Over its first three months the game signed up fewer than 50,000 subscribers, a pittance, so in June, Warner cut bait and agreed to sell the game to Sony. Last month “Matrix Online” was downsized from nine virtual “realms” to three, because users were having a hard time finding one another in the game’s vast digital ghost town.
The troubles of “Matrix Online” were partly of Warner’s own making; many players and critics agree that the game is a mediocre experience. But the online market used to make room for mediocre games. Now, the broader phenomenon is that so many contenders, including “Matrix Online,” simply cannot stand up to the overwhelming popularity of online gaming’s new leviathan: “World of Warcraft,” made by Blizzard Entertainment, based in Irvine, Calif.
With its finely polished, subtly humorous rendition of fantasy gaming – complete with orcs, mages, dragons and demons – “World of Warcraft” has become such a runaway success that it is now prompting a debate about whether it is helping the overall industry by bringing millions of new players into subscription-based online gaming or hurting the sector nagahoki303 by diverting so many dollars and players from other titles.” ‘World of Warcraft'(WOW) is completely owning the online game space right now,” said Chris Kramer, a spokesman for Sony Online Entertainment, buyer of “Matrix Online” and one of Blizzard’s chief rivals. “Look, ‘Matrix Online’ is good, but it’s like being in the early ’90s and trying to put a fighting game up against ‘Mortal Kombat’ or ‘Street Fighter’; it’s just not going to happen. There are a lot of other online games that are just sucking wind right now because so many people are playing ‘WOW.’ “Kramer is in a position to know. Last November, his company released “EverQuest II,” sequel to the previous champion of massively multiplayer games. Such games, also known as MMOs, allow hundreds or thousands of players to simultaneously explore vast virtual worlds stocked with quests, monsters and treasure. Players sometimes cooperate to take on epic tasks, like killing a huge computer-controlled dragon, and sometimes fight one another in what is known as player-vs.
-player combat.
But November 2005 was the same month that “World of Warcraft” hit the shelves. In a subscriber-based multiplayer online game, the customer buys the game’s software for perhaps $30 to $50, and then pays a monthly fee of usually about $15. (There are also many games that are sold at retail but then are free to play online.)
Since November 2005, “World of Warcraft” has signed up more than 4 million subscribers worldwide, making for an annual revenue stream of more than $700 million. About a million of those subscribers are in the United States (with more than half a million copies sold this year), and another 1.
5 million are in China, where the game was introduced just three months ago. By contrast, “EverQuest II” now has 450,000 to 500,000 subscribers worldwide, with about 80 percent in the United States.
Just a year ago, numbers like that would have classed “EverQuest II” as a big hit. The original “EverQuest” topped out at about a half-million players, and many, if not most, game executives came to believe that the pool of people willing to pay $15 a month to play a video game had been exhausted. The conventional wisdom in the industry then was that there could not possibly be more than a million people who would pay to play a massively multiplayer online game.
Now, “World of Warcraft” has shattered earlier assumptions about the potential size of the market.