Josh Drescher discusses success in a post WoW market place with Gamasutra.

Discussing the NRA and WAR is always fun, and Gamasutra got to do both last week. In the interview with Gamasutra, Josh Drescher of Mythic Entertainment discussed how they are going to take over the NRA and eat their food. And that is just the beginning! The interview contains very little in terms of new information since it apparently happened before the
launch cuts were announced (or the interview just stayed clear of it). What is in the interview though, is an interesting discussion about the post WoW market that not many others have touched on. The typical discussion for new games launching starts with "Nobody will ever beat WoW" which is followed by a long diatribe promoting and disputing that statement. The reality though may be something new, such as the possibility that the spill over from WoW into other games is sufficient to provide success to many other games. According to Josh:

"An interesting "behind the scenes" thing that's happened with our genre is that if you actually look at the success rate of MMOs that launched before WoW, and you compare to the success rate of MMOs that launched after WoW, there is a dramatically significant increase in success rate in the post-WoW world. If you launched an MMO before WoW came out, you had a really significant chance of failing no matter how good your game was; there were a lot of really great games that came out that just fell down, because there wasn't enough of a market to appeal to."

Said another way, the terms for success have changed and the bullseye may be smaller, but the target is so much larger that more companies can hit the board.

Another time honored argument is discussed, namely "the subscription model." Josh puts the over/under value of time at $1 for thirty minutes. How much is your time worth? Should micro transactions (for time or gear) rule the day or are the subscription models the best way to go?

Read the rest of the interview and then let me know, what is your time worth?