> MMOs have been very viable from both a business
Really? Everything that's not named World of Warcraft seems to die out, usually in less than a year. It's a genre that's been a notorious recipe for failure for most companies not named Blizzard.
Really? Everything that's not named World of Warcraft seems to die out, usually in less than a year. It's a genre that's been a notorious recipe for failure for most companies not named Blizzard.
MMOs aren't eating the world like in 2005, but they're a solidly-established genre that looks here to stay.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/276601/number-of-world-o...
[1] https://kotaku.com/wow-disappointment-plus-twitch-start-mass...
[2] https://www.ign.com/articles/2015/06/05/meet-the-man-who-red...
[3] https://tech4gamers.com/amazon-mmo-new-world-registered-a-pe...
But MMO in general today are massive, far bigger than WoW ever was. Though, there is also far more diversity regarding world-sizes. From smaller worlds for some dozen to hundred users, to bigger world with thousands and ten thousands, to the big massive virtual continents that WoWs era defined, we have them all now.
Then we have the endless amounts of wargames[1], shoots[2] and old browser-games[3]. Or the newer genre of battle royale, where we have hundreds of players per session in some game. Though, there is not much richful interaction between the players outside the game, it's all just simple chat or even none at all. Though, I heard Fortnite has gained some persistent world-aspects outside the game-sessions?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massively_multiplayer_... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massively_multiplayer_... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massively_multiplayer_...
> but do you really see Facebook creating video games for it's blue site and instagram audience?
I think their point is more that they will offer the graphical virtual space for the players to wait and meet between the games and work, while others will create the games and apps which people than can enter from this space. My understanding is, they offer technology and the connecting point, not the content. The same way they already do it today with plain old 2D crud-interfaces.
Blizzard was to the gaming industry what people often believe Apple is to the hardware industry. They were the only ones that invested in polished UI, coherent UX, etc. and it was so incredibly noticeable.
I'm sure a lot of this was pressure to get something out quickly to make a "WoW killer", which is what gaming media branded basically every MMO that launched after WoW.