On the heels of Blizzard’s announcement that they’ve reached the 1.5 million mark, Thor Alexander (former UO2 AI guy and currently editor of the recently released Massively Multiplayer Game Development 2) asks an interesting question: could WoW kill Blizzard? Sure, this seems like an absurd question, until you realize that in retrospect, UO killed Origin (and, I might add, outlived it). Salient quote:

It reminds me of Origin back in 1999 after the success of Ultima Online when the studio announced that it would forsake any further single player game development in favor of all MMP games. When I asked my project manager about the radical shift I was enlightened to the fact that UO had brought in more revenue then all single player Ultima games combined.

It’s always hard to make predictions based on Blizzard, because they just don’t follow the typical rules and patterns for sales that can be derived from other games. That being said, I can foresee a world where most PC games, especially from Blizzard, evolve to have SOME sort of subscription component. Simply put, except for MMOs, the PC market is dying a slow lingering death, and only MMOs seem to be able to take advantage of the PC platform and avoid the piracy that strangles other PC genres.

Which is a shame, since I vastly prefer PC games to console.

Original comments thread is here.