I still don't think you're giving credit where credit is due. FFXI was released in north america mere months before WoW, and for pretty much all of it's life was in direct competition with WoW. The various census data they put out reported over a million active subscriptions at it's peak. Perhaps it was just getting stale but the game didn't start to die until things were made more WoW like, you would think if anything that should increase subscriptions.
EQ was the same way, again perhaps it's age but when did it start to die? As soon as it was made easier. SWG was supposed to be the anti-EQ, which is sort of what you're arguing that WoW did, it died a horrible death(i know it's techincally still around but lets be serious), they even tried to outright copy WoWs design and its STAR WARS, and they could get a population worht anything. Vanguard goes to be like WoW, they're not running two servers and only one is populated.
I guess my question is how many games do we have to make like WoW that are horrible failures before we stop saying WoW is the only way to make an mmo? Obviously WoW did a lot right, but you can't just completely ignore other games that have had success, and a game isn't a complete failure when it doesn't have 10 mil subscriptions. You'd actually probably be amazed how many games out there are around the 100k mark and the profits are amazing.
I think the real problem is the mmo industry might possibly be the least creative sector of the video game industry. All the games are just copies of something else, and there's rarely an original idea.
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