The saga begins...

$1.5 billion. Random figure, perhaps? Well, not really - in fact, it’s very relevant to MMORPGS today, because that’s how much money World of Warcraft is taking in annually (assuming a few less than 9 million players at $15 a month). Yeah, I’d always thought MMOs were nice little moneyspinners, but when I did the maths I couldn’t believe it. Blizzard are taking $1,500,000,000 - if you were earning $10 an hour and working a 40-hour week, that’d take you just shy of 80,000 years to match. Nice little moneyspinner? I’d say so.

With the current levels of WoW subscriptions, the money brought in could buy a space shuttle within 15 months. They cost $2.1 billion.

Now, I don’t play WoW any more, but I think it’s still a good game. It’s far from perfect, but I admire Blizzard for taking the bull by the horns and COMPLETELY rewriting the MMO genre. It’s quite interesting, because I was reading the book ‘No Logo’ the other day (an interesting read), which talks about companies like Nike simply selling themselves and an image, rather than actually selling clothes. Blizzard haven’t quite reached that stage yet, but I seriously doubt WoW would have got the attention it did had it not been made by Blizzard, with their outstanding pedigree. This has an upshot, if you think about it. Blizzard know their name is valuable, as they’ve canned duff games before, even when they’ve spent years making them. Warcraft Adventures, anyone? Why this is good is simple. Starcraft 2. Blizzard are going to make that game awesome even if only to protect their brand name, no matter how much money they need to spend. It’s fairly clear they’re also going to be priming the SC universe for a MMO set there, too - but that’s another story. See ‘Blizzard’s next-gen MMO’ for my thoughts on that.
So, back to more immediate concerns. What’s going on in the world of MMOs? Well, at this moment there’s a lot up in the air that, frankly, could come down anywhere. The Burning Crusade came out a while ago now and with no other expansion looming for at least six months, WoW is probably at it’s most vulnerable point yet. It’s a veritable pensioner by now, coming up three years old in November. A few weeks ago now, the lead guild downed the end boss of the most recently added expansion, Illidan. As far as I’m aware, at the time nobody else had even seen him - the nearest competitors were nine bosses behind. The 20-30th ranked guilds (in the world, we’re talking guilds that dominate their sever here) were entire instances behind them. I don’t see Blizzard adding any new high-end raid content for a while, so basically these kiddies have ‘completed’ WoW. All that’s left is farming the instances to gear up, and then butchering people with it in PvP. Woo. Whether or not this the raids being available from expansion launch is a good thing is debatable when contrasted with the previous mode of gradually releasing new content when a significant number of high-end guilds had existing content on farm (see my debate on ‘raid progression’), but it does seem like WoW might be starting to falter a little. Should Blizzard be worried? Well, possibly, if they scan the horizon.

Burning Crusade, already been completed. Is WoW starting to falter or is it only getting stronger?

Two big names are on their way in. Age of Conan should be hitting stores in late October, while Warhammer Online is also chugging steadily nearer, slated for an early 2008 release date. LOTRO seems to be doing well enough, but we’ll give it a few months to see what happens with it. Everquest II also seems to be quietly growing in popularity after the announcement of the upcoming Rise of Kunark expansion scheduled for November, which aims to bring back arguably the best loved continent of the big daddy of all MMORPGS, the original EQ. If they do that well, you do wonder if EQ2 might enjoy a mini-renaissance. Given what the devs currently seem to be churning out, it’s certainly a possibility. Next post, I’ll go into the upcoming games in more detail.

Hektor, over and out.