Summary: When people remember 2007 in the MMORPG genre, it will be remembered as much for what didn't happen as what didand for a game launched years before. Of the four major scheduled 2007 MMO launches, two slipped into 2008.
The website of WarCry look at the current state of the market and wonders if the western subscription model has died.
The details are as below:
When people remember 2007 in the MMORPG genre, it will be remembered as much for what didn't happen as what didand for a game launched years before. Of the four major scheduled 2007 MMO launches, two slipped into 2008. EA Mythic's Warhammer Online and Funcom's Age of Conan were delayed, while Turbine's Lord of the Rings Online which was supposed to launch in 2006 made its mark and NCsoft's Tabula Rasa struggled in the tail end of the year.
And so, yet again, the year-in-review looks bleak. It's been three full years since World of Warcraft redefined the subscription MMO genre, and they were still the biggest story of 2007. Blizzard launched an expansion pack, continued to pile on the subscribers and brought their game into the mainstream of popular culture.
Yet, while World of Warcraft has been celebrated as a major step forward for the genre, the game for all its done right and all the success it has had- has become an albatross around the neck of the genre.
Since it launched, only two traditional subscription-based MMORPGs launched and found any degree of success: City of Villains and Lord of the Rings Online. The former, a glorified expansion pack to City of Heroes, reinvigorated the game and sold well. The later came into view with a massive intellectual property behind it and while the game undoubtedly found financial success, it likely didn't make nearly the dent Turbine hoped, as evidenced by the company's decision to replace CEO Jeff Anderson. Every other truly successful, "mainstream" subscription-based MMO launched before World of Warcraft and of them, only one EVE Online appears to have made significant strides forward since.
Lord of the Rings Online, 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.
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