Regarding the financial side of it, I’m often curious what Blizzard does with the cash it makes from WoW. I mean if companies like SOE and Turbine produce new MMOs from the backing of old ones with only 125k subscribers, what’s Blizzard doing with the money it’s making from 11 million subscribers? Shouldn’t they be producing content and expansions at a lot faster pace? Or is it all getting funneled into their next MMO?

Gordon wrote:
SOE obviously believed their main audience was Everquest players….

This is incorrect from what I’ve heard. The target audience was people who tried EQ but didn’t like it. EQ1 sold over a million boxes but retained less than half of that, so (in the old scale of MMOs) that was a sizable audience. The developers didn’t just want to make “EQ improved” because they didn’t want to just cannibalize EQ players. One might argue that using the EQ name wasn’t the best move if they wanted to attract people who didn’t like EQ1, but I think that’s kind of minor.

By and large, the EQ2 team succeeded, though and have a healthy population. The problem, as I said over at Wolfshead’s blog, is one of context. If WoW hadn’t launched, I believe EQ2 would do a lot better and definitely would have a better perception. EQ2 only “failed” because WoW came along and eclipsed the game by providing largely the same type of gameplay. This isn’t to say that wishing for WoW to fall into oblivion is a good (or even possible) strategy, but it provides context for why a game with a fairly sizable following is considered a “failure” or one that needs to revamp their newbie experience (again) to try to gain more subscribers. As the guys over at Penny Arcade put it for Warhammer, “I want to know what it’s like to design a game that makes millions of dollars a month, millions, and is still considered a failure.”

I’m sure that unless the SOE management team has turn completely incompetent that EQ2 is doing fine. Keep in mind that with “only” about 125k subscribers playing AC and a questionable partnership with Microsoft, Turbine was able to create two modern and expensive MMOs pretty much simultaneously. That’s pretty awesome for a game that came in a distant third back in the EQ1 days. You don’t need WoW’s millions and millions to be successful, despite perception.

Heh, that makes two of us, Sharon. The only reason I hopped into the graphical MMO game area so late (Novemeber 2006) was due to the fact that I was still playing a MUD then. I was all, “Yeah, sure, why would I trade all this awesomeness, RP, interactivity, ability to change the world, being a part of the great community, and imaginative world for a stupid GRAPHICAL game where people LOL and have no idea how to write?”

Sadly, the ‘lol’ part still holds true, and sadly, people’s writing abilities have gone down the can since then. I -still- take the time to spell out everything. When someone says ‘thx’ to me, I still say ‘You’re welcome’ and NOT ‘np’ (UGH!).

Any/Many games of the RPG genre have the player spend a lot of time setting up their character. In those cases it’s actually part of the appeal, but the player often doesn’t actually experience any gameplay in the first 15 minutes, especially a new player who reads through all the choices.

And that’s okay.

Of course you need to have core gameplay to make a game good too, otherwise people leave in droves after the initial month.

WoW was clever and nailed both aspects.

Also, I agree with the first part of Openedge1’s comment:
“This same WoW player decides to go play another MMO and thinks they are an MMO expert and decry any other games mechanics because it is not WoW mechanics..

Though I don’t blame Blizzard for player’s decrying other games. Blizzard crafted another game that became immensely popular; a game that happens to be in the MMO space.

I blame first players for the shallow thought that if a new game is not exactly like the old one its bad. Second I blame creators of new games that try to craft and market their game as similar to WoW.