Academics Speak On 'Life After World Of Warcraft'

simoniker writes "Are MMO populations 'tribal', and if so, what's the next tribal shift after World of Warcraft? At Gamasutra, academics including MIT's Henry Jenkins and Ludium's Edward Castronova discuss what's next for the MMO market, based on their research and play patterns. Jenkins states that WoW is getting _too_ much analysis from researchers right now: 'WoW deserves attention because it has so captured the imagination of gamers over the past few years. That said, I don't think it is healthy for the field of games studies, which is still emerging, to be so fixated on a single game franchise — no matter what the franchise. A few years ago, it might have been The Sims or GTA, now it's WoW.'" For more on this topic MMOG industry veteran Gordon Walton spoke on this topic last week at GDC Austin, and notes from that event are also available at Gamasutra.

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[moore.dustin]

Printer Friendly version of the article that is one page instead of 5.

Games with Endings

[SonicTheDeadFrog]

If I see one more franchise going "MMO" to try to get a bite of the WoW pie, I think I'm going to puke. After playing WoW for five months, grinding to 60 and grinding on "end game" content, I've come to the conclusion that offline games (i.e. games with ENDINGS) are actually a much more rewarding expenditure of time.

Practically every MMO out there is either a glorified chat room, or a grindfest-turned-second-career because it want's to be WoW without being WoW and all it succeeds in doing is becoming one more WoW or EQ clone and even the most ardent fanboys would have a hard time saying otherwise. The guys doing Warhammer Online claim that even WoW was largely a ripoff of DAoC, and popular though it was, DAoC was not a super smash hit like WoW.

There's nothing earth shattering about WoW except being in the right place at the right time. It's moronic to speculate on what the next big thing is because it's as likely to be random dumb luck as anything else.

There Is A Reason....

[Atomm]

No other MMORPG has captured the audience that WoW has. This alone is a reason to study this MMORPG over all others.

As for upcoming MMORPG's, none of them will command the attention that WoW has. If Lord of the Rings Online couldn't make a dent in WoW, especially given the long, great history of the Tolkien Universe, what chance does any other MMORPG have?

Warhammer might have a chance to top some of the other MMORPG's like EQ, Eve, AO, etc... But that is only because they copied a lot of the aspects of WoW and present a very similar style of game and universe. Don't believe me, look at the goblins in both games. It's like looking at cousins.....

So yes, WoW deserves to be studied to understand how they could capture and maintain an audience many times over any of the previous MMORPG's.

I wouldn't be that sure

[Moraelin]

Well, I certainly see your point, but the cynic in me says that we've thought this before... and we were wrong.

When Origin invented the genre, they were literally the only player in town. They were so far ahead the other MMOs, that the others were just getting started trying to copy it. Even if you consider MUDs to be essentially the same genre, the difference between UO and your average text-based MUD, if nothing else in terms of number of players, was larger than between WoW and Anarchy Online nowadays.

Other people who arguably invented a genre, or made it mainstream, are still the Gods of Gaming in that genre. E.g., Id and FPS. You'd expect Origin to share that fate, wouldn't you?

You'd think nothing could possibly dethrone UO at that point, until Origin creates UO2, right? Well, we already know how that went.

Then came Everquest, and it was so popular it became synonim with MMOs. You didn't talk, say, about people losing their job and wife to MMOs, you instinctively spoke of them losing that to Everquest. It's also the game which caused the deluge of me-too MMOs. It was such a money-printing license, everyone wanted a piece of that market.

Worse yet, along came a long period of stagnation, and most new MMOs just managed to steal some of someone else's players, only to have them stolen by someone else in 6 months. It looked like there were a total of about 1 million MMO players total... and EQ owned slightly more than half of them.

Once you factored in their other games too, Sony _owned_ the MMO market.

Surely one would have thought nothing will challenge that until their own EQ2 came out, right? Well, wrong, actually. EQ2 peaked a lot lower than what EQ still had, never mind its former peak. It _still_ has less players than the old Everquest. (Not saying it's necessarily a bad game, as that's something highly subjective, just that subscription-wise it failed to be the block-buster everyone expected.)

Instead there came this WoW noone really expected that much of. What people wanted from Blizzard was Starcraft 2 or maybe Diablo 3, not a MMO. They hadn't proved that they know their elbow from their arse in the MMO arena yet. They had the Warcraft franchise and name recognition, but an unrelated franchise name only carries you so far: see TSO which flopped in spite of the The Sims franchise which had outsold all 3 Warcraft games _combined_.

Not only it handed Sony its arse at its own game, it managed something that noone else had managed in years: it actually enlarged the western MMO market. About 10 times.

So now we think the same all over again. "Man, nothing's going to displace WoW until they launch WoW2." I dunno, we've been wrong about that at least twice before. (Or more than twice if we're talking about sequel surpassing their original. AC2 bombed so badly that it was shut down, for example. Essentially that sequel moved the AC franchise from being the second most successful MMO to being nobody.)

Before anyone accuses me of wishing that WoW fails or anything, note that I'm not against any of the games I've mentioned here. I actually liked WoW, though nowadays I'm playing COH yet again. I can see why WoW was successful. In this highly subjective taste matter, they sure managed to give the larger market segment, the casual gamers and off-line Oblivion-type gamers, more of what they wanted in a game. They "deserve" their current position. I'm just saying that noone, Blizzard included, has a certificate of ownership of the market. They all "rent" the #1 spot for a while. They can fall like everyone else, eventually.

