IGN: WoW drops to 5.6 mil subscriptions.What happens to the GENRE when the end comes?

[maniacalpha1-1]

http://www.ign.com/articles/2015/08...medium=PC&utm_content=7&utm_campaign=Blogroll

So what happens when WoW reaches the end, functionally within the industry even if a few holdouts last 30 more years? I would say that when it drops below 1 million that is a functional end to its role in the industry.

Will it still be copied by up and coming gold-prospecting gamemakers trying to make a cloning buck? Will the playerbase be ready to pick up a new game or will they be too old or uninterested?

And if a significant portion of the playerbase IS available to play new games, will it have any effect on what kind of games are developed? Will they all continue the recent drive to become more accessible/easy/every class can do everything/max level in 2 weeks or less/etc?

Edit: This is NOT about what happens to WoW itself, it's about how the industry will change as a result.

 

[pontifex]

does anyone but wow players even care?

 

[Fanatical Meat]

It will go F2P then limp along for a few years

 

[tential]

That we can get real MMORPGs again?
WoW completely dumbed down and destroyed the MMORPG genre....
If there is one game I could remove from gaming history, it would be WoW.

Edit: If we got Warcraft 4 instead of WoW.... that would have been heaven. A world in which WoW was never made, and we got Warcraft 4? Too much awesome.

 

[maniacalpha1-1]

I don't care about what happens to WoW itself, I simply wonder if the freed-up playerbase would help fund the creation of new games that right now, developers would decline, stating "that design is too niche, it wouldn't make financial sense to make design choices like that.".

That we can get real MMORPGs again?
WoW completely dumbed down and destroyed the MMORPG genre....
If there is one game I could remove from gaming history, it would be WoW.

Edit: If we got Warcraft 4 instead of WoW.... that would have been heaven. A world in which WoW was never made, and we got Warcraft 4? Too much awesome.

Exactly what I was getting at!

 

[Fingolfin269]

I think the whole genre is basically dying. Time for something fresh.

 

[lupi]

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2408111&page=22

 

[maniacalpha1-1]

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2408111&page=22

This is not about WoW itself, but about what happens in the industry. I'm guessing there will be lots of attempts to make it about WoW itself, though.

 

[HitAnyKey]

The players will have more time to play other games?

 

[Gryz]

So what happens when WoW reaches the end, functionally within the industry even if a few holdouts last 30 more years? I would say that when it drops below 1 million that is a functional end to its role in the industry.

There is no role. There is no definition of that role. There is no exact number where the border is, between playing that role or not. People make all these things up.

Less people want to play WoW today. That's all there is to it.

Will it still be copied by up and coming gold-prospecting gamemakers trying to make a cloning buck?

The last WoW-clone was Wildstar, just over a year ago. The one before that was GW2 in fall 2012, and Tera in spring 2012. I am not aware of any new "WoW-like MMO" in development right now. Nobody is cloning WoW anymore.

Will the playerbase be ready to pick up a new game or will they be too old or uninterested?

There is no "one playerbase". You can't talk about them in a general sense. There have been over 100 million people who have played or tried WoW over the last 10 year. Good luck trying to predict their future actions as a group.

... will it have any effect on what kind of games are developed? Will they all continue the recent drive to become more accessible/easy/every class can do everything/max level in 2 weeks or less/etc?

There is no one direction. You can look at a few games, and say they have been dumbed down. Then look at games like Dark Souls, and you see that the opposite can be successful too. The 2 best games on PC since Skyrim in 2011 have been 2 recent games: GTAV and TW3. Maybe you like GTAV and TW3 or not, but you can't say they are really dumb games.

So what exactly do you want to us to discuss here ? Something broad as "the industry" ? Games ? Only MMORPGs ?

I'll give you a few random points of view that you might find relevant.

1) Consoles have a lower piracy rate. Therefor a lot of publishers are going to focus on consoles. Of course there will be exceptions.

2) The number of retards in the world is a lot higher than the number of MIT grads. Therefor many publishers are going to target their games to retards, and not MIT grads. Of course there will be exceptions.

3) Yearly performance increase in CPUs has almost halted. Yearly performance increase of GPUs have slowed down from 100% increase per year 15 years ago, to 30% per year now. It will slow down even further, as smaller transistors will become increasinly expensive to make. Therefor fewer games can depend purely on new technology. Hopefully game developers will focus again on fun gameplay.

4) Software tools do keep improving. Which should lower cost of development. If you can develop AAA-quality games for a lot less than the $20M-$100M that current AAA games cost, then the industry can diversify into many more new and obscure genres. Like books, they cost almost nothing to develop. And therefor you can find books for any small niche you can think of. Hopefully the same will happen with games. (Example: I expect that most gamers will find this game completely uninteresting. But I want to play it. I really want to play it. If games like Tangiers can be developed on a low budget, so that it breaks even with just 100k sales, the future might be bright).

