SWTOR isn’t a complete success, therefore it is an abject failure in the eyes of many. But tons of people are still playing and enjoying the game. Count me among them. On the other hand, I haven’t raced to the top, still working to reach 50 on my main, and enjoying the journey. I am definitely an outlier there I suppose. I also don’t see an issue with replayability. At least 8 stories can be played through, with other way besides the planet quests to help level outside the storyline. But cool, it’s a failure.

Are people tired of WoW and WoW-clones? I don’t know, ask the millions of people still subscribed to WoW and its clones. I guarantee only a miniscule fraction of them is even aware of this debate.

The problem new MMOs have is that they must compete with an almost 8 year old behemoth. Maybe the original game only expected 500k players and had only(!) a $63 million budget, but the three expensions since then have surely topped $200 million in investment, at the same time the game was running unimaginable profits compared to everything else in the genre. What new game can possibly compete?

If you’re using a shard system, some costs are scalable, but they’re mostly related to hardware and customer service. The basic development of the game world and all the game content and features have to be fronted, and compete with WoW’s 4+ current continents with all the different racial starting areas, and the dungeon finder, etc., that took Blizzard well over a decade (including initial developement and the development of the expansions) to develop.

Until the market splinters more fully, I don’t see anything replacing the attempt to capture WoW’s lightning-in-a-bottle again.

I’ll be interested to see the numbers for GW2. Apparently Guild Wars sold 6.5 mil worldwide if you include all the expansions (which is kind of a cheesy way to count things, so I assume closer to 3 mil for the main game and less than that for each subsequent expansion) but I don’t know if the more overtly MMOified version will appeal to as many people.

Budget bloat and everyone thinking WoW-like numbers is the new minimum requirement for success is choking creative gameplay design, imo. Nobody wants to invest hundreds of millions on an untested formula, yet for some reason there’s this stigma that spending (and achieving) -less- is somehow less prestigious or will result in a less quality game.

What we don’t really have is any proof that any other MMO type would attract more players. Sandboxes tend to get very hardcore, attracting a very loyal core user base but not necessarily more numbers. My suspicion is that a really successful mainstream sandbox would have to really dial down the gaming features and dial up the socialisation. (It’s actually got to compete with Facebook.)

I would argue that even without subscriptions, MMO communities need players to focus on one game at a time. Whilst its fun for a lot of people to be MMO nomads, never really putting down roots, that’s not how solid guilds, friendships or communities are formed unless the nomads share some out of game common resource like a bboard or cross-game organisation or something.

No, I’m saying that there is only room for a small number of games that are derivatives of WoW’s gameplay to exist in the market at once, -especially- if they’re each game going to charge people 15$ a month to play. The number one mistake companies are making is to believe that ‘WoW’s formula = MMORPG’ and keep doing the same things with only minor tweaks and making games that are not different enough from each other to justify people to keep paying to play them.

The payment model is one part of the problem. At 15$ a month, people will rarely play more than one sub MMO at a time. This makes people very picky, and reluctant to cough up that much for a game that they don’t feel is worth it because the gameplay feels too cliche.

I disagree with that assumption, because if that is correct, all a new MMO can do is cannibalize from other, already existing MMOs.

Some MMOs, such as Rift, are going straight for WoW players in trying to ‘out-WoW’ WoW. Others, such as TOR, are making more of an effort to bring in new MMO players into the fold by emphasizing the journey to max level.

WoW, with both the name cachet and the huge player base, is caught in the middle: if it spends too much time trying to lure in new players, it pisses off a lot of the existing playerbase to whom max level and raiding are everything. If WoW spends too much time on end game, it lets other MMOs get the new blood instead. Everything that WoW has done to attract new subs is really WoW trying to draw back old subs, not get entirely new players. The Scroll of Resurrection, the D3 lure, all of it plays most to either the existing player base or those who recently left. The free L1-L20 levels that they’re currently working with aren’t enough to cover social and story issues in the game.

Even I still enjoy the ‘classic style’ MMORPG from time to time nowadays, but I am personally totally over playing $15 a month for one. I did my 7 years of time in WoW and enjoyed it a lot, but I’m not interested in shelling out that much time and investment in some newer copycat.

Even if he is referring to EA trying to bend the laws of business to make tossing money down a hole blindly magically result in profitable returns, the fact is not only is stuff like 38 Studios’ example of blatant mismanagement not something new in MMOs (I can name 3 other examples off the top of my head; Horizons, Vanguard, and APB), but the failings of SWTOR’s entire design philosophy was being commented on months and months before it ever came out. Both of these games failures are nothing more than two of the most expensive examples of old lessons that you’d think MMO devs would’ve learned years ago.