Hi, I’m Daniel. You might remember me from such other MMO articles like “It was great except for the Elves with 5 o’clock shadows” and “Tits and Fatalities aside, Age of Conan sucks flaccid donkey genitals”. I’m new here; and bringing you a highly opinionated, wordy rant on the latest of MMO trends: the term “WoW Killer”.
The meme itself isn’t new: the first earliest recorded instance of this meme was by the scribe Pontus Sextus Alphonsus in 300 A.D, writing about the threat of an invasion from far eastern Empires into the vulnerable Roman empire. He referred to these savages as possibly the first “Rome-killer” – yeah, ok, I just made all of that up. The term “WoW Killer” has been kicking it around since WoW first became a success back in 2004. Any major MMO release since then has been plagued with this term: “Will this game be the WoW Killer? Will this game gain self-awareness, attack the Blizzard server farm with a targetted nuclear strike, then start searching for Sarah Connor? Does this game have the potential to learn kung-fu?”
No, it doesn’t. The term itself implies that WoW in fact can be killed, which it can’t. Sure, it can lose some subscribers: even for arguments purpose, it’s possible (though not likely) that games like Warhammer Online have more total active subscribers than WoW. Does that mean WoW has, in fact, been killed? No. It would still be the 2nd largest MMO subscriber game, and it would still be the all time biggest MMO in terms of subscribers. Even in this best case scenario, WoW would still have a piss-ton of subscribers by industry standards.
Many people say that the only thing that can kill WoW is WoW itself. I liken this to people watching too many Terminator movies as kids or possible temporal lobe damage from hearing the pre-pubescent screams of Eddie Furlong too many times. WoW can’t kill itself, but it’s supporting staff of humans can perhaps muck things up a bit. A lot of WoW subscribers were alienated or quit after the Burning Crusade expansion: WoW subscriptions were down to around 2 or 3 million actual subscribers and about 17 million chinese gold-farmer accounts. Wrath of the Lich King might do the same thing; and it’s good to theorize that if Warhammer Online provides as good of a PVP experience as everyone hopes it does, it will take a good deal of the “real PVPers” away from WoW (if any still play) – and WoW can be happy in deluding people that the little e-sport Arena games are “real PVP”. At the end of the day, though, there is still a core group of people that love WoW for what it is: whether it’s because it was their first MMO, the majority of their friends play, or even it’s cozy familiarity: people will always stay and play World of Warcraft, and in great numbers.
TL;DR version: WoW has too many loyal fans and addicts to ever be “killed” as a MMO. End of story.
Now that we’ve determined that WoW can’t be killed, it’s time to move on. Even though it can’t be terminated, it can still lose a lot of customers, or better yet, it *is* possible that another MMO has just as big of a following and playerbase as WoW does without stealing their customers. In fact, this latter scenario is the best scenario because it means that players have been gained from outside the genre and the industry has indeed grown. This can’t really happen with titles like Warhammer Online or Age of Conan because it’s still stuck in the same genre (Fantasy) and is really just a rehash of the same thing – and maybe niched to a certain demographic, like PVP/RVR with WAR or Nudity and … well, whatever for AoC.
So what can rival WoW in fanbase and subscribers? A non-fantasy, perhaps “non RPG” based MMO that is rock solid, using a known IP. Whether this is a MMOFPS or MMORTS (or even both) – this is really the only chance that the MMO industry has at ever producing something that rivals the beast of WoW in revenue and following. Using this logic, companies like Mythic, Funcom and 38 Studios actually hurt the MMO industry because they won’t be generating many new players (from outside the genre) and have instead been focusing on stealing other players away from other similar games. Meanwhile, hordes of fantatical FPS and RTS players are uncatered for in our over-saturated Fantasy MMORPG market.
I digress; in conclusion, let’s stop using this tired term “WoW Killer”. The term is just plain inaccurate; we need to be more creative and constructive in representing the MMO industry. So, let’s focus on objective reviews and previews of upcoming releases and advancing and expanding the industry, rather than throwing this lame meme into the mix with every new title that’s about to be released.
The version of this article that came through the VW feed had ‘mime’ everywhere. Ouch. :)
yes….we know
I agree, we need something other than a fantasy mmoRPG that has the high production value of WoW. Why do you think Hellgate has as many subsribers as it does, despite its problems. It’s the reason im playing and loving hellgate right now.
It’s the reason ive tried a free 14 days on Eve 3 times now. I want to like Eve, but the combat is not my style.
My French spellchecker, for some reason, auto replaced “meme” with “mime” for some god-awful reason. Weird because meme is a french word… though, perhaps it’s because I didn’t have the accent on it.
Mimes scare me.
Completely agree –
I think by calling a game a ‘WoW killer’ it almost dooms it from the beginning because people will invariably, whether consciously or subconsciously, compare it to WoW. And it will be really really hard for any new game to match the polish and the depth (not to mention the existing online user-base) of WoW. As Daniel points out, only Blizzard can really kill WoW, but even if they lose users and don’t manage to sustain the ridiculous base they have now, there will always be people playing WoW, questing with the guilds they have been playing with for ___ years.
I think there is loads of opportunity to expand the pie, and bring lots more users into the ‘massively multiplayer online’ space. It might be heretical, but I am personally tired of people equating ‘MMO’ with ‘fantasy-based questing game.’ There are lots of other opportunities to make cool games that bring loads of people together to play them. Massively’s question got a bunch of cool ideas for bringing existing IPs into the MMO space (http://www.massively.com/2008/07/31/the-daily-grind-name-your-mmo-dream-team/).
I think it will just take a team with a bunch of money behind them (Slipgate, 38 Studios?) to pound through the technology limitations (make the world fast and big), and have someone with a big enough brain to think up, and then polish the tremendous gameplay needed to make an MMO work (how do you balance characters in a GI Joe-themed world? Why can’t everyone be a freaking Jedi in Star Wars?). And I think the clincher will be to make it really easy to play, and non-threatening to the non-tech – can you do a drug-dealer model, and get all those people playing Pogo and Wii to ‘upgrade’ to a massively multiplayer world?
@Paul:
Thanks for the good feedback.
I did an article on 38 Studios a few months back. (http://www.r1ft.com/dev/a-letter-to-curt-schilling-and-38-studios/)
38 Studios could be the answer to getting a MMO out of the normal Orcs / Elves / Swords / Magic genre… but I’m not totally sure.
On one side, we have Todd McFarlane, which could promise some City of X type comic / Spawnish “Fantasy” came that might be actually different. However, on the other hand, they have R.A. Salvatore for the lore / storywriting of it, who is mostly known for the Drizzt / Forgotten Realm series (which I love, dont get me wrong). If it’s a FR game, then we’re just looking at WoW/AoC/WAR/DDO all over again, rehashed.
I guess we’ll see next year. My money was on Fallout Online for the next “big game” … but hey, they didn’t want to hire me, so their loss. ;)
‘Meme’ is not a french word. It’s a neologism coined in 1976 by Richard Dawkins (a man not known for his frenchitude.) in his pop-biology book, The Selfish Gene.
I now return you to your regularly scheduled MMO discussion.
Actually, meme is a French word. It means the same. As in “c’est toujours le meme” (this is always the same).
But I only live here, what do I know? :)
Just to correct an inaccurate comment. You said that there was a decrease in NA/EU subscribers after BC. This is false, subscriptions in NA, Europe AND Asia continued to climb after BC. The total number of subscribers in WOW has continued to rise and the portion of players from each region has been fairly constant. Asia was 55% of wow’s subscriber base when it was at 3M subscribers total, and it is 55% now that it is at 10.9M.
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