World Of Warcraft Crushing PC Game Industry?

simoniker writes "Age of Empires co-creator and Iron Lore co-founder Brian Sullivan has been discussing his studio's first game, Titan Quest, but along the way has openly wondered whether World Of Warcraft's success is part of the reason for the decline of the PC retail game market. Sullivan commented: 'For retail PC games, I think the biggest problem is World of Warcraft... It is such a compelling MMO game that it sucks up a lot of money and time that would normally be spent on other retail PC games.' Does WoW's growth actually mean that PC games in other non-MMO genres may sell fewer copies?"

Re:Actually, not..

[Durrok]

Problem with TQ is that you basically play the same game through each time. Mobs are the exact same place with each character, maps are the same, etc. In D2 it was kind of like this but the randomization of the maps added a lot of replay ability.

There is also WAY too much loot that drops in that game. There is no real money sinks so you just keep getting more and more money with nothing to spend on it. I've started not picking up items that aren't green or blue because there is simply no point. Speaking of items, there is no "chest" or something equivalent to it to store your items. This means if you are trying to collect a set of something you have to keep it on your person all times. Not a real big deal but it just annoys me, especially early on in the game when space is still a commodity.

Lastly, you can bring your single player characters into multiplayer so there is going to be rampant hacking.

Other then that, yeah, it's a great game. :p

Re:Loads of Bad Games

[ToxikFetus]

RPGs have always been better sellers than other titles because there is a strong market for them.

Apparently you slept through 1995-1997. Yes, some gems came out in that period (Diablo), but the CRPG market was pretty dead until Fallout and Baldur's Gate arrived in late 1997-1998.

WoW can be played casually

[andi75]

Many people complain that WoW either sucks up your whole time, or you don't get anywhere. That's not true, you can easily play the game two evenings / week and still see the whole end game content.

The solution? Find a group that's *organized* (i.e. has a webpage and a forum). Their raids have fixed schedules. You show up at 7:50 p.m., buff up, raid starts at 8:00 and at +/- 23:30 you can go to sleep. Since the big raid instances only reset once a week, you don't have to do more than two evenings (and if your group is getting really good, you can even clear MC in 4 hours), which you would have wasted with reading slashdot or watching TV anyways.

- Rhonac (60 Shaman on Thunderhorn EU).

In my experience, ppl don't have time.

[aztektum]

You've pretty much hit it on the head.

My friend runs a guild with about 50 ppl in it, not including alts. He's a student and has his summers off and other than a trip to China which was for credit in school, he's done nothing this summer but sit and play WoW. The ppl in his guild come home from work and sit and play WoW. It's actually fairly frustrating because we were working on some personal projects that he's relegated to "After I play this raid/hit lvl xx/get through this dungeon." So I'm seeking help elsewhere (since i'm a horrid programmer) and have found some former WoW players who were able to get away.

He gets away with playing as much as he does because his g/f comes home from work and plays with him. I suppose though, 6 million people globally play. I would wager the population of just the US that sits and watches TV all day is higher.

Cash

[phorm]

MMORPG's are the goose that keeps on laying golden eggs. Once you've got somebody hooked in to monthly fees and a continual source of revenue, why make anything else?

I do think that the whole MMO trend has somewhat set back regular games. I personally don't have the time to devote to Massively Multiplayer world's, and have found the selection of non-MMO titles somewhat lacking (although I am tempted to try EVE or something else that doesn't require constant massive time injections).

No shards in EVE?

[the_raptor]

You really believe EVE could be as popular as WoW and have no shards? I played EVE for over a year and a half (I was in the Jericho Fraction and Aegis Militia for most of it) and for most of that time it was unplayable at peak hours or in hub systems. Even CCP were smart enough to create a separate shard for the Chinese market, and that will probably be broken into more shards if it gets really popular over there. EVE has around a hundred thousand active players, WoW has millions, you couldn't buy a pipe fat enough to allow hundreds of thousands of people to play on the same shard (and even if you could the game wouldn't work with thousands of people at the same system let alone the same planet).

