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Academics Speak On 'Life After World Of Warcraft'
Posted by
Zonk
on Wed Sep 12, 2007 12:05 PM
from the it'll-come-eventually dept.
from the it'll-come-eventually dept.
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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>
> Before running into the office all by himself?
Hey, at least I got a red stapler.
World of WarCraft 2: The Attack of the RPG Clones (Score:3, Insightful)
I wouldn't be that sure (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:I wouldn't be that sure (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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.
Parent
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Sorry, but this struck me as funny. I'm a level 64 pally, and in the last two days, I've pwned 2 70 'locks. The moment they start to fear, you bubble, Holy Shock, whack 'em a few times, do a Hammer of Justice and a judgement, and watch them cry all the way to the grave.
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Yes, and Alterac Valley for example is so lopsided that most Horde players simply sit in the cave because the Alliance has the advantage.
Furthermore, where is the WAR in Warcraft? Hi, remember the games of Warcraft? Remember the epic battles with various seige weapons and vehicles and the like? In WoW? Three years after release almost? Nope, sorry. AV is the closest we get and like I said, it's horrible.
You miss World PvP? They created world PvP "minigames".
Ref
This is key, IMO (Score:2)
This, I think, is key. Why do people play MMO's? To quote Sony, 'Live in your world, play in ours.' People are looking for an online world they can enjoy in their free time. So my thought is, why sho
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I remember them saying the same thing about Ever Quest, that the only thing that could displace it was Ever Quest 2. That didn't turn out to be too accurate. I think WOW will run it's course and then most people will move on.
Henry Jenkins? (Score:3, Funny)
Hennnnry JEEEEENKINS!
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Games with Endings (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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There Is A Reason.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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I'm not disagreeing about Warhammer's chances against WoW, but that statement made me think of this Penny Arcade:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/04/10
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I don't think it will take a lot of "study" to see that game success has nothing to do with weight of established lore behind it. Just look at the history of Star Trek games. If anything, having a license to an existing "Universe" is a millstone around a game's neck.
Lot
Academics aren't market researchers (Score:2)
Although the focus of whoever wrote the article is on the Next Big Thing, this isn't necessarily the top priority for scholars. The study of games is more about people than it is about games themselves. Here's Florence Chee from the article:
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The main reasons for its success are, I think, the quick pace of rewards and its friendliness to casual and occasional players. It is possible to have a very rewarding experience in WoW, easily play with your friends, and still "have a life." This isn't really the case for ot
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Florence Chee had the best viewpoint (Score:3, Interesting)
I foresee a day when WoW is replaced by games where you yourself perform the actions of your character, using Wii-mote and nunchuck, to hack slash and parry your way through the world, or use the Wii-mote as a wand.
When? Probably next gen. So, I would say look for 2009, when the successor to the Wii comes out.
[caveat - I went to SFU at one point so I'm biased
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Not really what I meant. Nintendo hasn't been building out games with online content on them, whereas MS and Sony (to a lesser extent) are heavily utilizing online content and features in many games.
So, if anyone's gonna do a console MMO other than FFXI, odds are it'll be Microsoft.
And my point about Nintendo's unwillingness to make original content stands. Even if they did do an MMO, I'm not sure that Mario Party MMORPG is going to take the gaming community by storm (sure hold interest for this guy, th
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Kind of seems like a stupid statement (Score:4, Interesting)
Doesn't 'emerging' seem to suggest that there is going to be a rather narrow sample size, to begin with? And I don't really fault researchers focusing on WoW; I mean yes, they could grab whatever game is on the shelf, but you have no idea if it's going to be another WoW or if it's going to be Vangers (look it up). I would imagine that anyone in this 'emerging' field would want their results to be reasonably relevant, interesting, and applicable to as broad a field as possible.
Right now, there's really only one game that hits that mark, and that's WoW.
For those researchers who are looking for other interesting fields of study in this area, I would make some other suggestions.
Look at http://www.mmogchart.com/ [mmogchart.com]:
- The Matrix Online, Asheron's Call, Anarchy Online all have very interesting player number curves. Why?
- WW2OL has fewer subscribers than most of the 'big name' games and quite a few of the middling ones, yet it seems to be surviving where others are shutting down. Why?
- Runescape - real MMOG or webgame? Is the distinction important?
- These various games have a host of pay/play models, what's working, what isn't?
- MMOGs are in a way the descendants of online mass flight sims - Warbirds, etc. How do flight sim pay/play models compare? User numbers and retention?
