Published:
Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment wanted to make a big splash in the video game world back in March when it introduced Matrix Online, a massively multiplayer online game based on the once-hot film franchise. The game made a big splash all right, like a belly flop.
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Over its first three months the game signed up fewer than 50,000 subscribers, a pittance, so in June Warner cut bait and agreed to sell the game to Sony. Last month Matrix Online was downsized from nine virtual "realms" to three, because users were having a hard time finding one another in the game's vast digital ghost town.
The
troubles of Matrix Online were partly of Warner's own making; many players and
critics agree that the game is a mediocre experience. But the online market
used to make room for mediocre games. Now, the broader phenomenon is that so
many contenders, including Matrix Online, simply cannot stand up to the
overwhelming popularity of online gaming's new
leviathan: World of Warcraft, made by B
With its finely polished, subtly humorous rendition of fantasy gaming - complete with mages, orcs, dragons and demons - World of Warcraft has become such a runaway success that it is now prompting a debate about whether it is helping the overall industry by bringing millions of new players into subscription-based online gaming or hurting the sector by diverting so many dollars and players from other titles.
"World
of Warcraft is completely owning the online game
space right now," said Chris Kramer, a spokesman for Sony Online
Entertainment, buyer of Matrix Online and one of B
Mr.
Kramer is in a position to know. Last November, his company released EverQuest II, sequel to the previous champion of massively
multiplayer games. Such games, also known as M.M.O.'s,
allow hundreds or thousands of players to simultaneou
But
November was the same month that World of Warcraft
hit the shelves. In a subscriber-based multiplayer online game, the customer
buys the game's software for perha
Since
November, World of Warcraft has signed up more than
four million subscribers worldwide, making for an annual revenue stream of more
than $700 million. About a million of those subscribers are in the
Just a year ago, numbers like that would have classed EverQuest II as a big hit. The original EverQuest topped out at around a half-million players, and many, if not most, game executives came to believe that the pool of people willing to pay $15 a month to play a video game had been exhausted. The conventional wisdom in the industry then was that there could not possibly be more than a million people who would pay to play a massively multiplayer online game.
Now, World of Warcraft has shattered earlier assumptions about the potential size of the market.
"For many years the gaming industry has been struggling to find a way to get Internet gaming into the mainstream," said Jeff Green, editor in chief of Computer Gaming World, one of the top computer game magazines. "These kinds of games have had hundreds of thousands of players, which are not small numbers, but until World of Warcraft came along no one has been able to get the kind of mainstream numbers that everyone has wanted, which is millions of players."
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Or as put by another B
Worldwide,
about the only subscriber-based multiplayer online games that can compare to
World of Warcraft are Lineage and Lineage II, from NCsoft. Each game claims about 1.8 million subscribers, but
in both cases the vast majority of players are in
World
of Warcraft has taken off in many countries because B
"The emphasis has clearly been on removing all sorts of barriers of entry," Ville Lehtonen, a 25-year-old Finn who runs Ascent, one of Word of Warcraft's elite player organizations, or guilds, said via e-mail. "The low-end game is a great triumph of usability - everything is aesthetically pleasing and easy to learn, making the experience a very positive one. Also the ease of leveling guaranteed that people didn't get frustrated too easily. These effects combined to lure in the so-called casual crowds in huge masses."
It
is much the same formula that B
"This
is what B
Some
of B
"World
of Warcraft is absolutely expanding the market, and
that's a positive for us because we don't want this to just be a niche
market," said
But there is also trepidation.
"If you're only playing WOW and you're paying every single month, what does that mean for all of the other Internet games out there that are trying to get your $10 or $12 or $15 a month?" Mr. Green said. "WOW is now the 800-pound gorilla in the room. I think it also applies to the single-player games. If some kid is paying $15 a month on top of the initial $50 investment and is devoting so many hours a week to it, are they really going to go out and buy the next Need for Speed or whatever? There is a real fear that this game, with its incredible time investment, will really cut into game-buying across the industry."
In any case, as in years past, there are those who believe that paid online gaming is all a fad anyway.
"I don't think there are four million people in the world who really want to play online games every month," said Michael Pachter, a research analyst for Wedbush Morgan, a securities firm. "World of Warcraft is such an exception. I frankly think it's the buzz factor, and eventually it will come back to the mean, maybe a million subscribers."
"It
may continue to grow in