And the main difference between EVE and WoW is that WoW is casual. I was a high end player in EVE and there was far to much work involved in keeping an effective PVP corporation going (logistics is what wins wars in real life and EVE). It was a second job to the people that did it. People whine about having to put in eight hours a week to do end game in WoW, the logistics people I knew put in eight hours a day, and high end PVP corps expected you to be on call whenever you where online (Band of Brothers). I got sick of a game being like a job (it took me three days to move my gear from one base to another) and now I play WoW. And the PVP is just as good, with none of the problems of having to go to extremes to find targets, or a 5:1 ratio of grinding to PVP, or every second PVPer being rigged to run away rather then fight.

MMORG - it's a trend.

[wonkcity]

Perhaps my personal experience will shed some light.

Some time ago my gaming troop was playing tribes2 and waiting/watching/wishing for the new version of Tribes, the new Halflife (which we thought would be an online co-operative at the time) and some other games to come out.

We waited. And waited... and there were delays.. and we waited. We played some Unreal Tournament, etc.

Then while waiting since there was nothing going on, we tried FFXI (Final Fantasy IX - a Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game).

We have been playing that for 2+ years now. The new titles came out but we were already satisfied and only one or two of us purchased the new titles.

The game industry lost our troop as customers by taking too long to bring out the next titles.

Some of the group who were playing FFXI concurrently went to try WoW (World of Warcraft a MMORG) but they then came back to FFXI because WoW didn't have the holding power over post-teen gamers FFXI did.

Some of the group (including myself) went to try EVE but eventually dropped that and came back to FFXI. reasons: Servers kept crashing and you couldn't get to parts of the game unless you devoted your life to it and joined a big alliance. To be in a big alliance you had to use some sort of voice-chat and manage 'chat rooms', etc in order to tell your alliance buddies not to frag you because you were about to jump to a new section of the game they happned to be camping. (Camping: to wait for something to happen in-game)

quick note: To those who say you have to devote your life to an MMORG, well you can but I play FFXI for 4 hours a week or less.

The short of it:
I won't be buying another title for my PC anytime soon.

The long of it:

A good MMORG has advantages over new game titles. Below is why our troop moved to FFXI.

1) no hardware upgrades needed since we are still playing the same title for 2+ years. The only hardware upgrades we made are those we chose to make. (one of us bought a Dell 24" screen monitor just for playing FFXI)
2) new content comes out so the game 'grows' and has new things to do/explore
3) new upgrades/content are also for co-operative online play (unlike HL2 (Half Life 2) which was dissapointingly only single player)
4) the server infrastructure for online play is maintained by monthly fee. (I used to be against monthly fees but ran into HORRIBLE performance from the 'free' servers,etc.)
5) Things done in-game builds add to your characters standing and thus to your playing experience. -a game like AOE (Age of Empires) is played against other players, but each time you start a new match, you start from scratch again.
6) We don't have to learn a new interface, a new strategy or run into new setups and connections and new passwords for new accounts... etc. etc.
7) If you want to be busy or relaxe you can choose. Playing styles such as micro-management or laid back playing can be chosen by character 'job' type. I.E. those who want to play and be 'very busy' (example: FFXI job 'Red Mage') can play side by side with those who want to relax. (example: FFXI job 'Monk')
8) I could go on but don't wan't to be a bore.

Re:Wrong argument?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's exactly why I quit playing WoW. I don't have the time to devote to playing it. You cannot spend an hour at a time playing WoW and advance to level 60. If an instance requires 4 hours to complete, that's 3 hours too many. Maybe I judged this game unfairly, but I got to level 20 and quit simply because it demanded too much continuous play time to have a single sitting be productive. For most other games I enjoy you can put in a half hour to an hour at a time and finish the whole game at your own pace. That may be indicative of the genre though, WoW is the only MMO I've tried. I loved StarCraft and the earlier WarCrafts. You can go online and play a round or 5 of StarCraft in less than an hour depending on the map in use and number of players of course.