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

My alternates to WoW

[justthinkit]

I've played electronic games off and on for 35 years. WoW has zero attraction to me as I am not interested in swinging swords at things. Games I have played for hundreds and even thousands of hours include: well set up physical pinball games, Arkanoid, Tetris, Centipede and now 3D Ultra Pinball Thrillride (3DUPT). My son was playing a free demo of 3DUPT and got me interested. We ended up buying the game online (via Amazon) for something like $6 plus s+h as the game is no longer mainstream apparently.

The pinball "feel" is truly impressive, playing better than a physical pinball game mainly because the flipper contacts never arc and corrode and become flaky. Unlike most PC pinball games that are portrait-style like the arcade versions they emulate, 3DUPT uses the full 4 by 3 ratio screen to great effect. 3 sets of flippers, multi ball, sub-level playing fields -- not innovative in themselves but superbly done parts of a perfect game.

The 3DUPT demo timed out after you earned 2 million points. Eventually we would try to earn that on the first ball. Whoop. My current personal record on the full 3DUPT is 135 billion, with a typical top game lasting 4 to 6 hours, spread over as much time as I like. I have played and paused games for up to 3 days. Another part of the beauty of 3DUPT is I never have to pay-to-play it again -- even burning a CD backup of the game required no hacking tool, a refreshing change.

Part of the ongoing enjoyment of playing 3DUPT is trying to beat my previous high score. At any point the ball can drain and if it drains quickly just a couple of times my chance of breaking the record during that game will be over so I have to stay sharp continuously. The same is true of Arkanoid, Centipede and physical pinball games in general. By the way, this sounds like the opposite of WoW and many/most of the other games mentioned.

I track my scores in other parts of the game -- longest ball duration, largest bonus, etc. -- and my son and I have talked numerous times on ways we would improve the game. I can't imagine playing a game with a cap on it (e.g. a quest that ends predictably for one and all). Pinball never ends and you get out of it what you put in.

So, 3DUPT is a game I'd pay money for. Before I found out I could easily back up the game I even planned to buy several more copies of it as backups. Make more games like this and I will buy them. WoW is for Sci-Fi types, I prefer ESPN. MMOs are for chatter types, I prefer something that can be paused or played entirely on my whim. WoW and most games in general these days are violent and repetitive, I prefer good old hand-eye coordination activities (including real football, soccer, etc).