Trion CEO Lars Buttler certainly isn’t modest about what RIFT has accomplished in the seven months since its release earlier this year. In an interview with IndustryGamers Buttler basically called out the entire MMORPG industry stating that RIFT and RIFT alone has been the only serious competitor ever to Blizzard’s World of Warcraft stating, “WoW basically had, for seven years, no competition” adding further, “Rift is out there as the most serious competitor they ever had”.
While technically he might be right as I can’t name another subscription based MMORPG that currently has over a million players, it still don’t make it entirely true. Correct me if I’m wrong, but there have been dozens of supposed “WoW killers” over the years, none of which have come close to toppling WoW and if I’m not mistaken RIFT is one of them.
I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell Trion this, but you’re no more a serious competitor to WoW than Warhammer Online or Lord of the Rings Online are. Sure you have a million plus subscribers, but at best that puts you at 10% of WoWs player base. That’s like saying a Mac is a serious competitor to the PC, it’s laughable.
I don’t doubt the RIFT isn’t a great game and give kudos to Trion for the constant and steady flow up updates, but it’s just not a serious competitor, at least not yet. Fast forward a few years as WoW continues to decline and RIFT continues to build itself up, then sure maybe then, but right now, it’s not even close.
Rift build itself up?? I know of half a dozen guilds that have disappeared as players desert the game in droves….I was one of them. Too much same-same grind for little reward. We;re all hanging out for SWTOR. Just going through the motions in LotRO until launch.
The only reason this is true is because of the non consensual PVP prevalent in most of the new games in the last few years. Rift will happily let you play with out PVP just like WoW if you like but will also offer epic armor rewards for doing so in its PVP instances or has PVP servers just like WoW. Basically it has the same rule sets , same type stuff plus the added zone events. Its just like WoW but its prettier.
So sure its competition for WoW and anyone who has played it should know they are deliberately targeting WoW’s customers. Spider mounts are inc soon, couldn’t get much more WoW target audience than that.
Well, for a game without a large name behind it Rift is doing pretty great – 7 months after it’s release it has about a million subscribers, the developers are listening to the complains of the players and are doing everything they can to satisfy them. In the subscription based market there have not been a fantasy MMORPG this successful since LoTRO and it is 1 very different from both WoW and Rift and 2 – has the LOTR name which is a huge boost. So in reality he is right – Rift is the most serious competitor that WoW has ever had even it is still feeble as hell.
No more mystery, Wow died after vanilla, and has only retained 16 year olds with daddys credit card, or the die hard fans who’s brains got re-wired so bad they can’t tell when a game goes bad (like when poker addicts can’t stop when they go in debt). I know thousands of players in a community that stopped wow some years back, couldnt find another mmo, some turned to paper and pen mmorpg, and now they are all in RIFT (most of them awaiting SWTOR as well). RIFT can go bad just like wow if they screw up ALL their expansions due to piss poor management and big egos (like wow).
Any ways, better F2P out there for me. Play Regnum (great RvR, PVE, sandbox/classic rpg feel) it’s vanillaness remains.
Black prophecy: Best space sim, doesn’t feel like microsfot excel like EVE. It is story driven, and great mechanics (only noobs complain, because they go from swinging a swrod to trying piloting a ship).
War Inc. Battlezone: Best shooter. Tactical, non asian twitcher, requires skill, not Sadly I can not return the honor to blizzard, and sadly I should have kept my money.
1 million plus subs? Source please. They probably have a very weird and dishonest definition for subs if they actually said that anywhere…
They had 41 servers in Europe at start (and most had queues)… now they have 23 with pretty much 0 queues. Does this mean they had over 2 million players at launch? :P Gimme a break…
I’m ok with Trion as a game dev, but their marketing is absolutely evil. They treat their customers as bags of money with little to no brains… I remember RIFT being advertised as a full NEXT-GEN mmo before launch. After that they said it’s completely different from WoW (you’re not in azeroth anymore bla blah) when in reality RIFT is WoW’s twin. Now they’re saying their sub number is huge and growing, while they close down servers and avoid any official statements…
well wow isnt really that big with 8 million subscribers in china. That leaves just over 2 million around the rest of the world. Rift has 1 million around the rest of the world…and it isn’t in china. SO there really isn’t much of a difference.
This looks like quite a bit of “Fanboy” fluff…
The odds of Rift beating World of Warcraft is slim, but then again It’s normally the “Fanboys” that measure success with the “WoW meter”…
Try something new like maybe http://darthhater.com/2009/09/30/swtor-vs-wow-is-it-really-a-rivalry/ ….
This might result in a better more informative and less “Fanboy-ish” article.
Rift has no more challenged World of Warcraft than Wizard 101 has, yet Wizard 101 boasts millions of players and still hasn’t claimed “WoW Killer” status… Reading the statement from Buttler merely states that no one else in the genre has even lit a candle to the success of World of Warcraft compared to the success Rift has seen against “The Giant”…
Trying to be proactive for a game leaves very little room for an unbiased opinion. Keeping objectivity will not only make the article better but elaborate more on the truth and less on the aforementioned opinion…
Rift basically is wow in vanilla, its a total rip off i seen nothing original.