The Year The Subscription Model Died
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WoW casts a huge shadow and no one has been able to get out from under it. The evidence is in the numbers. Before WoW, EverQuest lorded over the genre with an estimated peak in the range of 500,000 subscribers. Star Wars Galaxies was at its most successful still considered a relative disappointment with over 300,000 subscribers. Games like Dark Age of Camelot once hovered well over the 200,000 mark. Then came WoW, now at 9.5 million and counting.
Other developers spouted off about how they wished Blizzard all the success in the world. It was reasoned that as Blizzard blazed new trails, other games would follow and pick up the table scraps. Everyone truly believed World of Warcraft would make the subscription-based MMO pie bigger for everyone. Three years later, the evidence says that is not true.
There is no doubt many of the old guard have suffered. The combination of time and Blizzard make the decline inevitable. For example, Dark Age of Camelot's numbers have fallen off considerably, as evidenced by their publicly available active user numbers. It is also obvious that a game like Star Wars Galaxies has suffered significantly from its missteps and is no where near its historic high. In fact, I would be shocked to see any pre-WoW AAA MMO with a Western subscriber level above 225,000.
