WoW Had 'No Competition' for 7 Years, Rift 'Most Serious Competitor They Ever Had'WoW remains the king of MMOs if you ask most people, but the game from the talented folks at Blizzard has also been around an awfully long time. Rift, meanwhile, from Trion Worlds has quickly amassed 1 million activations and appears to be growing still. Trion Worlds boss Lars Buttler asserts that Rift is actually the most competition WoW has ever seen.
While talking with IndustryGamers about the upcoming propietary 'Red Door' platform, we asked Buttler if Trion sees a very long-term future for Rift, similar to WoW.
"I think nobody can ever predict that there’s another WoW because WoW basically had, for seven years, no competition," Buttler remarked. "There was nobody launching that created an experience that was even remotely comparable - never as deep, never as polished. Now that has changed, obviously. Rift is out there as the most serious competitor they ever had, and now with Rift updating and evolving in the most dramatic way, that is changing everyday. Essentially, with every new update, the landscape is changing. But our goal is not necessarily to create one giant product that everybody has to play, but to give people choice."
"When we started five years ago, there was only WoW. Now there’s Rift as an absolute serious contender, with the most dynamic gameplay ever."
He continued, talkoing about Trion's strategy: "If you’re a strategy gamer today, and you love to play with all your friends, chances are you play an online role playing game, because those are the only ones that give you multi-player fun. Now, but the moment you have amazing online strategy games that are truly multi-player, these people actually might decide to end up here. And then what about all the shooter players, the action gamers, and so on? So the idea is to build strong, long lasting and comfortable franchises that can get better and bigger over time so that you can monetize better and better that don’t burn out after a few months, like typical social games, but that last for many, many years and then build on top of each other. One on top of the other on top of the other and so on."
Rift has indeed done very well, but there's another serious challenger in the MMO market coming this holiday season: BioWare's Star Wars: The Old Republic. BioWare sees itself filling a void in the MMO space with its game, but is there any concern that this could take away from Rift? Buttler doesn't appear worried in the least bit; in fact, he said it's encouraging to see another big name MMO coming.
"I think it actually creates a perfect storm of energy in our space that will catalyze the shift to online and multi-player even more. And Rift is such a great game and it’s so live and it will continue this speed of innovation that we don’t think anybody will be able to match," Buttler boasted.
"So I expect many people will try it and even people who haven’t tried Rift will try Star Wars and then we’ll see where they end up in the long run. I’m actually extremely excited about what’s happening in our space. When we started five years ago, there was only WoW. Now there’s Rift as an absolute serious contender, with the most dynamic gameplay ever. Then there’s Star Wars, then there’s End of Nations coming. Then there’s Defiance coming, which was MMORPG’s MMO of E3, ahead of Star Wars. So we’re not afraid at all. We actually look forward to it with great excitement. It makes our point."
