World of Warcraft is approaching the fifth anniversary of its release and the industry is starting to reflect on its impact on gaming. With roughly 12 million subscribers and millions more having purchased the game in the past, some say the game’s prominence makes it harder for other MMORPGs to succeed, but Blizzard VP of Game Design Rob Pardo thinks it's brought more new people into the genre.
Pardo says that World of Warcraft introduced people to the genre "(a)nd then when they were done, they decided to go, 'Hey, I'll give Lord of the Rings Online a chance, or Dungeons & Dragons Online a chance,'" he told The Escapist. “The genre benefited from the growing of the market."
While World of Warcraft has had good success, Pardo has enough guile to know that all glory is fleeting in the gaming industry. He’s not shooting to split the company’s user base with its next MMO; he wants to expand it.
"Obviously, we want to compete with ourselves, and create something bigger than WoW ... We know that someone is going to beat WoW one day. Someone is going to make a bigger MMO, it's going to be faster and better. If someone's going to beat WoW , it might as well be us,” commented Pardo. “There's a whole bunch of people who tuned out of WoW two years ago or four years ago, but who really enjoyed it, and when another MMO comes out that tickles their fancy, they'll jump into it."
A huge base of subscribers is among the many reasons we think competing directly with World of Warcraft is foolish.
1 Comments
November 18, 2009
If only I had created World of Warcraft. Or at the very least bought a ton of stock in Blizzard before the game came out.