The video game industry is no stranger to boom-and-bust cycles, in which dozens of opportunistic developers rush to launch the latest massively successful copycat competitors, and most, if not all, fail. Perhaps the biggest example – and certainly the most embarrassing for almost everyone involved – was the race to release the mythical “”Wow killer”: a massively multiplayer online role-playing game that would topple Blizzard’s global megahit, World of Warcraftand earns its creators millions of dollars in monthly subscription revenue until the end of time.

It turned out to be an epic, industry-wide failure – and I had a front-row seat to that unfortunate spectacle. My career in video game journalism began in 2004, just a few months before Wow was released. My obsessive love of gaming threatened to derail that career before it had truly begun, but instead I turned it to my advantage, specializing in covering a gaming genre that was too obscure and took too long for most editors and publishers to get feedback. heads around. I traveled to dozens of preview events for MMO hopefuls that PR reps would optimistically present as “World of Warcraftbut for football,” or “World of Warcraftbut for vehicle combat. In 2008, I was hired by Eurogamer as editor of its short-lived MMO section (let’s not pretend that we journalists were immune to the same misconceptions about the gold rush) and I discovered for myself why the whole enterprise was doomed to failure. .

One of the reasons is that World of Warcraft – especially during its peak from 2004 to 2010 – was simply too good to beat. But another reason is that chasing moves, which is not a good strategy at the best of times, is almost impossible to achieve in the world of online social games. Hits attract an intensely loyal and invested audience who play them month after month and aren’t really looking for anything else to move on to.

These audiences are hermetically sealed within their own fandoms and care far less about shiny graphics or other technical advancements, while constantly updated games have enough room to innovate and evolve the genre within themselves. The age-old tactic of “just put a big license (like Star Wars) on it” is also less effective in this area, because the appeal of famous characters and storylines doesn’t necessarily apply – players are more invested in their communities.

Yet the industry continues to make this critical mistake with online gaming. Just watch the spectacular crash and burn of Concord earlier this year, just the latest in countless attempts to knock Overwatch from its hero shooter throne. In the spirit of constructive learning, and only a little schadenfreudelet’s look back at some of the games that failed to make a dent World of WarcraftHegemony…and the few who made it.

Lord of the Rings online (2007): This entry is perhaps a bit unfair, since various people had been trying to make a Middle-earth MMO based on Tolkien’s works long before Blizzard thought of it. Wow. The original developer, an MMO specialist called Turbine, probably thought it was just creating another niche online game before publisher WB Games became unduly excited about its potential. The game was good, but clearly a generation late Wow in terms of its design. But people still play it!

Age of Conan (2008): Oh Dear. The first and most instructive case of post-Wow the pride came from Funcom, a Norwegian specialist who pushed his limits trying to push cutting-edge graphics, gore, sex and dynamic real-time sword fighting in an MMO based on the fantasy world and vigorous by Robert E. Howard. The publisher Eidos has put in all its chips; I remember attending an absurd press event held in the 1952 Oslo Winter Olympic Park, transformed into a medieval setting with barbarians on horseback and fireside feasts. (A PR rep I was with was very drunk and stole a sheepskin rug, roaring incoherently into the Scandinavian night while carrying it on his shoulders.) The game was a mess at launch and has been hard.

Warhammer Online: Age of Judgment (2008): EA’s big game made sense on paper; the Warhammer license is probably as close as legally possible to the Warcraft setting, and developer Mythic’s The Dark Ages of Camelot was appreciated by the hardcore MMO. The game was lavish and expensive but limited in design, too focused on massive player versus player combat while Wow excelled at adopting almost every playstyle possible. Warhammer online was closed in 2013.

APB: Bulletin of all points (2010): A Grand Theft Auto style massively multiplayer game featuring intense levels of player customization and helmed by the creator of GTA himself, David Jones? What could go wrong? All! APB was packed with ambitious features but was particularly lacking in, you know, gameplay. Additionally, Jones’ company Realtime Worlds, which previously made the excellent Repression for Xbox, it was way too deep. A disastrous launch was followed a few months later by the developer’s bankruptcy and APB be arrested. Another company bought it and relaunched it, but failed to get a real game into it.

Crevasse (2011): The MMO gold rush wasn’t just about games; entire companies have sprung up, attracting huge investments on the promise of some revolutionary technology or other. Trion Worlds was an example of sophisticated server-side technology meant to bring MMOs closer to the dream of fully simulated cloud gaming. Unfortunately, its flagship fantasy MMO Crevasse was very boring.

Star Wars: The Old Republic (2011): Stung by the failure of Warhammer onlineEA was nevertheless ready to try once again to break Wowarmed with the Star Wars license, its star in-house developer BioWare, and a seemingly unlimited budget. The hype was off the charts, but BioWare’s expertise lay in single-player games. Everyone bought it, played the story and moved on, which is… not the idea. BioWare didn’t give up, however, and gradually built a true massively multiplayer game around the story campaigns. After a successful relaunch of free-to-play, The Old Republic always has an audience.

Guild Wars 2 (2012): Guild Wars 2 is actually a fantastic game, easily the best on this list – I feel bad including it. He refined the fights and used several genre-defining ideas that were later copied by Wow, Fateand others. But the scope of this relatively streamlined game didn’t live up to the hopes publisher NCSoft had placed on it – and the ever-expanding offerings. Wow presented a moving target that could never be caught.

Wild Star (2014): NCSoft, a major player in Korea, made its most determined attempt to break the West with Wild Stara game from former Blizzard developers with a very Warcraft color palette and art style. It was cute, expensive, edgy, and had some fun ideas, but it was also very obviously a hodgepodge of trend chasing with no reason to exist beyond trying to outdo it. Wow. NCSoft shut it down and shut down developer Carbine in 2018.

The game almost killed WoW

Final Fantasy 14 (2013): The prize for perseverance goes to Square Enix, who simply didn’t give up – and who, above all, had other reasons than to compete with Blizzard to create an MMO. Final Fantasy 11 had been a pre-Wow struck in 2002; the first attempt to follow up with FF14 in 2010 was a disaster, but Square Enix bravely abandoned it and asked producer Naoki Yoshida for a complete overhaul. It was more a question of honor. Yoshida’s reboot ruled, and Square Enix didn’t falter while it didn’t immediately Wow figures, but continued to invest. FF14 gradually got bigger and better, and it was ready and waiting when Blizzard stumbled through a succession of PR disasters and lackluster Wow expansions in the late 2010s and early 2020s. Wow streamers and gamers are starting to leave for FF14 in mass, and Square Enix’s game is, finally, the competitor that Wow always deserved.