Is World of Warcraft Doomed?
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In the 120,000+ player chart, we've got our champions. Lets disregard Lineage and Lineage II because I'll not be held accountable for Korean Internet Café based madness. At number 3 we have World of Warcraft, still very young and on its initial box sale spike much like Planetside and City of Heroes before it. I'm here to talk about something a little more established. Number 4 and Number 5 are Final Fantasy XI and Everquest, firmly members of the (Old School Slayers) category. One thing you'll immediately note about them: Their subscription went up and stayed up consistently. In the case of Everquest, it may have been due to it being there at the right time, but Final Fantasy XI has no such excuse.
Now, in all fairness, obviously total extinction has not occurred to City of Heroes or Planetside. There are still people playing both, these MMOGs are (to my knowledge) still pulling a profit. However, this does not mean that they have differentiated themselves from a standard game, because you can be certain there are also still people playing Diablo II. Clearly, there is a core following of players who are quite happy with a given well-made game who are slow to clear out. World of Warcraft, being a well-made game, is not going to suddenly go from hundreds of thousands of players to nothing.
Based on past trends of similar styled games, World of Warcraft will not retain players the same way that Everquest and Final Fantasy XI have. I expect it will fall to somewhere between a half to a quarter of its current subscribers. This is ratio greater than that lost in Planetside and City of Heroes because I believe the "core following" is far less than the runaway success World of Warcraft has been would indicate.
