Abalieno said:
At all.
Let"s be honest. WoW has an unexpected player retention but this is due to two main reasons:.
I disagree. You don"t keep 5+ million people from around the world due to two main reasons, or even 10, you do it because there are a million more reasons it"s good than it"s bad.
Abalieno said:
1- WoW is "king of the hill", and that fact alone builds retention and influx of new players. And this fact won"t change till WoW won"t have a serious competitor (and it won"t happen anytime soon).
2- The good retention the game still has is NOT due to what Blizzard did from release till today, but the great work on the "accessibility" that was done BEFORE release.:.
1) We can agree to disagree again Being king of the hill has zero affect on player retention imo. Players don"t continue to play a game that sucks, regardless of how many others are playing it.
2) I think the main reason it"s retained it"s massive player base is because Blizzard delivered what the umpteen millions of Blizzard fans expected. Blizzard was, imo, the third most branded franchise to ever enter the MMO space, following LoTR and Star Wars. Blizzard had almost a decade worth of branding the Warcraft world and of putting stuff into the game space with the Blizzard name on it, and they repeatedly pleased their customers by doing it right the first time. I don"t know about you but that matters to me. In this day and age, to KNOW I can buy a game and not have a mountain of issues before I can even log in is not something I take lightly, since basically no one else does it.
Abalieno said:
For example something that I repeat from *years* is that a soloable game usually can survive better on the longer term as it can depend less on the presence of other players.
But despite WoW has a very good retention, it is still a clone of a model that is DESTINED to a decline. This is a rule.
A game world based on THAT model can die more or less slowly, but the fact that it WILL die is assured.
WoW will die when they want it to. Saying an MMO world is going to eventually fade away is akin to saying the sun will come out tomorrow.
WoW may lose player base, but that modified number will still surpass by a factor of 10 at least, anything else done in the U.S. to date.
What I do love about them and the game is that there really is so much to learn from both as a development company and a player.
I"ve said it too many times already, but it is still fact imo, it has and always will come back to the game.
You can have the greatest brand on the planet, the coolest art, most involved and interesting storyline, but if your game sucks your game sucks and no amount of design or creative genius will get players to play.
I really think at the core of the development ideas you have to focus on trying NOT to make YOUR game.
I"ll give you an example.
PvP.... I absolutely hate it, always have. Having said that there is a MASSIVE PvP audience out there. To design a game and not include an incredibly in depth and well designed PvP system is, I think, bad business and stupid. Why alienate an enormous section of players because you don"t like an aspect of game play that a huge faction of fans does? Bottom line is you don"t, and you also realize that"s probably not the only thing that as the Founder of a Game company you don"t like, that will actually work.
That"s why you MUST have outside the box, innovative and envelope pushing talent in every arena of game development.
People that have worked for SOE, EA, Blizzard, Mythic, Midway, etc., they have all been there and done that and the good ones, while being part of teams that have developed things that DON"T work or have failed, they"ve gotten better because they learned from those mistakes and aren"t still trying to push round pegs in square holes. They are creating their own new pegs and holes based on trial and error that, and this is important to me, has PROVEN itself to not work in the game space and has already been battle tested by the masses.
