Lucasarts and BioWare are scheduled to make a big announcement next Tuesday. If you’re a gambler, place your bets on this announcement being the new Star Wars MMO that has been a big open secret for a while now; the one set in the same era as the Knights of the Old Republic games. Hopefully, we’ll get an estimated window for a release date. I’m guessing late next year or early 2010. While the Star Wars universe is ripe for role-playing possibilities, you want to do it right.
Of course, Internet forums and blogs and GameStop stores the world over will be abuzz with the same discussion: is this the fabled WoW Killer? It’s amazing how the term “WoW Killer” has taken on a mythic quality in the world of MMORPGs, like there is an ancient tome somewhere that speaks of a chosen one who will come out of the shadows and slay the mighty emperor who holds the populace enthralled.
The WoW Killer, however, may be one of those legends that people stop believing.
One of the reasons some people avoid playing WoW–or any MMO for that matter–is that it is subscription-based. It requires a monthly fee (or, can be subscribed to in chunks of time for a slight discount). However, when Guild Wars came on the scene, it didn’t pull a significant number of people away from Azeroth–in fact, Blizzard’s subscriber base has grown by some 2 million people despite competition from the free-to-play Guild Wars. If a free MMO couldn’t pull people away from WoW (or at least not pull enough people away to damage Blizzard’s bottom line), how can another pay-to-play game do so?
Even a Star Wars MMORPG–complete with lightsabers, Jedi versus Sith battles, and fully-realized Force powers filling the game world–couldn’t stand toe-to-toe with World of Warcraft, no matter how great a game it might be. Even if a game were to come along that unquestionably dwarfed WoW in pure game play quality, Blizzard’s invincible giant has two things working for it: economics and social networking.
Since WoW does require a monthly subscription, people have invested money in the game; and the only return on that investment is their characters, loot, and gold. Unlike a car or a home, which can be sold when one decides they no longer want them, your in-game items and your character’s talents cannot be sold off to help recoup your losses (without, of course, breaking Blizzard’s EULA and risking identity theft). When you decide to stop playing WoW, you get to keep your characters–I have had to cancel and restart my account twice since I started playing, for various reasons, and found my toons waiting for me with open arms upon my return–but that’s your only piece-of-mind; that $15 a month is not recoverable in any way. Not to mention all those hours hunched over your monitor, grinding away on mobs and running from one end of the map to the other, watching your XP bar inch to the right.
It’s unlikely that most players–especially those with at least one character at 80 (or whatever the level cap may be upon the release of the Star Wars MMO) and/or two or more characters in their thirties or forties–would be willing to give up on their investment of time and money to start playing a new MMO, unless they wanted to juggle subscriptions as opposed to juggle play-time (subscribe to one then cancel, subscribe the other then cancel, repeat as necessary); it would be horribly cost-ineffective to subscribe to two MMOs at one time, unless those were the only two games you played on any system, and even then your progress versus your time-on-task would be laughable.
While it would be bad money-management to stop playing WoW if you were near the endgame, there is an even greater reason to not shift loyalties, and it’s far more poignant than cold, hard, practical economics: the social nature of humans. When a child begins a new school or an adult moves across the country to find a new job, they often dread the prospect of having to make new friends, find new favorite hang-out spots, and learn their way around a new geography. This should be no different for video game space. Who wants to make new contacts, join a new guild, and find their way around a new game world when you have friends and contacts right there in your current MMO? The only reason I ever got into World of Warcraft was because I had a real-life friend it, and the one of the reasons I have stayed with it is because my social circle within the game has expanded. Unless my friends move en masse to another MMO, I’ll be staying with what I know–I don’t think it’s incorrect to say that I probably speak for most gamers.
BioWare is more than capable of creating an awesome Star Wars MMORPG. I’m sure it will get rave reviews and will pull in a new audience to the world of video games. It may even put a dent in WoW‘s subscriber base; there are hordes of Star Wars geeks out there after all, eager to play in Lucas’ world. A WoW Killer, however? The mythic chosen one that topples the mighty beast from its gilded throne?
Not a chance.
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