up your whole time, or you don't get anywhere. That's not true, you can easily play the game two evenings / week and still see the whole end game content.

The solution? Find a group that's *organized* (i.e. has a webpage and a forum). Their raids have fixed schedules. You show up at 7:50 p.m., buff up, raid starts at 8:00 and at +/- 23:30 you can go to sleep. Since the big raid instances only reset once a week, you don't have to do more than two evenings (and if your group is getting really good, you can even clear MC in 4 hours), which you would have wasted with reading slashdot or watching TV anyways.

- Rhonac (60 Shaman on Thunderhorn EU).

No shards in EVE?

[the_raptor]

You really believe EVE could be as popular as WoW and have no shards? I played EVE for over a year and a half (I was in the Jericho Fraction and Aegis Militia for most of it) and for most of that time it was unplayable at peak hours or in hub systems. Even CCP were smart enough to create a separate shard for the Chinese market, and that will probably be broken into more shards if it gets really popular over there. EVE has around a hundred thousand active players, WoW has millions, you couldn't buy a pipe fat enough to allow hundreds of thousands of people to play on the same shard (and even if you could the game wouldn't work with thousands of people at the same system let alone the same planet).

And the main difference between EVE and WoW is that WoW is casual. I was a high end player in EVE and there was far to much work involved in keeping an effective PVP corporation going (logistics is what wins wars in real life and EVE). It was a second job to the people that did it. People whine about having to put in eight hours a week to do end game in WoW, the logistics people I knew put in eight hours a day, and high end PVP corps expected you to be on call whenever you where online (Band of Brothers). I got sick of a game being like a job (it took me three days to move my gear from one base to another) and now I play WoW. And the PVP is just as good, with none of the problems of having to go to extremes to find targets, or a 5:1 ratio of grinding to PVP, or every second PVPer being rigged to run away rather then fight.