The Daily Grind: Is it luck?

Reader Comments (3)

No it wasn't "luck"
It had more to do with the fact that Blizzard already had millions of battlenet players worldwide long BEFORE WoW.
Blizzard also has always enjoyed a solid reputation for making high quality games.
Combine that with the MMO genre of 2004 which was full of stale repeats of long and dull grind games like L2, FFXI, SWG (which was all grind at the time) Horizons, CoX (at the time CoX had a very punishing grind) and half a dozen other generic fantasy look alikes and the market was ready to jump on something that was "fun" to play.

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THIS. Warcraft was the BEST designed mmo at the time of its release and they have continued to constantly improve upon that and dispite what the naysayers (Usually of the EVE,WAR,DF,Runescape, fanbot gallery) may say THIS AND THIS ALONE IS WHY WARCRAFT IS THE KING.

I've see loads of BS posts (MMOrpg forums, or Forumfall if your REALLY HORDECORE) that its just Warcrafts advertizing or that everyone dose it because thats what their friends do, that if you play WoW you are fat and live in your moms basement ect.

Warcraft's initial sucess is PARTIALLY related to timing, Warcraft 3's popularity ect but the continued long term sucess is because its is a seriously good game put out by a quality Dev.

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That IS luck, you two. It was lucky of them to launch their game at the time they did when everything else was "stale" (players getting burned out with EQ/whatever) and no other game launch was within a year of WoW. That's called luck.

Think about it, if Tabula Rasa or Hellgate London, Warhammer Online, Vanguard, or any other MMO had launched around the same exact time as WoW then it wouldn't be as "big" as it currently is and would be splitting it's popution with another game or two.

Timing = luck. Period. With the limited Sci-Fi MMOs right now, Stargate Worlds would have/could have gotten a good basis going for them, but LUCK has it that Star Trek Online is releasing around that time and so is The Old Republic. Each has their own "fanbase" but if only one of them were launching then the fanbase of all of them might just touch that one instead of individuals. See my point?

As more and more fantasy MMOs come out with different IPs (Lord of Rings, Warhammer, Conan, Darkfall, ect.), each will gain their own fanbase, whether that's part of WoW's playerbase or not. And that's because at the time of WoW, there were no other fantasy games with those IPs that suited the players want of fantasy MMO gaming.

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