Originally Posted by
Niwes
same oppinion here.
ofc the mmorpg genre was freh in 2005 for the mass audience (star wars galaxies and ultima existed long before for the mmorpg crowd). after the hype of wow mmorpg elements influenced every fukin game out there (even sports games). so mmorpg stops relative early to feel fresh. and as above said every expac is the same in its core.
but i dont think thats the reason the playerbase lost half of their ppl. i have a few reasons for that:
1)
every day a new 12 year old kid is born, never played a mmorpg. the wow universe could be a great thing to a 12 year old kid. will say: there are always new ppl which are not "through" all the wow stuff and have the repetitive feeling after expac nr 35272635.
2)
you have a crowd. called ppl playing EXACTLY that game or genre they like most. and they playin it because of it is IT. they not even dont care when every xpac is the same with different color/world/quests/bosses, because thats what they like, no, they even WANT that behaviour. so why they should leave ?
3)
statistic wise the "half playerbase lost, bc of gettin old" argument can not survive.
so, my oppinion is, like the quited one, they changed things too much, lost a great part of their crowd, to target the mass audience. but they do not get as much out of the mass audience, as they would get out of a directly targeted crowd. this is mostly because the mass audience standard casual gamer play that game 2-3 months and leaves the game forever. imo they underestimated the value of long term customers playing the game cause of they are the crowd of the game.
you can see this when you look at the subscriber numbers. exactly at the moment they start targeting the mass audience better, it goes down down down. before (mid-last Wotlk) it was up up up.
imo blizzard made a huge mistake when they changed their targeted audience to a mass audience. the jerks of all trades never left the casino with full bags of money, at the end of the day.