 

[tential]

Did you seroiusly just quote Dark Souls as a game that isn't "dumbed down"?

I could write essays on how terrible that game is, and still not come close to how poor the combat and control system in that game are not to mention how pathetic their idea of "difficulty scaling" is. Jesus what a horrendously made game, the fact that the PC gaming community found such a game difficult is just a testament to how little gamers are willing to try at ANYTHING anymore. Just read neogaf to see how people want a "press a to continue" game.

And on Triple A gaming, that doesn't cost a lot just because it's a massive game. THey bring in massive names/marketing budgets with them. So it's no wonder they cost a lot to develop.

 

[tential]

On the topic of the OP about the playerbase,
I think the playerbase of WoW will simply splinter off into new games. TBH, I don't think many of them were ever "hardcore" MMO players. WoW was just a great fun game for them.
Playing WoW was a long cool fad in gaming that's come to an end IMO. MMORPGs blew up after WoW and people who never heard of an MMORPG were playing them. I think now, they'll leave the MMO space, and MMO's will become more intricate and interesting again.

AT least I hope so anyway.

 

[maniacalpha1-1]

MMOs/MMORPGs, sure.

1. As far as consoles, I know at least a couple of MMORPGs will be/are on them. I don't mind that so much as I do that (despite that they could support KBM) developing for consoles means developing for gamepads. EverQuest Next, to the extent it actually exists and is not vaporware, is a good example of it (EQ1 with dozens of abilities, EQN simplifying to 8 or so). I don't know about TESO, I know it's on console but I don't know if console influenced its design significantly in that way.

3,4: What about DX12? I don't know how much of MMO relies on what that will help with; but will it provide any gains?

 

[Newell Steamer]

WoD took the excitement out of WoW.

I am skipping the next expansion pack.

Blizzard has been pretty disappointing in the last few years.

 

[bystander36]

That we can get real MMORPGs again?
WoW completely dumbed down and destroyed the MMORPG genre....
If there is one game I could remove from gaming history, it would be WoW.

Edit: If we got Warcraft 4 instead of WoW.... that would have been heaven. A world in which WoW was never made, and we got Warcraft 4? Too much awesome.

WoW had a good direction until WotLK (2nd expansion). At that point, they started putting extremely casual friendly features that had a side effect of killing off what made MMO's great. What followed is that everyone else followed their lead.

So yeah, I agree, but they didn't start off bad. They just got greedy after some great success.

The worst part of it all, is that every other MMO followed suit and completely turned me off of MMO's entirely. There is no point of an MMO without strong social aspects, and every MMO these days has dumbed everything down and effectively killed the need for social interaction.

 

[lupi]

This is not about WoW itself, but about what happens in the industry. I'm guessing there will be lots of attempts to make it about WoW itself, though.

then remove WoW and your thread deletes itself. there isn't any non-asian mmo with subscription number to matter in itself.

 

[bystander36]

I guess my point is that WoW killed the aspect of what MMO's are about over the course of their reign. I doubt anyone can bring back the magic at this point, as it is would likely be hard to bring back what makes an MMO great in today's ADD environment. No one wants to be forced to socialize and pay money when there are so many other MMO's which are free and can allow you to be anonymous.

Unfortunately, without that need to form groups the old fashioned way, few people make social connections, which is about the only thing an MMO does better than a single player game.

 

[Pwndenburg]

I'm playing ffXIV now, I'm finding the community to be pretty excellent. However, back to the console problem. I believe the global cooldown is about a second too long because of consoles.

 

[Tsavo]

The genre isn't dying. Lots of games are doing incredibly well. FFxx and GW2 to name a couple.

The MMOs that are doing poorly aren't suffering because of a perceived decline in the genre, but because they were crap games.

WoW is taking it in the shorts on subs because the last half of WoD is junk. People want to play WoW, 10MM subs at WoD launch is proof of this, but they don't want to play junk.

 

[clok1966]

The doom and gloom thread, there inst a single MMO game that wouldn't blow a monkey to have those numbers, heck even half or a third of them. Its been said many times they need about 250,000 users to make a game "work" and sustain, 500,000 is where its very worthwhile and you can pump some decent content out. WoW at its current decline rate means in about 20+ years we can ask the OP question as it will be down to those numbers.
But i think the OP question is when this genre cant support itself. Gaming has always gone in cycles, it all comes around. Point and click adventures dominated the late 80's early 90's and where all but dead till just recently where they have made a comeback. Text games are pretty much dead, but still have a few coming out, and have good reviews. No style ever dies, most of the time the lack of ability to not copy others (wow is just a copy) and have your own ideas cause the glut that makes Genre's "die out", to much of the same makes anything seem uninteresting. About the only genre that seems to headbutt this rule, FPS, my god, can game devs make anything else?

MMORPG's are not dying out, there is a glut, and a 10+ year old game (think about it, any game that last 10 years is beyond fantastic!) that has been the poster child for how to print money (and still is) even in decline shows that its not really going away, its just cleaning up the trash.

