How World of Warcraft Reigned Supreme in 2008

One of the editors over at The Register has written up an article that attempts to explain why Blizzard’s World of Warcraft was far-and-away more successful in 2008 than any other MMORPG before or since.

In October, before Blizzard released the astronomically successful WoW expansion Wrath of the Lich King, EA claimed to have 800,000 Warhammer subscribers. Funcom’s latest count in November for Age of Conan was 700,000 subscribers. Blizzard, meanwhile, said it had more than 11 million.

With numbers like these it’s not hard to see why everyone wants a stake in the gold rush. Next year, therefore, will see even more MMO releases on the market. There will be superhero MMOs like Champions Online, and DC Universe Online, sci-fi MMOs like Star Trek Online and Star Wars: The Old Republic – there’s even a Lego MMO scheduled for 2009.

But what happened to this year’s new entrants and why did WoW come out on top? Age of Conan had an extremely rough start, with plenty of bugs and incomplete content for higher level characters when it was pushed out. Warhammer seemed to have a smoother launch but as the year closes it already appears to be losing its audience in the face of WoW’s latest expansion.

The real killer, though, seemed to be simply that everyone plays WoW because that’s what everyone is playing. Why?

The game’s success certainly isn’t based on innovation. WoW adds very few tricks to the MMO genre as a whole. Almost everything it does, other MMOs have done before. The types of quests the player is assigned, the way players battle, the classes of characters to choose from, the game’s setting, commerce, transportation – it’s all been done before.

But WoW does it all with grace. The game has refined – arguably homogenized – the formula of an extremely complicated and intimidating genre, and made it approachable to everyone – including women – rather than the usual serious male-gaming audience.