Azaroth

Although I haven’t seen the exact way that they calculate subscribers, I’m guessing that it’s fluffed in one way or another. I’m just a cynical like that. How many of you would be playing if WoW listed its current subscribers as 250k? The answer is “not as many”. Also, don’t call me Alex.

The most interesting part about all of this is, I think, all of the hate coming from other individual game developers. Which is natural. Jealousy breeds hate. And it’s easy to conclude that “WoW is ruining the chances of every smaller MMO on the market… which must be the reason mine isn’t doing well!”. However, I think this conclusion is downright silly, and I’ll tell you why.

First of all, these subcribers don’t, for the most part, come from existing MMOs. I’m sure UO has lost 75,000 subscribers to WoW, as have other older games. However, the biggest MMO prior to WoW happened to be EQ, and it happened to have 500,000 or less subscribers. Very simply, the majority of the 9 million current WoW subcribers are playing their first MMO.

Now, if it weren’t for WoW, theoretically I suppose that these people might be playing other MMOs. However, the fact that they weren’t playing onlines games before WoW makes this highly improbable. The fact is that these people were brought in by Blizzard and Vivendi, where the chances are that they wouldn’t have been brought into the online gaming universe otherwise. In fact, just the simple act of announcing extremely high account numbers brings more people in. Everyone wants to be part of the phenomenon. Nobody wants to be a part of that thing that 100,000 people worldwide do – except existing gamers.

So it’s a given that World of Warcraft brought these people in, but opining that it’s a bad thing for them to have them because they brought them in is a little silly as well. There’s always a hemorrhage of players, and Blizzard can’t hold all of those 9 million subscribers indefinitely. Admittedly most of them will disperse into games in China and Asia in general, since that’s where a lot of them are, and where a lot of the future market is. But here in the west, the facts remain the same. No matter what games Blizzard opens in the future, or what expansions they put out for WoW, they won’t be able to hold these 9 million people indefinitely. In fact, the churn of accounts has already meant big things for the MMO industry. Specifically for games like Eve, I imagine, and even Vanguard. By its budget, Vanguard is supposedly quite a failure. However, I last saw its subscriber level listed at around 200,000. With 250,000 in Eve, 350k in EQII, 60k in UO, and, hell, countless others in smaller games and even free MMOs… you’ve already surpassed the previous count of MMO subscribers sans-WoW by leaps and bounds.

So like I said on another site, because you start wishing death destruction and cocacola on Blizzard’s datacenters, just remember that they’re bringing in people that wouldn’t have been playing these games otherwise – and that a lot of those people will end up playing other games, even if WoW’s subscriber base remains relatively the same. 50% will leave over the next couple of years, and another 4.5 million will come in to replace them in all likelyhood.

And remember that shutting off the servers entirely as some have suggested out of general spite would be a worse idea then letting these players disperse organically when they’ve become fed up with WoW. Force them to find a new game, and you’ve got a bunch of cynical players looking to tear apart every feature and magnify every bug. Let them get terribly sick of WoW (which, trust me, is very possible with any game that’s heavily PvE dependent), and suddenly they’re praising the next game they choose to play in part to coax their guildmates and friends over, and in part simply because because they’re sour.

So if you’re a developer of another online game, or even just a player of a smaller MMO, remember – something like WoW only increases everyone’s potential in the long run. Stop hating yo’.