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How fucking dumb can Sony and LucasArts be to completely ignore their existing fanbase and go ahead with not ONE but TWO game "redesigns" on Star Wars: Galaxies such that the end product was a completely new game? And thus, Star Wars: Galaxies - with a rabid fanbase* and new incoming fans - went from being in the top 3 MMORPGS to virtually non-existent. Which, I guess, actually answers the question I posed
*I mean, come the frack on... I knew a LOT of peo
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Basically, they saw World of Warcraft eating Star Wars: Galaxies' (and other Sony games) lunch _big_ time and they let GREED rule their game. Instead of refining existing gameplay and stressing the openness and versatility
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Even if we stick with MMOs I think a study of the people who have stuck with Star Wars Galaxies or Dark Age of Camelot would be interesting if only to find out why they still play those games (which I admit I have never played myself. I just know that they aren't all that popular i
What comes after WoW (Score:2)
for just the briefest second... (Score:4, Funny)
self-defined ending (Score:2)
I quit WoW after getting all the gladiator gear and being ranked in the top 10% of the first arena season. Basically, once you get to a certain point there is nothing left to accomplish. The only gear upgrades you can get after a certain point are marginal at best, and require a totally disproportionate amount of time to achieve.
The next big game will come up with a way to reduce the effect of gradual leveling, then very difficult end-game, then nothing left to accomplish. WoW will be easy to dethrone be
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Re:I wouldn't say... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
For a $1.5B annual gross, damn right! (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Parent
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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 ...
This is, I think, Blizzard's greatest challenge. They need to continue to innovate incrementally (the way the game did when it was introduced) without holding back because they have a lot of money to lose now. They absolutely will lose the market if they treat WoW like a cash cow and milk it until everyone leaves. Well, not everyone will leave. EverQuest is still out there, and I'm sure WoW will be for many years after it ceases to be popular.
But I really think that WoW could exist as a popular MMO functio
Yeah, but... (Score:2)
True, but if that person exists today, they're probably not going to be willing to work for a professor's salary; they'll earn the money themselves. More to the point, somebody taking a few years of classes on the psychology of the online gamer is not going to be an expert in the field. That kind of knowledge an
Re:"Games Studies"? Are you kidding me? (Score:4, Insightful)
First, game studies is not the same thing as a major program in videogame studies. Most of the academics involved in game studies have other home disciplines, whether anthropology, film studies, communications, computer science, sociology, comparative literature, economics, or what have you. Talking about the over-focus on one game or another is a top-level discussion among researchers across disciplines, not a question of what to be teaching undergraduates. Research fields are not the same as undergrad programs.
Second, I can imagine at some point there actually being an undergrad program in game studies. I know that there are minor programs. Like English or other degrees that don't seem to have immediate relevance, they are usually made far more relevant when mixed with a different graduate degree. An undergrad in game studies who then goes to law school might work on game-related policy, censorship issues, game-dev labor disputes, etc. Another one who then goes to business school might work on game-dev management issues, etc. Another might get an MFA or a CS MS and working on design or programming issues at a high level.
Games are significant. We're now seeing in adulthood people who grew up with them as their primary entertainment activity. Digital games structure thought, attention and activity differently than any other media before them. They merit study.
Parent
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Oh, and what the **** is with the penguin!?
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The WoW killer (Score:2)
The single niggest complaint I usually hear about MMORPGs is that what your character does has no real effect on the game world, at best you can get player triggered events that lasts half and hour. If WoW2 or some other well made MMORPG incorporated lasting world changes based on player achievements (ie: a slow replacement of Horde flora and fauna with Alliance flora and fauna) then it would be set to b
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EQ2 and AC2 just divided their respective player bases. With the remaining communities being too small to sustain an MMO, players moved on to other MMOs. Its an easy choice for someone who has already quit the original MMO in the series to move to a wholly new franchise.
If Blizzard just keeps releasing expansion packs, then they will maintain their momentum. Its certainly not agood way to be innovative, but they want to keep those monthly sub
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Its a shame I already posted, so I can't mod this up. Blizzard's success is at least as much of an anomoly in the gaming industry as WoW's. Every game Blizz has released after their first has been a huge hit. Nobody else in the industry has a track record like that. Heck, nobody in the entertainment industr
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You could say the same thing bad about someone's favorite hobby, and I'm sure they would defend it just like people defend their own MMO -- b/c it is a hobby for many.
For others, a MMO is some sort of justification of their existance. "Oh, I killed the big bad mega-boss, I'm awesome, will you date me now?".
Even withing each MMO there are different levels of dedication and the same sort of 'tribes'.
I play FFXI, I don't deny it. In
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Indeed. I think one things people forget is that GAMES MODEL WORLDS, either abstract or based on portions the real world. Games are SIMULATIONS, so saying we shouldn't study games is like saying we shouldn't investigate the natural world. Games and the real world have a lot in common, one is based on pure digital information, the other more solid 'physical' world.