The Genre of Warcraft

Escapist Magazine has published an editorial called “The Genre of Warcraft”, in which they discuss the positive and negative impact that World of Warcraft has had on the MMORPG industry.

What was a wide open field of limitless possibility for companies interested in exploring subscriber based gaming as few as five years ago, has become an environment where even cash-rich companies with dependable IP are completely unwilling to challenge the 800-pound gorilla.

And the few studios willing to take a chance can barely scrape together any meaningful attention in a market that seems to know only of struggles between Horde and Alliance. Outside of Asia, which seems at times to be on an entirely different spiral arm of the galaxy, World of Warcraft has laid claim to more than half of the now 13,000,000 subscribers to major persistent world games. Put another way, if you added up all the subscribers of Ultima Online, both EverQuests, City of Heroes, both Lineages, Star Wars Galaxies and virtually all other MMOGs combined and populated a single game with them, that game would still have fewer subscribers than World of Warcraft.