Over the past year or so Blizzard and World of Warcraft have lost a bit of luster as the ideal for game development. So many studio's efforts have dashed against the rocks trying to be the WoW-killer that developers are beginning to try something else. But what? A game that has grown every year for the past 10 years really sounds attractive as a model.
That's right, the current flavor of the year is CCP and EVE Online. Look at some of the recent developments. Carbine's payment model for Wildstar involves a subscription plus CREDD, a PLEX-like object good for 30 days game time that players can trade for in-game currency. Former Unista (and Sony Online Entertainment CEO) John Smedley's new game, EverQuest Next, is designed as a sandbox with emergent game play. Oh, and if EQNext follows the payment model of the rest of the SOE stable of games, will also feature the Kronos, SOE's version of PLEX, to pay for the subscription option.
But CCP's influence is starting to creep into very successful games as well. I got a kick out of ArenaNet's celebration of the first anniversary of Guild Wars 2's launch. A
post on the official website contained an interesting graphic. Below is the very top of a graphic displaying a lot of statistics.
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| Remind you of anything? |
"More than the entire population of Iceland." Remember when CCP was touting at Fanfest in 2009 that EVE Online had more subscriptions than the population of Iceland? Now ArenaNet is touting a concurrency across all shards greater than the population of Iceland. I do see one important difference though. Since 2009 EVE Online has continued to grow and reached 500,000 subscriptions at the beginning of 2013. My understanding of the GW2 mark is that was accomplished at launch and has gone down since. But either way, I guess that makes Iceland the gold standard of how to compare the success of an MMO.
