| .jayderyu said: A good article was written by the owner of one of those MMO collective sites. That most of WoW players are WoW players not MMO players. Because they will never play another MMO. While MMO players are fractures, but essentially same concept for the rest of the market. So only the interested, disatisfied and theme fan will bother with any of the listed games. On a parallel note. This is the same situation for PnP rpgs. D&D is king due to the exact same situations. If any MMO is to compete. It needs to provide content outside of the Combat Simulator and appeal to more than the current MMO market. not a single listen game does either. |
While the bulk of your post was interesting, I think you forgot one key factor. While there are a lot of 'new' MMO players coming into the genre with WoW, the 'hardcore' MMO player is still there. And they aren't nessesarily just going to play WoW forever. Heck, many of them are already looking for other MMOs to play, if not playing new ones already. And this is pretty much the strongest consumer base for an MMO. WoW has shown it can generate large groups of newcomers through mass marketing and hype. But if it loses the 'core' MMO community, it will probably lose its dominance. As its the core players who shell out the most money and play for more than 3 months.
And this is where big budget games like Star Wars: The Old Republic comes in. Sure its anyones guess which new game will become the next 'hit', but WoW won't be on top forever. And as the 'core' MMO fanbase has shown in the past, they get bored of playing the same MMO over long periods and move on. I'm sure they'll move on from even the mighty WoW if there's a good enough reason to. And with games like Old Republic and even Diablo III coming from Blizzard itself, its going to be hard for Blizzard to keep WoW running on just Ozzie ads and new gear/level caps.
btw, as an aside, I don't think we've seen the full potential of half the games listed in terms of your 'combat simulator vs additional content' scenario. And in terms of The Old Republic, I think we can safely say that game at least is doing new things and has content . That seems to be the entire basis of the games engine, as your actions alter gameplay and your stats. Kind of like Knight of the Old Republic taken to the extreme. And frankly, I find the idea refreshing, in this stagnant 'kill monster/gain new gear/PvP/do a little dance/repeat' MMO world. In my humble opinion, the next MMOs which will probably find dominance will probably be the ones which break away from the traditions of the past and don't stick to this boring monster grinding/WoW mimicking concept of old. Star Wars: The Old Republic seems to be one of the first big budget games to do so, though there's been many others, mostly in Korea.
Six upcoming games you should look into:
