The AAA games industry has hysterically overreacted to the failure of anyone to capture the lightning in the bottle that World of Warcraft. It’s weird – AAA studios seem completely and totally oblivious to the fact that EverQuest was quite successful with – what, 450K subs max? WoW at the time, if you recall, stated they merely needed to match EQ to be successful. Analysts at the time used to say stuff like ‘there might only be 600K to 1M MMO players in the world – how could WoW and EQ2 possible coexist?’ Even then, the breakout success of games like Lineage in Asia suggested that something could come along and blow the doors off of things.
Going back through my blog in the mid-aughts, people forget both how slow WoW’s roll to 12M actually was, and also how stunning most observers thought it was at every major milestone. I remember when they hit 1M and were clearly still on the uptick, a lot of people discovered the need to recalibrate their definition of success. As one example, Star Wars: Galaxies (which launched about a year prior) went from being considered a solid and respectable success at 250K subs to one that the corporate overlords apparently figured needed a disastrous reboot in the form of the ‘New Game Experience’. Because WoW recalibrated what success SHOULD look like for a major MMO. Continue reading
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