Most MMOs are WoW clones because WoW made money, and everyone else who wants to do an MMO says "obviously that is the way to do it" and then tries to make their own version of WoW with different graphics and maybe a different system or two.
What they fail to get, time after time, is that WoW was there first, did it better, and has the money to keep adding content. If you're going to succeed with an MMO, you need to do something different.
Because they make WoW clones, the best of them generate some excitement and some up-front revenue, and then peter out as people get bored because the developer can't add content fast enough to keep peoples' interest.
Cryptic has been rather clever about how it went about doing this, buying up old popular board or computer game licenses and re-releasing the games in an MMO format. This guarantees a big initial buy-in from fans of those games, since the art assets are very nice. Of course, once you get IG, it is the same MMO with a different skin.
The thing is, as long as they are relying on their own dev team to generate new content, they'll never be able to do it fast enough to retain peoples' interest. People are even beginning to find WoW stale - though the immense capital available allowed them to add content for a long time.
NWN is still a viable online game 9 years after release because the robust toolset and standalone servers allowed everyone to generate their own content with few limitations. This allowed - and continues to allow - a phenomenal variety in servers to play on. When game companies stop trying to make the next WoW and figure out how to allow unrestricted user-generated content and make a profit off it without stifling it, then we will see the next successor to NWN.
Modifié par Sethan_1, 03 août 2011 - 08:46 .
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