In fact, I'm sorta surprised that WoW hasn't fallen back yet. Again, I don't wish it or anything, but it's not like they have a patent on what made WoW successful. Everyone else is free to copy the elements that made it sell well. It's just that everyone else seems to be surprisingly slow to understand it. Oh, they've tried to copy bits and pieces of WoW, but they just can't seem to understand _what_ they copy. It's... a bit like watching a clock maker try to copy random individual cogs from a competitor's clock, without understanding what they copy or the larger scheme of the mechanism in which it must fit in.

But eventually it's bound to happen.

Re:I wouldn't be that sure

[Evangelion]

In fact, I'm sorta surprised that WoW hasn't fallen back yet. Again, I don't wish it or anything, but it's not like they have a patent on what made WoW successful. Everyone else is free to copy the elements that made it sell well. It's just that everyone else seems to be surprisingly slow to understand it. Oh, they've tried to copy bits and pieces of WoW, but they just can't seem to understand _what_ they copy. It's... a bit like watching a clock maker try to copy random individual cogs from a competitor's clock, without understanding what they copy or the larger scheme of the mechanism in which it must fit in.

But eventually it's bound to happen.


The problem is that it's not just one thing that makes WoW successful. It's alot of things that Blizzard is doing right all at once. The key though, is that Blizzard, despite what you read on forums, does listen to it's players. The game as it stands now is vastly, vastly different from when even I signed up in 2005 -- and they're laregly positive changes.

• World PvP sucks? They added instanced PvP.
  
• You miss World PvP? They created world PvP "minigames".
  
• Honour system is a joke? Scrapped, in exchange for a token system.
  
• Unorganized instanced PvP too much of a hassle? Have short (on the order of minutes, seconds if you're up against a 'lock) 1v1 - 5v5 arena matches.
  
• Farming for the 1% elemental drops sucks? We'll split them up into more common drops (motes), so your farming doesn't suck as much.
  
• Crafting seems useless as a moneymaker? Epic crafted items now require a BoP drop, so you can now actually make money from your profession.
  
• Hybrid classes and off-specs getting the shaft? There are different versions of the new class armor sets for different specs.
  
• Instance runs taking too long? All the new 5-mans are split up into wings a'la SM, so that you can run one in less than an hour.
  
• Want epics in 5-mans? Okay, we'll add a heroic mode, but it'll be harder, and you can't expect to go in green quest rewards.
  
• Having trouble getting a group? We'll tie entry into heroics to specific reputation grinds which can only be done in instances, so people have incentives to run them.
  
• Still having trouble? We'll create an actually useful LFG system, and tie entry into the LFG channel to registering with it (to avoid it looking like Trade - City)
  
• Don't have a warlock in your group, or he's out of shards? The summoning stones can summon raid members with only 2 people present.
  
• Reputation grinds suck ass? Okay, instead of having one or two factions with everything, and a miserable rep grind (I'm looking at you TB), we'll create lots more factions and make each grind easier.
  
• Need an easy source of money? We'll make daily quests you can repeat each day, which give cash (and rep) rewards.
  
• You want to fly? Sure.
  

Ontop off all of that listening, the technical quality of the software from Blizzard is continually top notch. They've folded in popular mods (Scrolling Combat Text, etc), and there were mentions about built-in VOIP, so voice chat won't be limited to guild runs.

Really, it's Blizzard as an organization that someone would have to copy to unseat WoW from the fantasy MMO genre, not any specific attribute of the game.

For a $1.5B annual gross, damn right!

[RingDev]

Actually, given the $120 million dollars WoW is pulling in each month, and the number of competitors out there trying to create the next great game, hiring a person who has made it their goal of understanding the psychological, social, and economic drives inside the game, and the same factors outside the game, should be a very high priority.

I was following a game a few months ago. Solid looking graphics and network engine, decent sounding game engine. It looked like it had some great potential and they had a multi-million dollar budget. But they had absolutely no knowledge about handling their community or managing a MMO, and the whole thing crashed and burned a horrible death. They hired a fan from the forums to become their community rep. Nothing like taking a kid with nothing more than a high school degree and put him in charge of distributing knowledge to packs of rabid fans.

Had they brought in people with experience in managing MMOs, and people with an understanding of the underlying factors, they would have likely done much better.

-Rick

Re:I wouldn't say...

[ajs]

That it captured the imagination of anyone. It has certainly attracted the interest of bunch of players, but the game is not imagination-grabbing by any stretch of the... oh you know. I think it's safe to say that it's captured the imaginations of players in the sense that it has become one of the most popular Tolkienesque settings in the world. I'm sure that a hefty fraction of the player base were exposed to either WoW or the LoTR movies as their first dose of high fantasy. Now, no one's going to say that the entire game is innovative. It's very much like EverQuest. It's very much like Warcraft. Warcraft was very much like all of the rest of the genre. There's certainly some originality (as a game and as a story), but originality and imagination-capturing aren't always the same thing, especially when something is so popular that it's the first exposure to a genre for so many.