Crash of the Titan

I am going to try and move quickly through my post this morning, just not sure how successful I will be.  I have a super busy day ahead of me.  At 8 am I am supposed to be at a development conference here in town, and after the first section… I need to head back to work to try and work out the kinks in a program that has to go live on June 1st.  Needless to say I am stressing more than a little bit at the rushed schedule.

Brand Loyalty

To make matters worse I have decided to pick a topic that I have been wanting to write about for a few days, but not really found the time to sit down and put pen to paper… or in my case keyboard to words?  On 5/28 it was revealed in a Venture Beat article, that the infamous Project Titan would be delayed until at least 2016.  This announcement of course has caused various ripples in the blogosphere and twitterland, most of which relatively negative.  This is going to be my attempt to wrap my head around the issue.

WoW is back in a state of decline based on an early May report that they were down another 1.3 million players.  I myself have done the resub and cancel dance a few times since the release of Pandaria.  Ultimately people play wow not out of a sense of loyalty to the content anymore… people play wow because people play wow.  The best thing about wow is also likely the most fleeting.  It is the only MMO that has been able to accumulate that many subscribers in one place at one time.

Players need cycling back to WoW in most part as a way to hang out with their WoW friends.  For those who are relatively new to the blog I will give a quick bio.  In 2004 on launch day I founded a little guild called House Stalwart.  At that point we had roughly 50-60 players and over the course of the ebb and flow of expansions, we reached our pinnacle at the launch of Cataclysm… with roughly 800 characters in the guild, divided up by a completely indeterminate number of accounts.  At this time we had 4 active raid teams, and more than enough players to do anything with at any time.  We have never reached the Alea Iacta Est levels of having 13+ guilds melded together through the use of an addon… but we were fairly large.

The Shedding

Since that time I have seen two things happen over and over.  Firstly players got tired of the gameplay and when something they liked better came along… they moved over to that.  There were pretty massive exodus points with the launch of Rift and Star Wars the Old Republic… but there have been smaller little conversions going on as well.  Secondly I have seen a good number of players simply leaving because of life.  They no longer wished to devote the amount of time they were spending on wow to the game, and instead chose to divert that effort into family, careers or other hobbies.

The end result is that we have lost roughly half of the active members that we once had.  Instead of four raid teams, they now barely have two… one of which struggles constantly trying to fill any given raid night.  On a good night there are around 20 people on at any given time, but there are also large stretches where that number is in the 3-5 range.  Essentially our guild has dropped significantly, and this is the tale I have heard over and over from other guild leaders from the early days of WoW.

This is not to say that there have not been an influx of new players coming in to fill the gaps, but in our case and the case of many vanilla guilds… they are shells of what they once were.  Remember my statement about “people play wow, because people play wow”… ultimately this attrition will reach a point where there is no longer enough of a critical mass of players people remember… or want to play with… to act as a magnetic core to keep pulling people back.  I know in my own case, the number of players that I really want to see dwindles each time I return to the game on one of my “wow whims”.

Crash of the Titan

One of the things that has universally been held off in the distance as a beacon of hope by the true believers, is that Blizzard was working on a new MMO…  that this would be the one to cure all the ills.  The problem is right now they have been given the knowledge that this promised land will not be coming for at least another three years.  That means three more years of the status quo.  Sure there will be another expansion in there, that will raise the level cap and provide another dose of very similar raid encounters…  but ultimately there will be nothing truly new for three long years.

As a former dedicated warrior blogger, I still have a ton of friends and online acquaintances that actively play World of Warcraft.  The problem is, on any given day… I can watch my twitter feed for thirty minutes and see several posts of subtle frustration about the game.  Maybe I just notice these more than most people, since I am been in a not so subtle state of disappointment with the game for a long time.  I still find it extremely fun at times, so long as I “don’t think about it”.  It has become the ultimate junk food gaming experience, that I can really enjoy so long as I don’t think about what I just consumed.

Ultimately I know that sooner or later WoW will suffer the same fate that all aging MMOs have to this point.  Players will abandon it for the new shiny on the horizon.  Warcraft has had a longer than normal shelf life, but when I have had my little whims, the game play experience and client already feel extremely dated.  Essentially there will be a point, and I am not sure what that number is… where there is just not enough of a critical mass of players to glue the other players together.  Because a large chunk of the players still actively playing wow, are the ones that derive their gaming enjoyment from playing with other players.

