salamanca

I'm fairly sure Tycho intended for the yeti-skin complaint to be ironic. As in, he deliberately employed irony as a literary device.

And I think his point was not that "Any MMO that doesn't top WoW's subscription base is a failure" but more that he was touching on the difference between the MMO genre and gaming in general - when the latest and greatest shooter comes out, it only has to be slightly better than the previous King of the Hill to be the new reigning champ. Whereas in WoW's case, if a slightly better MMO comes out, it won't be enough to sway all those people to switch games and lose all their months/years of progress.

Someone who owns and enjoys Halo 3 is probably *more* likely to buy CoD4 than the average person, because they like good FPS's, whereas someone who plays WoW is likely to stick with WoW even when a new MMO comes out that might have spiffier graphics and a couple new features.

His point is that WoW is so entrenched, it will take a revolutionary MMO to unseat it as the "latest and greatest" (merely in terms of public opinion, not necessarily in subscription numbers) and everything else will just be seen as marginal or middling efforts.