Is World of Warcraft killing the mmorpg industry? Hey!! How can you say that? Isn’t
WoW defining the mmorpg industry? Well, Richard Bartle seems to suggest in a recent interview that WoW is preventing other mmorpgs from succeeding. Bartle said,
INTERVIEWER:If you could take over control of one major MMORPG - which would you choose and what would you do with it?
BARTLE: I’d take over World of Warcraft and I’d close it. I just want better virtual worlds. Sacrificing one of the best so its players have to seek out alternatives would be a sure-fire way to ensure that unknown gems got the chance they deserved, and that new games were developed to push back the boundaries.
Er, I would get to do this anonymously, wouldn’t I?
I disagree with this conclusion. Instead, similar to The Common Sense Gamer, I think that World of Warcraft’s playerbase is not the same playerbase that mmorpgs have typically attracted. WoW’s players are not the same players who played Everquest, Dark Ages of Camelot, Asheron’s Call and Ultima Online. No these are console players and casual gamers who happened to think that World of Warcraft is a great game.
I think that mmorpg developers need to stop viewing WoW as the competitor to emulate and beat. Instead, they need to develop great mmorpgs. While typical mmorpg players also think that WoW is a great game, they are also hungry for a new mmorpg. Something other than WoW. Many of players had high hopes for Vanguard, and have high hopes for Warhammer Online (looks like a WoW clone), Pirates of the Burning Sea, and Age of Conan. MMORPG developers will do themselves a disservice by creating a WoW clone. We already have WoW: we don’t need another.
Instead, design a game with the typical mmorpg players in mind. Because like Darren, I do not think that it is given that the WoW playerbase will move to another mmorpg. They will play WoW and move to another great game.
