TR should be thankful to WoW, says Garriott
Blizzard‘s World of Warcraft (WoW) is generally considered as one of the most, if not the most, successful MMO video game these days. So, it is quite understandable if some development companies are wary of going head-to-head with WoW and its 8.5 million strong user base.
But that is not entirely the case for Tabula Rasa‘s Richard Garriott. The game developer is credited for Ultima Online – the decade old MMO title that revolutionized the genre. According to Garriott, Tabula Rasa should be thankful to World of Warcraft more than anything. He explained,
The people that World of Warcraft brought into online gaming have been churning out, and are now looking for other forms of online entertainment. So we’re very excited – truly, honestly – to see any successful massively multiplayer online game. World of Warcraft has done us a great service.
The renowned game developer added that it is rarely that one player plays the same MMO title for more than one year or so. Garriott then discussed that while it is true that Ultima Online still has a couple of hundreds of thousands of players, almost no one playing today has overlapped with the ones who played it a year ago or the year before that.
Lastly, maintaining the idea that the MMO genre will be too crowded, Garriott said that the real danger is when fans get a taste of a bad MMO game. He commented,
What’s interesting is the MMO space is still growing so rapidly. The only enemy we have are bad games. If people try MMOs and get a bad taste because of a bad game, they won’t continue to play MMOs. They’ll go back to playing offline.
Via Games Industry
Blizzard‘s World of Warcraft (WoW) is generally considered as one of the most, if not the most, successful MMO video game these days. So, it is quite understandable if some development companies are wary of going head-to-head with WoW and its 8.5 million strong user base.
But that is not entirely the case for Tabula Rasa‘s Richard Garriott. The game developer is credited for Ultima Online – the decade old MMO title that revolutionized the genre. According to Garriott, Tabula Rasa should be thankful to World of Warcraft more than anything. He explained,
The people that World of Warcraft brought into online gaming have been churning out, and are now looking for other forms of online entertainment. So we’re very excited – truly, honestly – to see any successful massively multiplayer online game. World of Warcraft has done us a great service.
The renowned game developer added that it is rarely that one player plays the same MMO title for more than one year or so. Garriott then discussed that while it is true that Ultima Online still has a couple of hundreds of thousands of players, almost no one playing today has overlapped with the ones who played it a year ago or the year before that.
Lastly, maintaining the idea that the MMO genre will be too crowded, Garriott said that the real danger is when fans get a taste of a bad MMO game. He commented,
What’s interesting is the MMO space is still growing so rapidly. The only enemy we have are bad games. If people try MMOs and get a bad taste because of a bad game, they won’t continue to play MMOs. They’ll go back to playing offline.
Via Games Industry
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