World of Warcraft is indeed the biggest North American MMO out there on the market currently and has held this slot for over five years. Once mighty MMOs are now dwarfed by WoW's large playerbase and huge community that can easily shed over half a million subscribers and still dominate without injury. Yet, will it hold this number one slot in the coming years? Some argue that it won’t and the market will be shifting to a newer, fresher take on MMOs.

This kind of paradigm shift is, without a doubt, overdo. WoW has held the market now for longer than any other MMO has and maintains a huge playerbase that have been playing the same game for ages. So something new this way comes and there is no stopping it. Is it necessarily a bad thing? No. Is it even a bad thing for Blizzard? Nope. Will it ever happen? Of course.

Nothing can dominate forever and there is no way at all to tell me that World of Warcraft will be the number one MMO ten years from now. After five more expansions, about sixty raid dungeons, and three complete revamps there would be no way at all for the community to latch on to the game and stick with it for that long. That isn’t to say it won’t be around ten years from now nor that it won’t have a big presence, but there will be other games come and become that great “WoW killer” that everyone has foretold now since the start of time.

Yet, this WoW killer has not arrived yet and each new game that launches gets a louder and louder voice. It all started with Vanguard and then Warhammer Online followed by games such as Aion and Rift. Each game arrives, takes a huge chunk, and then everyone returns like lost puppies and the other games fade into obscurity. Everyone then sits and waits for the next game to come along to deliver them from the evil grasp of WoW, that, by the way, they play about 70 hours a week.

On the horizons there is hope for those misguided souls distraught by World of Warcraft and are eagerly awaiting their due deliverance. Sadly, I dare believe that they will not get the pie that they so crave, but the ideas that they preach will arrive with staggering haste. Two MMOs sit at the precipice of greatness: Star Wars: The Old Republic and Guild Wars 2. Both have the opportunity to achieve the status of “the great WoW killer” yet I doubt, in all seriousness, that they will achieve their glory through defeat. Instead, their glory will come from advancement.

Let’s face it, the MMO community is stagnating and stagnating hard. We have no great games out right now and the only subscription based game that can scream success IS WoW. That’s it, the only player out there, unless you want to move to the varying quality free-to-play games. There is no other big dog, no competition, nothing at all standing between WoW and “winning.” However, if games like Guild Wars 2 take off then there will be competition, followed by a huge expanse in the market, and much more variety in AAA games.

Games like Guild Wars 2 present something different. Is it enough?

Let’s use Guild Wars 2 as an example. The game is beautiful, has great minds behind it, and is free-to-play after the original investment. It’s full of unique ideas that address a lot of concerns MMO players have and will be very easy to get into. Once it launches, it could expand the genre and introduce a lot of fresh blood into our stagnating community much like WoW did many years ago.

The great WoW killer, something that games like GW2 could become, will not claim their victory by stealing another game’s playerbase but instead by expanding the genre and pooling in new clients elsewhere. For instance, GW2 is free-to-play and an AAA title. That means there is an entire stock of F2P fans who wouldn’t mind skipping a cash shop purchase to buy a game upfront. We know for a fact that the great WoW killer will not “kill WoW” nor take its subscription base, if just based on the fact that most WoW players leave, play the new game, get frustrated, and return posthaste. This is why whatever begins competing will need to look for its users elsewhere.

Don’t knock Blizzard out of the game though, games like Diablo 3 and their mysterious Project Titan may arrive at any time and do exactly the same thing. Blizzard has even said that they don’t want a game to directly compete with WoW which is the true path to victory in this stagnated climate.

Whatever you may think, I do hope a game comes out that can directly take on WoW toe to toe. Not because I hate WoW, oh no, but because I love to see competition and I love variety even more. I’d like to have a choice, for instance, whenever I want a cell phone or to get long distance. I don’t want to be locked into one monopoly. Sure, I might like what I’m with, but that choice makes me feel even better about it.

So, in conclusion, whatever game that comes out that “destroys” WoW will need to pull its users from somewhere else and it’ll eventually happen. Until then, we have Firelands to look forward to and after that we could see if some of this new MMO talent truly brings something different to the table.

What are your thoughts? Want to play WoW for the rest of your life or can’t wait to jump ship? Leave your comments below!


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Last Updated: Mar 29, 2016

About The Author

Get in the bush with David "Xerin" Piner as he leverages his spectacular insanity to ask the serious questions such as is Master Yi and Illidan the same person? What's for dinner? What are ways to elevate your gaming experience? David's column, Respawn, is updated near daily with some of the coolest things you'll read online, while David tackles ways to improve the game experience across the board with various hype guides to cool games.

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