Last night I pulled out some readings for my classes- things which, despite being barely a decade or less old, are already slightly out of date classics by even academic standards on new media. I got a brief chuckle from Nakamura’s Cybertypes and Castronova’s Synthetic Worlds, both of which mention Everquest and Ultima Online when talking about online virtual gaming worlds. How little we knew then. How quickly things changed when World of Warcraft barged in and demolished all competition. At its peak (2010, during the Wrath of the Lich King expansion and the last time Ret paladins were awesome…), WoW boasted 12 million players. Recent reports put current numbers at closer to 7 million- quite a decline, but still massive in comparison to other MMORPGs (paladins are also decidedly worse- coincidence?).
Blizzard is confident that its new expansion, set to be released in about a month, with reinvigorate the game and bring back some old players. Of course, the obvious question is how many players and for how long, but I think there’s a more interesting question to consider: is the MMORPG a dying genre?
For the past several years players have been looking for and predicting “the WoW killer”: an MMORPG that would finally topple the beast and become the new truly massive MMORPG. And it hasn’t happened yet. That isn’t to say that other MMORPGs aren’t good (or even better than WoW at a number of things) or that they don’t have players, but the simple fact is an MMORPG hasn’t yet been able to hit and sustain the number of subscribers WoW has.
At this point, it seems to me that the WoW killer might just be WoW itself. At launch the game immediately grabbed diverse audience of players. There were those who came for their knowledge of the franchise, those who came because they enjoyed the genre, and (importantly) a large group of more casual players who came because the game was far less punishing than other MMORPGs at the time (death penalties in other MMORPGs at the time are great examples of how WoW helped players into the experience by not punishing them in early game play). Furthermore, in the early years, WoW did a great job of pleasing a variety of audiences (or at least keeping them hooked enough to keep playing): casuals, hardcore raiders, PvPers, etc .
While WoW is still trying to manage this careful balancing act (multiple tiers of raiding content, pet battles and various daily quest hubs, arena tournaments and unique content), the gaming landscape itself has changed. MOBA games (Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas) like League of Legends and DOTA are offering players interested in PVP-style combat an interesting system with a robust out-of-game community (streamers, E-Sports). The rise of social and mobile gaming has given more causal players lots of options for online, multiplayer, quick games.
To be clear, I don’t think that we’ll reach a point at any time in the near future where there are absolutely no MMORPGs. But will any new MMORPG ever reach the subscriber levels WoW had at its peak? My guess is that just as other genres have had their heyday and fallen from popularity (like the RTS genre), we’re in the midst of the slow wind down of MMORPGs. Now, if you’ll excuse me I have a couple achievements I want to finish up before patch 6.0 drops >.>