 

[Grooveriding]

The game is finally dying out. I think it has 2 expansions left in it before it goes free to play. It's about time. Hopefully something new and innovative arrives because WoW has been dull and uninspired for a long while now. The only good thing left in the game is raiding, everything else is awful.

Blizzard as a whole is no longer the incredible game dev they once were. They're just trying to keep churning out cash from the game as long as they can. The corporate side of the company knows the game is on its way out and they are trying to milk it for what they can before it goes legacy. I think the genre its self is failing and that something new needs to happen.

The meta of what an MMO is has to be changed by something new. The traditional approach every company is taking, the one WoW has, is stale and boring at this point.

 

[Gryz]

Did you seroiusly just quote Dark Souls as a game that isn't "dumbed down"?

I didn't say it was good, did I ?

I wanted to like DS1 and DS2. I tried them both briefly. Controls sucked. The HUD sucks. Movement sucks. Combat sucks. Inventory sucks. The renderer and graphics suck. Everything technical and gameplay-wise sucks. Respawning enemies suck. Getting weaker as you die often, sucks. The invasions and pvp suck.

But it is not an easy game. The bosses are not a walk-over. And even if you think (like I do) that the difficulty is artificially inflated, because of bad controls, enemies respawning, etc, etc, it is still not an easy game.

Compare that to WoW. In WoW there are two game elements. 1) The latest raid (Hellfire Citadel) and 2) everything else. Raiding the latest raid is always hard in WoW. You need to prepare your character (get the best gear you can get your hands on, enchants, gems, flasks, etc). And you need to prepare yourself (read tactics, get addons, tweak your HUD, etc). If you don't do that, you will not be successful in raiding. Not mything, not heroic, and probably not even in normal. (Walk into a normal-mode raid with 20-30 people who are undergeared, didn't read tactics, not gemmed and enchanted, no addons, and see how it goes).

Everything else is easy in WoW. Like really easy. When you level from 1 to 85, you will not die. Not even once, unless you go AFK at the wrong time. And even then, mobs might hit your for 3 minutes, and you'll still not die. No quest is hard. Most elites are removed from the world. The few that are left can easily be soloed. No group quests left. Professions require zero thought. You can't go wrong with talents anymore. Etc, etc.

I played for part of the year in MoP in 2014. You know what the hardest things was I did in those months ? I defeated the Celestial Tournament with my pets. Yep, acquiring the pets to prepare for the CT was imho harder, took more time and effort than raiding. (I went 9/13 in heroic SoO (later called Mythic SoO). That's how sad WoW is these days. And WoD made it even worse.

So yes, Dark Souls is a lot harder than WoW. And there is a lot less handholding. Therefor I would call Dark Souls a lot less dumbed-down than WoW.

 

[ewdotson]

In a perfect world:

- Fewer new MMOs would try to be all things to all players in a desperate attempt to live up to WoW's numbers. It would be a good thing if games narrowed their focus.
- More MMOs would be willing to accept "is it profitable" as the metric to be judged by rather than "does it make so much money we can use $100 bills as toilet paper"?

In practice, I'm guessing it'll just mean more WoW clones until the genre goes the way of RTSs.

 

[Genx87]

WoW will be around another 20 years. Ultima Online turns 18 years old this Sept. It maxed out around ~250k subscribers.

Anyways I think the genre is tired. How many skins can a developer put on the same basic mechanics? Going forward the industry will have niche products that cater to smaller populations. But the games have more potential to be great imo.

 

[Gryz]

3,4: What about DX12? I don't know how much of MMO relies on what that will help with; but will it provide any gains?

DX12 has multiple new features. Just like every DX release had. I suppose you are referring to the most anticipated feature, which is that DX12 will allow engine-developers to program "much closer to the metal" ?

That helps in only one situation. That is when you have a relatively slow CPU coupled with a relatively fast GPU.

Example: any AMD cpu, or an Intel i3 cpu, with a top-end GPU, like a gtx980(ti) or AMD R9 Fury. Or when you do have a top-end CPU, but you have 2 or 3 high-end videocards in SLI or CF. In those cases, DX12 will help. For the gamers who have a i[57]-[2345]xxx CPU and a fast videocard, not much will change.

Of course there will be exceptions. I believe that RTS games with lots and lots of units on screen might benefit more than other games. Yes, maybe MMOs might benefit too, but I doubt it. Also, implementing this feature in DX12 means you have to completely redesign the main skeleton of your renderer. And you need to readjust your renderer every time a new family of GPUs is released. Big engines, like Unreal, CryEngine, FrostBite, Blizzard's engine, Unity, etc, will certainly implement the improvements. And I expect high-tech engines by smaller companires will do it too (like those of the Metro games, of CDPR of the Witcher, etc). But lots of games will not programming the bare metal. Don't expect DX12 in the new Fallout, or in the next Elder Scroll game. Bethesda will just not bother.