We Fly Spitfires – MMORPG Blog

If WoW died, China would face an economic recession

There’s been a lot of negative articles in the news lately about WoW and, although I’m not talking about the BBC here, I do mean big, well-known sites like Yahoo over smaller dedicated MMO gaming sites and blogs. Indeed, as much as the saying any publicity is good publicity (arguably) goes, getting the headline of “Is Warcraft in trouble?” or “Chinese prisoners forced to play World of Warcraft, make money for guards” splashed over the homepage of Yahoo can’t exactly be what Activision Blizzard were hoping for.

Although I highly doubt WoW is in any kind of serious trouble or going anywhere anytime soon, all of this high profile negativity did get me wondering – if WoW did die, would it be good for the MMO industry? I mean, let’s just imagine that for some freak reason Activision decided Warcraft wasn’t profitable enough any more, either due to lack of subscribers or increasing overheads or whatever, and pulled the plug on it completely in a servers offline, game over dude, end of days scenario. Would the MMO community as a whole be happy or sad? And, more importantly, would it have a positive or negative effect on the industry?

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There's more to life than money

I’ve been playing MMOs for over a decade and, as the years pass, I’ve starting to notice an uncomfortable trend of monetizing every aspect of our gaming. Bloggers have widely debated the pros and cons of subscription models versus free-to-play (aka micro payments) and that’s all fair and well yet, unfortunately, what we seem to be seeing now is the horrendous amalgamation of them both. More and more MMOs are now looking to offer a rather unpleasant combination of not only monthly subscriptions and additional purchasable one-off “extras” but also enhanced premium services. How come everything is all about money now?

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I feel compelled to return to WoW

I don’t often invoke the language of French but sometimes those lovely croissant monkeys have the perfect phrase to sum things up, in this particular case my feelings towards World of Warcraft. I commented today on Twitter how I hadn’t played RIFT in a while and yet, instead of feeling compelled to get back into it, I had the urge to return to WoW instead. Just what is it about that game that keeps luring me back like a sultry siren to a bad relationship? I quite officially a couple of months ago and stopped playing several weeks before that, so irritated and despondent with its community and achievement porn culture that I couldn’t take it any longer. But here I am again, contemplating resubscribing.

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If Sony really wanted to turn public opinion against their accused hackers then they shouldn't have picked ones with such a cool logo

Although my time in the MMO world has been limited as of late (I’ll let you all know why in about three weeks… ominous I know!) I’ve been following the news about Sony’s hacker problems quite closely. Surprisingly I’m feeling quite calm about the whole thing given that I have a PS3 hooked up the PSN with all of my (fortunately outdated) details and a stagnant SOE account. Sony sure does have a fair amount of information about me and the idea of it falling into the hands of Russian/Chinese/North Korean/Belgian hackers doesn’t exactly fill me with joy to say the least. Still, I’m pretty chilled about it all and, if anything, I’m actually feeling rather sympathetic towards Sony.

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I can't be the only one who sees a nipple here

I’ve probably been a little out of touch with the intricate goings on of MMO affairs this last week or two but, from what I can tell, everything (and by that I mean fanboi excitement) seems to have quietened down a bit. Is it just my imagination or have we suddenly entered a bit of a fallow period for the MMO industry? We had the big explosion of RIFT (again with the caps) back in February/March and now that the magic seems to have worn off we’re back to the same old drudgery of daily life waiting for the cycle to continue again.

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