Has World of Warcraft not only shaped the MMO genre but also destroyed it? Is the MMO market essentially not an MMO market at all, but just a market for World of Warcraft, just as the MOBA market essentially belongs only to League of Legends?
Rob Pardo, former Chief Creative Officer at Blizzard, stated during the Games-First event in Helsinki, Finland, that more and more developers were avoiding the term “MMO” and there is a specific reason for that: they shun the comparison with WoW.
When World of Warcraft was released in 2004 and its immense success was evident, many other studios wanted to ride that wave. However, no other MMORPG could truly match the success of WoW. While some were successful in their own right, most were not.
Over time, developers realized that it was not such a good idea to design a game that is very similar to WoW. Therefore, this type of game is currently evolving. However, the term “MMO” has become associated with World of Warcraft and has been shaped by the game, so they are distancing themselves more and more from it.
Publishers shunned the comparison with WoW and the expectations that come with it when announcing they were developing an MMO. Even the WoW of 10 years ago would be outmatched by today’s WoW, because it has so much more content. Today, anyone claiming to be an MMO is not only competing with the WoW of 2005 and 5 years of development time, but they are competing with the WoW of 2015 and 15 years of development time.
MMOs that no longer want to be called that
According to Pardo, many studios are developing online games where players interact in a persistent game world, but they shun the term MMO. Pardo cites Destiny as an example. It is obviously an MMO, although with gameplay that is quite different from WoW. However, the developers avoided the MMO term. This can serve as a good example of how today, while creating online games with persistent worlds, they are slowly working to eliminate the term “MMO” to distance themselves from it.
This is the only way to avoid comparisons with World of Warcraft, and publishers have recognized this as well. Examples of games that had trouble attracting enough players due to the term “MMO” include Star Wars: The Old Republic and WildStar.
Blizzard’s hard but necessary decisions
It has simply become extremely difficult to establish oneself in a genre when a single game defines the genre. This is the case in the MOBA genre, for example. Even software giant Valve finds it challenging to compete with League of Legends. A new, attractive genre is often seen as a “new market.” However, the game that establishes and legitimizes this genre makes it difficult for newcomers to compete.
At Blizzard, however, they still believe in the MMO market. They did not cancel the mammoth project Titan because they lost faith in the genre, but because they were surprised at how long-term the success of WoW would be. No one had anticipated that even 10 years after release, WoW would still have so many subscribers.
They thought they could slowly pull developers away from WoW to work on Titan. But that was not the case.
