There’s a lot of talk in the industry these days about what the “biggest” video game is. It’s an easy debate to get into as there are record-setting games being released left and right, and the industry is exploding in popularity around the world.
That leads to accomplishments like there being 67 million monthly League of Legends players, or a game like Grand Theft Auto 5 selling $800M worth of copies on day one. With new games like these breaking records, it’s easy to forget that the biggest game of them all is still one that’s nearly 10 years old.
That would be World of Warcraft, the MMO that launched a thousand more MMOs, yet no one has been able to duplicate its success to date. Debuting in 2004, World of Warcraft was not the first MMO ever to hit the market, but it quickly became the most popular in the years that followed.
Based on Blizzard’s famed Warcraft strategy series, World of Warcraft created a massive shared world where players level characters and raid bosses with one another, paying $15 a month for the privilege.
Because of the huge popularity of the game and the use of a monthly subscription model, World of Warcraft towers over every other series in terms of total revenue. As last reported in 2012, the game had brought in $10B as a franchise, and makes up nearly half of Activision-Blizzard’s profit by itself. Copies of the game itself and its myriad of expansions have sold well, but it’s that constant monthly income that makes World of Warcraft a golden goose for its creators.
Subscribers have fluctuated over the years as players come and go with the release of new expansions or competing games, but even now, a decade later, World of Warcraft still boasts over 7 million players a month. It peaked at 15 million a few years ago, but it’s still a hugely profitable game in this age of free to play, and has 100 million registered accounts as of 2014.
World of Warcraft has found continued success because it’s one of the few old school MMOs that have survived all these years with their subscription model intact (only a few others like EVE Online exist). Consumers as a whole have rejected the subscription model in newer games, and it’s caused WoW’s competition to self-destruct.
The most high profile case of this is EA/Bioware’s Star Wars: The Old Republic, an MMO set in the Star Wars Universe that had a budget of a few hundred million dollars. But on release? Even the brand couldn’t make the subscription model work. Players were no longer interested in paying $15 a month for a game, and they criticized SWTOR for being too similar to World of Warcraft. EA tried to create a WoW killer, but only managed to make a clone.
Subscription MMOs still exist to this day, but it’s become something of a running joke in the industry that it’s only a matter of time before any new MMO moves to free-to-play, just like SWTOR and so many others did. Recently, we saw the release of The Elder Scrolls Online and Wildstar, both with $15 subscription fees and $60 box copies. It’s too early to tell if they’ll follow the same path as SWTOR and other like it, but it’s become simply expected that nothing can compete with WoW.
World of Warcraft will obviously not be able to live forever, and Activision-Blizzard may actually struggle to replace it once it stops being profitable (though that may be for a while yet). For years now, Blizzard has been working on a next-gen MMO called “Project Titan,” but in recent years many problems have plagued the mystery game and they’ve gone “back to the drawing board” on it at this point. It seems Blizzard may have learned a cautionary tale from its own competition, and perhaps they’re scaling back on an idea to release yet another costly, subscription-based MMO in an age when so many are failing.
The genius of World of Warcraft is that its most devoted players have come to accept the cost as a way of life, and if they’re so dedicated that they’re still playing the game all these years later, $15 a month is nothing for how much time they’re likely to spend playing WoW during that period, which could be dozens or hundreds of hours.
Even if a game like League of Legends boasts 67 million players and is far and away the most played game in the world, World of Warcraft’s 7 million subscribers are still more valuable as they’re paying customers. They’re a guaranteed $15 a month while League is lucky if they average $2 a player from microtransactions.
World of Warcraft is truly a legend in the industry. Often imitated, but never beaten; not even a decade later.
[Photo via Blizzard]
