How MMORPGs Evolve - What You'll Be Playing in Three Years

My parents purchased our first computer when I was 9 years old. It was a top of the line machine for its time. It was one of the first machines to use a Pentium chip, running at 75 MHz and after a few months had the first edition of Windows 95 installed on it. After having spent the first few years of my life playing with old Mac computers that my elementary school had purchased during the Reagan administration, I was enthralled with the possibilities of this new machine in our living room.

Soon, the internet followed suit and I was equally enthralled. There was so much I could think to do; create art, write stories, research homework. As you might have guessed, it only took a couple more years before I realized the true purpose of the internet and what it held for me – games.

In 1999, I was with a group of my friends, watching two of them play Street Fighter, when someone popped out of the kitchen with a disc in his hands. It was an Ultima Online installation disc and by dinner time the next day all six of us were deeply involved in the online world of a MMORPG. I didn’t play Ultima quite as much as the rest of them in those early high school days.

I felt like I was abandoning too much to spend time on it. But, my high and mighty stance only lasted until I reached college and the real explosion of MMORPGs took place and I couldn’t help but be dragged into the middle of it. First, there was Final Fantasy XI. From the tender age of 10, I had played the Final Fantasy games religiously and the online version sounded like a great idea.

Alas, horrible customer service, a 2 year old computer, and the prospect of paying monthly fees for something that annoyed me more than anything else turned me off to the game. But then there was World of Warcraft.

I’m not an avid World of Warcraft player like so many others. I haven’t stayed on for days at a time, playing until I reach that last elusive level. I didn’t stand in line for the expansion pack only to complain about how disappointing it was a week later when I’d finished leveling up. No, that was my family and friends. But, I did put a few good months into that game and I did have a lot of fun with it.

My thoughts on the game though are slightly more philosophical, largely keyed by a three hour drive from my parents’ house to the airport in Pittsburgh when I visited them last month.

You see, my parents are huge fans of the game. Living in the midst of nowhere and not knowing too many people, they spend a lot of time at home. So, they picked a hobby that allowed them to socialize in some way and that was WoW. They both hit the maximum levels and bought the expansion, played it until there was no more to play and now largely pick apart the game’s short comings, talking about the next big MMORPG to hit the market this coming summer, Warhammer.

What I thought was largely interesting though was that with over 8 million users and an obvious corner on market share, Blizzard could let their game lapse at all. Consider the economics of running an MMORPG. First off, competition is limited only by attractiveness. It’s akin to selling cars. Everyone needs a car, right? Well, not many people can afford more than one car, and surely no one can drive more than one car at a time.

An online RPG is extremely time consuming. Those people complaining about the shortness of the expansion pack still spent 30 hours finishing the new leveling and only consider that time too short in comparison to the hundreds or thousands of hours input to the initial release. Who would have time to play a second MMORPG if they played WoW for 6 or 7 hours a night? Absolutely no one with any vestige of a live to live. There’s just no time.

So, the only way another MMORPG can become successful enough to stick around is to A)offer a franchise that everyone wants to play, for example Final Fantasy, or B) Offer a better experience. And yet, every month there are one or two more of the things on the market, offering nothing incredibly new or impressive and slowly dying off in a few months.

Does anyone remember that Star Wars Galaxies game a few years back? I didn’t think so. And now, with The Lord of the Rings MMORPG recently released and Warhammer on the way, where exactly are these new games going to find their users. The only true way to pull it off is to leech them from WoW.

Those very Lord of the Rings developers of course thought of this very matter, only proving my point, by offering up to three weeks of free play on the game, calling it an open beta. However, the game was free up until the very day of release, when you could buy the game and transfer your character to the purchased server access and play for real. The only way they could assure that they’d have any kind of user base on release was to give their game away and let it speak for itself.

What then, is the future of MMORPG’s? I honestly don’t see Blizzard giving up any kind of market share that WoW has developed. Sure, they disappointed a few people with a weak expansion pack, but still, after two and a half years of release, their game is the best out there. When a better game comes along, it can only succeed by leeching enough users and growing large enough to cover the development and upkeep costs.

And keep in mind that Blizzard has not released a new game in almost three years now, which is their usual gestation period for new software. With such a money making opportunity at their finger tips, don’t expect them to walk away from the chance to make a World of Warcraft 2 or a completely different online venture. Starcraft Online anyone?

For those many WoW fans out there, beginning to look around for a new experience though – keep in mind that the market is fickle and that if you don’t choose the right game, you may have wasted $50 on a game that no one plays, no one updates, and will eventually die a slow and painful death of disinterest.