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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?"
While I'm not a huge player of WoW; I do play that /other/ MMO. It has all but eclipsed purchases of other games. Pretty much anything that's not in the maybe top 5 of games I haven't played. In fact, when I asked my friend the other day "Hey, what games are out there?", the response I got was "World of Warcraft". We had this very discussion, and yea, that's pretty much it. Everything else seems short lived.
~Rebecca
You're standing in EB Games checking out the PC games. There are millions of options. Flight simulators, first person shooters, strategy games, and now MMORPGs. First, you consider the newest first person shooter, but then a thought comes to mind. "Hey wait, don't I own twenty copies of this same game? Aren't these all just the same thing? I'm an attractive guy that the ladies love and I shoot things. Yeah, I'll pass." Then you put down that box and study the strategy games in front of you. You're not quite sure how entertaining roller coaster tycoon 3 will be in a few weeks though. $50 is a lot of money after all. And then you step toward the MMORPGs. Now here's something a bit different! Something that you could play with your friends. Something that won't ever end! Why not buy this instead?
Let's face it. The video game market is flooded with terrible games that are the same thing over and over again. I mean, seriously, besides really little kids, who bought the Finding Nemo game? RPGs have always been better sellers than other titles because there is a strong market for them. It only makes sense that a game that also allows for social interaction AND is an RPG will sell out other video games.
Though, I personally dislike WoW. I'm all about Guild Wars.
In all honesty, how do people have time to play MMO games and do anything fulfilling with their lives?
I'm not terribly torn up about the gaming industry going downhill, what with the only titles recently released being yearly updates to re-hashed sports titles or GTA variants, but I do wonder how the industry became profitable in the first place.
Almost nothing is geared towards a casual gamer any more. I maintain an Everquest subscription for old time's sake, and to have the option available if I want it, but I'm lucky if I log on two hours per week. Between my education, employment, volunteering, and interpersonal relationships, I have very little time left to put into something like that. At the endgame, where I've managed to get by plodding along an hour or two a week, it can take up to an hour to find a group of people to play with in the first place. All the other MMO games are the same, and even a lot of the non-multiplayer games involve a lot of grinding or gruntwork to actually get anywhere in them. The only good casual games out there are Nintendo platformers, and these are so devoid of maturity in any respect that I can't play most of them. (Exemptions given to Mario and Zelda games, because those are classics.)
I just wonder, how it is possible to participate in an MMO and still do anything with their lives?
I wager that, in fact, it isn't.
A friend of mine, meanwhile, neglects the first three and a good portion of the fourth items in my list of other activities there, in favor of playing videogames for the better part of 8 hours a day. He's capped out multiple characters in World of Warcraft, but in reality, has nothing to show for it aside from a hole in his bank account and a slightly bigger imaginary e-penis. Actually, on further inspection, it's not just one friend...it's all half-dozen friends I know who play that game, do it at the exclusion of other activities they previously found enjoyable and profitable such as jobs and friends.
China's three-hour-rule seems like a very, very good idea to be put in place on the server end, all around the world.
was posted sometime last September here on /.
I was heavily involved in WoW at the time and know that it affected my game-purchase habits; I can only imagine how much impact it's had on the PC and console game industries as a whole. When you have dozens of days (and I was on the low end compared to my peers) invested in several characters, it sure seems hard to do anything else but to continue to play just. that game. After all, isn't that part of the hook? That if you stop, you're "throwing it all away"...?
WoW isn't killing PC games, the game companies are. I haven't even bothered to LOOK at WoW, much less try it. I finally got kicked out of caring about PC games by two things:
1. The nasty, intrusive copy protection on Half-Life 2 where it took ten minutes saying "mother may I" to the servers every time I tried to start it up (and then the gameplay sucked.)
2. "Starforce" copy protection (which can wreck your CD/DVD drive) being used by game companies.
If the game companies aren't going to make it pleasant to use their product, they have only themselves to blame.
For me the biggest problem was the monthly fee. It was like a clock ticking in the background. Why spend 8 hours playing a massive game of Civ4 when I'm paying WoW money per month, I should spend that time playing it. That for me was the biggest turnoff. It felt like I needed to spend all my time playing it or I was wasting my money. I've never been able to get into one game that hardcore, so I quit, bought a bunch of new games, and had more fun than I ever had playing WoW.
Introducing Microsoft Vacuum 1.0 The first Microsoft product that doesn't suck.
Let's just play devil's advocate for a minute:
If one game stifles a whole industry resulting in lowered sales of other games and this consequently results in:
1. A bunch of copycat games trying to steal market share from the leader
2. Game development being cancelled on games that don't fit the business leader's model
3. Less diversity of choice for gamers - a flood of me too MMOs and lack of games in other genres
Well that would be a bad thing.
I don't really feel this is the case. I think MMOs will have a permanent impact on PC gaming, just as online FPS games did. Although Doom may have ushered in the LAN party, games like Quake and Unreal Tournament pretty much made online multiplayer a required feature of any PC FPS (yes there are exceptions such as Max Payne). It didn't kill the market, it just changed it.
MMOs are taking players away from single player gaming experiences. Since I started playing MMOs I have played (and purchased) a lot fewer single player games BUT I still play some.
WoW isn't going to be the #1 game for all of eternity. The market will change again and who knows what the next big thing will be.
The Titan Quest developer's biggest problem may be simply that people aren't interested in another Diablo style clicky action RPG. I was kind of surprised that Dungeon Siege 2 did as well as it did. I literally fell asleep playing the first one. And I'm a gamer who spent hundreds of hours playing the Diablo series - I guess I just burnt out on that play style. At least until someone does something really innovative with it.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
I agree completely, on every aspect, the parent post.
You can also add that WoW, or other MMO, requires much more money than any other game in the market. The basic cost + the monthly fees.
It's simply less money to spend on other games made by other companies. All that money goes into the same company. Meaning future releases in gaming will require bigger and bigger companies to be able to rival those kind of assets.
More money required = less "risk", less "innovation", less number of "games", "higher price" and more monthly fees...
We lose in the end.
So the lesser the number of WoW players, the better games we'll have.
TFA basically says something i was scared of the first time i heard of the original EverQuest and it's "monthly fees" and MMO and popularity a few years back...