World of Warcraft

[NiteFox]

But the concept of persistant vitual worlds is not going away/

I'm sorry, but I believe you are wrong. Granted, the concept of persistant virtual worlds may indeed never leave us, but the actual worlds themselves will. Whether it be Everquest, or Neocron, or Star Wars Galaxies, or whatever, eventually the plug will be pulled on each and every one of the worlds these games create.

This may be because players will tire of the worlds themselves, or tire of buying or downloading expansion packs to expand the world, or eve give up on the game entirely. And once even a minor portion of the consumer base leaves, the majority will leaving the diehards behind, and let's face it - The companies won't try that hard to keep them on an existing game when they can try and transplant them (For another box price of $50) to their next game. One by one, each of the existing worlds will whither away and vanish, and you've spent x hundred amount of dollars on a game you can no longer play.

And when it happens once, it'll happen again. But the next time, the consumer may be more wary about dropping hundreds of dollars on a game when you can get pretty much the same enjoyment out of a standalone game for the same price and no monthly fee.

People are lapping up MMORPGs because they are new and exciting. Granted, you may want to cite Evercrack as being an old dog, but at initial release few people were actually playing the game and it took a while for people to jump onto that particular bandwagon. I remember the same thing with FPSs. Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Doom II was good, but we really had to wait until Duke Nukem 3D and Quake before that genre really achieved status. Now you're bogged down with FPS games, many of which are barely worth a second glance and those that are worthy have a relatively short shelf life too.

Persistant worlds are, in one way here to stay. Perhaps we're not really that far away from a Snow Crash-style world where total immersion reigns supreme. But then again the Avenue had all but faded from existence in The Diamond Age, even though some folks still remembered thrashers.