Sure. Absolutely. That’s market competition, right? If Blizzard don’t get some of the gamers’ attention and money, then they go out of business.
And the only way they can get their attention and money is by making appealing games.
And all companies try to do that, and some succeed and others don’t.
Yada yada, nothing new.
Right now Blizzard are riding the end-tail of their past successes. They can’t keep doing that.
So if Blizzard wants to compete in the future market against Riot and Nintendo and Rockstar and what they’re all called, then they need something new.
I don’t think that’s an improved WoW. I don’t think it’s a revamped WoW. I don’t think it’s WoW at all.
It’s a new game. Games even.
This is the easiest way of explaining it:
This model is the holy bible to anyone who’s had business economics.
WoW is a cash cow. Around 20 years ago it was a star. It can’t be a star again. It can become a dog, but Blizzard will try to maintain it as a cash cow.
That’s it. WoW’s entire future lies in that yellow square with the image of a cow.
That’s business.
If Blizzard wants new stars (and they do), then they have to make new games.
See those are the questions I am curious about, and I think the OP leaned into a bit as well.
The first one: Would WoW 2 even be appealing to the general gaming market or young players? Do they even know what Warcraft is? Would they even care to learn about it? Is Warcraft even popular beyond the existing WoW players?
The second one: Is another MMO going to be “the next big thing”? I don’t know. I personally feel like the concept doesn’t garner much excitement anymore, because it’s been done so many times. Battle Royale wasn’t an MMO, but it became “the next big thing”. So does future success from Blizzard have to begin with their game being an MMO at all? In the light of Baldur’s Gate III, does success even require that the game is multiplayer?
It’ll be curious to see what answers Blizzard has to those questions.
Well said, And honest reply… And very fair questions too ask… None of witch I hold the answers too.
But I hope WoW 2 would be appealing and give the young ones the same experience we had… And make it warcraft.
I think mmo’s are always going too be appealing… Who wouldn’t wanna make a character in a fantasy world rich with lore and story and a whole world too explore? I think that idea will always be enticing no matter the generation.
Who wouldn’t wanna ‘‘live’’ in a magical world rich with fantasy and magic and fantasy xD surely that appeal will always be there cross generations.
There was an (horizontal) Vertical-ish progression during Icebrood Saga in the form of buffs you get in the Maps and Strikes of IBS and there was a robot upgrade giving you as much as +25% HP in EoD. I’ve never heard anyone saying it should not be in the game (IBS was criticized but for story and patch content cadence, not for this). If there’s anything, the community seems actually to ask for a little bit more vertical progression, as pretty much all the equipment slots now have it’s own legendaries, resulting in Anet to add new slots of equipment and types of weapons (Relics and the coming Land Spear). If anything, those addition are light vertical as they’re vertical but not for a long time after their expansion launch.
In my opinion, it lacks not much in terms of content, but there is a wall to climb when you want to start engaging with end-game content and Anet should release Strikes and Raid wings more frequently. To help aliviate this wall to climb Anet will launch the next Raid with 4 difficulties, to have a similar kind of progression than Wow with the last being (if it’s comparable to Cerus CM) at least comparable to the Wow’s Mythic Difficulty and the first being pretty much a story mode.
If this expansion raid is successful, we could see a raid coming out each expansion like that (one per year, which is far better than before and just about half-ish the number of raids wow release).
WoW is peak Warcraft, and Warcraft will never be more than what it is in WoW.
What we have in WoW is a game world that is built on the foundations of lore and story that goes back to the early 90’s. There’s more than 30 years of continuity in the understanding of the Warcraft universe. The amount of Warcraft material that exists is absolutely insane.
It is impossible to package and sell such a beast to anyone who isn’t already a veteran nerd of the franchise.
And few people are that these days.
WoW 2 can never be more appealing than WoW, because the Warcraft franchise is by its sheer monstrous size a frightening sight to all but its most devout followers. Us.
If Blizzard makes WoW 2 so that it’s appealing to you and me, then it’s never going to be appealing to a 12 year old. And if Blizzard makes WoW 2 appealing to a 12 year old, then you and I won’t want to play it.
So Blizzard are caught between a rock and a hard place.
Personally I don’t think they’ll do more Warcraft. The Warcraft franchise will exist within WoW and it will die with WoW.
My own little theory is that Blizzard will “birth” a new universe from within WoW by the end of the World Soul Saga, but it’ll be its own thing.
That way they can kind of have WoW 2 without it being WoW 2. They can have their cake and eat it too, if they’re smart about it.
But we’ll see.
MMO’s are dying because there is no innovation in the space and it costs too much money and takes too long to develop them. Releasing iterations on what came before, new players aren’t interested in playing a 2000s game with modern graphics, that’s why these games release and then die within a year.
Remember when Everquest Next was going to try to innovate and then it got cancelled? That was over a decade ago, the genre has been stale for a long time.
What argument were you trying to make here?
World of Warcraft - 2004
Final Fantasy XI - 2002
Final Fantasy XIV - 2010
Guild Wars 2 - 2012
SWTOR - 2011
EVE - 2003
Star Trek Online - 2010
The newest game in this list is 12 years old, Star Trek had peak player count of 7k on Steam 11 years ago, it was never popular.
Nobody ever said the game had to be recent.
We were talking about MMO games dying out, so I presented you a list of the top games currently being played with active, stable player bases.
Just because the game is old, doesn’t mean it’s dead or invalid.
Sands, look at EverQuest, they’re even older and still around.
The genre is dead, no new games are being successfully released in the genre and no innovation is being made, it’s a stale genre with extremely expensive games that fail and die.
SWTOR, one of the most expensive games ever made had to be put on Steam to try to save it and it peaks at 5-10k players daily. These are life support games, don’t get me started on Final Fantasy XI which was shut down once and brought back to life where it has literally nobody playing it.
I was ready and waiting for something new as early as 2012. I thought the genre would develop and move on with great strides but instead we have the same games as 15-20 years ago dominating. It’s a sad state of affairs.
MMO’s won’t be popular again until they can provide a new experience, one that new players and generations will be pulled into like we were when WoW blew up. Old games remaining popular within their niche cannot save a genre and nothing currently being developed is doing anything new in the space.
I am not sure if this is the last annual report we saw but I couldn’t find anything for 2024
Wow figures will also go up if China is back. That was meant to happen late Summer 2024. No idea what is going on with that atm.
However as for CoD it does mention (at that time):-
Call of Duty approaches its 20-year anniversary in October with around 90 million monthly players, with over half of all engagement on the mobile platform.