Tomorrrow-morrow-land

The big thing that the Titan announcement has done is said to those players that there is no real future in this game.  When Everquest was declining in numbers, leading to the launch of World of Warcraft… they had a new and shiny game in Everquest 2 waiting in the wings and currently fairly publicly beta testing.  Blizzard has come out and said that they essentially has nothing up their sleeves.  Once that has happened, there is no “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain”…  we all know the wizard doesn’t actually exist.

Granted I get the reboot, and I get the reluctance to announce anything at all.  Essentially Blizzard hit one out of the park on a fluke swing, and based on the way they have mismanaged World of Warcraft over the years… I know for certain they have no clue what magic they cast to get the initial success.  They know that whatever they come out with has to be bigger and better than WoW…  or it will likely be not just the end of the franchise…  but also potentially the end of their company.  They have also seen that anyone who has come up against their own monster creation has fallen grossly short of all possible sales and subscribership goals.

I sincerely think they have no clue at all right now of how to create a new IP that players will love as much as their very fabled Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo product families.  All of which were allowed to start with extremely humble roots… and were allowed to be grown up through the very supportive and nurturing PC gaming cocoon of the 90s.  They basically have to birth a fully formed and ready to run adult franchise, with all the characters and branding that we the consumer will immediately latch onto and love like no other.

Screwed

In a word, they are screwed.  Building new IP is not the strong point of the juggernaut that is Blizzard.  I remember when they were talking about World of Warcraft… being completely shocked.  Up until Warcraft 3… the games basically had just enough storyline to keep the gameplay from absolutely falling on their face.  I had no clue how they would build a fully fleshed out and three dimensional world out of that type of writing.  But they managed to do so, but did it by drawing upon characters and settings that had already been created.

I have no idea how they are going to create this fully fleshed out reality that is deep enough for us to care about it immediately.  Especially when it has to be amazing enough to keep players from getting drawn into other truly epic IP that it will be competing with.  Namely I am talking about Elder Scrolls Online, and the mouth watering prospect of being able to play through all of Tamriel in the same game.  You have to realize we have never seen more than a small corner of that world in any of the modern games, and each of them is just mind numbingly huge.

How can Blizzard come up with anything that will trump a world that has been built over the course of almost 20 years and 5 blockbuster games set in the same world.  While I have friends that work for Blizzard, and I wish them the absolute best… I question as to whether or not they can roll out this new IP and hit the ground running with enough momentum to trump a setting like that.  I feel like ESO is the first game to come along that really has a chance in hell of toppling the WoW Juggernaut, only because of the landmark success of its previous incarnations.  Skyrim for example sold seven million units in the very first week and in my Raptr users group, a large number of those players have put in 300-500 hours playing this “single player” game.

The Paradox

Ultimately… people play wow because people play wow.  The only thing that will pull players away from wow permanently, is enough of a mass of players playing something else.  I feel that both Wildstar and Elder Scrolls Online have the potential to do this over the coming year.  Combine this with the fact that there is nothing coming down the pipe from Blizzard to compete with this… and you have a recipe for change.  This is going to happen sooner or later, this is a certainty…  WoW will wither…  all MMO titles wither given time.  It is exceedingly hard to actually kill an MMO, as evidenced by the fact that both Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot are themselves going relatively strong… just in a greatly diminished capacity.

I realize that players have predicted the doom of Warcraft, over and over… and each of them… myself included have been wrong.  It feels like this announcement about Titan is the beginning of something…  what that something is quite honestly is undetermined yet.  Blizzard may retreat into its juggernaut and produce a golden age of content…  or they may devote seasoned resources away from it to build their new planned kingdom.  But in either case, I think Titan being pushed back and rebooted entirely has been a massive blow to player confidence.  I think it is this blow that will ultimately have major repercussions.

Wrapping Up

I need to wrap this up, I could rattle on at length about this for a few more pages… but I feel like I have essentially said what I set out to say.  I need to print off my ticket for the dev conference… go get some breakfast and get on my way.  I hope you all have a great day… and this little doom and gloom treatise has not diminished that.  I still like World of Warcraft as a concept, I have just been very disappointed in the overall experience for several years now.