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Can Anyone Beat WoW?
Next Generation is running an article penned by DFC Intelligence Analyst David Cole, exploring the overwhelming popularity of World of Warcraft. Coles asks Is It Possible to Surpass World of Warcraft? He explores the reasons behind WoW's success, and what it means for the market as a whole. From the article: "All of these factors point towards one conclusion: World of Warcraft's success, admirable as it may be, will be extremely difficult to duplicate. This will be bad news for all the frothy investors who are suddenly discovering the MMOG business model. In the new DFC Intelligence Online Game Market report we forecast revenue in the MMOG market to grow over 150% from 2006 to 2011. However, this doesn't account for all the investment money that is likely to be lost chasing after that revenue growth."
There will always be that one game that defines a genre. Doom was not the first FPS, but it was the FPS that made the genre a sensation. Command & Conquer did the same for RTS. WoW is just that defining game for MMORPGs; it built upon the pioneers and has reached that critical mass where MMOs stop being a niche genre and have become mainstream.
The question is: do we really want a single dominant game in any genre?
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
It will be incredibly difficult to reproduce the success of WOW for a number of reasons. The main being that WOW is incredibly accessible to gamers of all skill levels. Having played many different MMORPG's WOW was easily the easiest to pick up and run with. Other games have an incredibly steep learning curve and to the casual gamer are turned off. With WOW you can jump right in and get to doing quests without having to go through the tedium of starting off so weak you can't do anything. Additionally, Blizzard has been incredibly successful with almost every game they have released. I'm hard pressed to find a Blizzard title that wasn't both a commercial and critical success, with the exception of the long-anticipated, maybe to eventually be released Starcraft: Ghost. Additionally, from my experience WOW is the only MMORPG you can play for short periods at a time. If you have a half hour you can jump into WOW and actually accomplish something. Other games, they require large chunks of your life to achieve a modest level of success. I'm not saying that the other games are bad, because they are by no means, but they are not as accessible to the casual gamer as WOW is. WOW definately isn't perfect, what with the lack of overall storyline, but in terms of quick fun it beats the others hands down.