09-19-2008, 06:37 PM
We'll see how things pan out with Warhammer Online, but my guess is that WoW won't lose a significant number of subscribers until Diablo 3 or another Blizzard MMO comes out. I haven't heard of anything on the horizon other than Warhammer that is supposed to pose a significant threat to WoW. Age of Conan was supposed to, and look how that turned out.
The "problem" is that you have millions of MMO players who have gotten used to the WoW way of doing things. For anything to come out and win over that crowd, it's going to have to basically copy & paste the WoW formula with fancier graphics. At which point a two things will probably happen:
1. It will be written off as a WoW clone (for good or bad)
2. Blizzard will upgrade the graphics engine of WoW
Even the successor to WoW will have this problem unless they do something completely different. World of Starcraft, maybe?
The "problem" is that you have millions of MMO players who have gotten used to the WoW way of doing things. For anything to come out and win over that crowd, it's going to have to basically copy & paste the WoW formula with fancier graphics. At which point a two things will probably happen:
1. It will be written off as a WoW clone (for good or bad)
2. Blizzard will upgrade the graphics engine of WoW
Even the successor to WoW will have this problem unless they do something completely different. World of Starcraft, maybe?