How much of WoW's success is b/c basically any PC can run it?

[Retron]

Teenagers buy computers for games, grownups don't.

What a daft statement!

The PC I'm writing this on (i7-5930K, 980, 4K monitor) was primarily built for gaming. It happens to be pretty decent for everything else too, but games were the driver behind investing in this.

That's been the case for me since 1992. Every single PC (at home) I've bought has been spec'd for games first, work second.

The only "work comes first" PCs I spec are the ones at work. For home use, why wouldn't you go for a gaming setup, provided you can comfortably afford it?

(As an aside, maybe you're unaware of PC gaming history. Back in the day, people upgraded to 386s or 486s just to play Doom or games such as Wing Commander. Ever since then, it's been games driving the development of the PC, not application software. Heck, requirements for Windows have remained the same for the past 8 years!)

[Notshauna]

I don't think so, WoW is actually terribly optimized and runs like crap on most machines.

[Retron]

And as for the original topic of the post, I doubt it had that much to do with it.

I used to play EverQuest avidly before WoW came out, as did a few hundred thousand other players. EverQuest worked well on the same hardware that WoW required, but people left it in droves for WoW. Why? Simple: they released an expansion, Gates of Discord, which was aimed largely at raiders. That alienated the more casual player base and as WoW had launched amid much fanfare, people gave it a go and found it to be much more casual friendly.

WoW itself owes a great deal to EQ, not surprising considering some of the high end EQ players joined Blizzard (Furor and Tigole). It does the same thing EQ did, but removed most of the annoyances - and it gained a great reputation. There was literally no other decent alternative, with the Sony devs taking the suicidal route of making an EQ "sequel", thus further damaging the EQ player base.

Or, in other words, there were other games at the time which had similar requirements and broadly similar gameplay. WoW just happened to be more attractive to people and hence it developed a much greater player base.

[HeiAggra]

Im 30 i've been playing all my life cuz of my cousin that are now on the 40's and i have a gaming pc. The first pc i had was a spectrum and from what i know from the new players they just buy pre built pc for gaming but they don't have as much knowledge or exp as ppl in their 30's or 40's those are the real gamers nowadys.

[Deleted]

A huge part of success was that any pc could run it. Nowadays it's not relevant, I could run it on my flip flops

[Vargur]

Pretty high.

The support for Mac for many many years will have had a major impact too!

I think you're overestimating the amount of nonPC users.

- - - Updated - - -

I think thats extremely hard to meassure, and it also depends how you define playerbase

But go ahead and fling some loosely imagined numbers at me that i wont believe anyway ^^

500 million players.

[Lilly32]

I used to play EverQuest avidly before WoW came out, as did a few hundred thousand other players. EverQuest worked well on the same hardware that WoW required, but people left it in droves for WoW. Why? Simple: they released an expansion, Gates of Discord, which was aimed largely at raiders. That alienated the more casual player base and as WoW had launched amid much fanfare, people gave it a go and found it to be much more casual friendly.

everquest was, and still is a game dedicated to hardcore people. GoD did the exact opposite of what you describe. It actually drove off their raiders because the expansion was made for people 5 levels higher. I think only 1 guild even did Tunat prenerf and it was Triton. A LOT of major raiding guides left because of how badly GoD was handled. Afterlife, Fires of Heaven, Triton, Paradigm, and im sure theres others I simply cant remember because it was 10 years ago. They all came over to WoW. Also the fact that one of the major faces of EQ raiding was now a leading Dev on WoW, Tigole helped a lot too. So they didnt drive of casuals becuase EQ never had many casuals in the first place. They actually drove off their hardcore players and tt was a combination of things. Mostly due to a piss poor job of SoE with the GoD expansion, WoW was new and shiny, and again because Tigole was working on it and had pulled a lot of the Raiders over to WoW. In fact Vanilla WoW was very hardcore compared to today's WoW and 40 man raids were taken from EQ where very large raids were used, up to 72 people.

[Teebone]

everquest was, and still is a game dedicated to hardcore people. GoD did the exact opposite of what you describe. It actually drove off their raiders because the expansion was made for people 5 levels higher. I think only 1 guild even did Tunat prenerf and it was Triton. A LOT of major raiding guides left because of how badly GoD was handled. Afterlife, Fires of Heaven, Triton, Paradigm, and im sure theres others I simply cant remember because it was 10 years ago. They all came over to WoW. Also the fact that one of the major faces of EQ raiding was now a leading Dev on WoW, Tigole helped a lot too. So they didnt drive of casuals becuase EQ never had many casuals in the first place. They actually drove off their hardcore players and tt was a combination of things. Mostly due to a piss poor job of SoE with the GoD expansion, WoW was new and shiny, and again because Tigole was working on it and had pulled a lot of the Raiders over to WoW. In fact Vanilla WoW was very hardcore compared to today's WoW and 40 man raids were taken from EQ where very large raids were used, up to 72 people.

Damn you, you could've mentioned the #5 guild! Mine =( Insidious Blood ^_^

But I digress: they purposely made a hardcore raid expansion, and they purposely made it impossible to complete so that one would have to backtrack from OoW (Omens of War) to complete it. The casual appeal was just extra candy. Seriously a lot of us were sick and tired of having to group for everything (there was a running joke that you couldn't use the bank unless grouped too) and SOE's stance at old content being a necessity.. yes folks, it was to a degree a necessity.. made players feel like second class citizens to their NPCs.

This is why I hate WoD so far: I am getting that familiar feeling when they makes changes that seemed to be based off of no existing feedback for the sake of slowing down players wanting to simply progress. I remember WoW used to have a nerf/no buff/yes attitude to it.

Hell, there's now a buff called Spirit of Wolf in the game now. TELL ME that doesn't at least concern you a bit...

[Arbs]

You can say it is 1 of the reasons for sure, but not the biggest.

but people use WoW has their backup / fallback MMO, if one game flops, dies out or even crashes. WoW is always their to welcome you back & than it progressly locks you in a room so you can't get away.

[Retron]

everquest was, and still is a game dedicated to hardcore people. GoD did the exact opposite of what you describe.

Not really. I was a grouper and a hardcore grouper at that - in the top 10 in LDoN (the previous expansion, based on group instances) on my server, for example. And that was the problem: Gates group gear wasn't much of an upgrade on LDoN gear and to get to the good stuff (equivalent to old raid gear) you needed raider friends to tank several instances which completely obliterated group-geared tanks.

So unless you had raiding chums and tagged along on their coat-tails, you were stuck with having to go into an instance solo and (slowly) kill single mobs over and over hoping to get a zonewide rare drop. That was it in terms of group progression!

It's no surprise that groupers hated the expansion and roughly half of my guild left, never to come back. A few left for raiding guilds and the rest just slummed it until Omens of War came out.

At the casual, non-raiding end they completely mucked it up. (Vanilla) WoW was a breath of fresh air in comparison, you could handle multiple mobs at a time even as a non-tank and there was no exp penalty on death, no running back past mobs while wearing no gear to your corpse, no summoning mobs... fantastic! I stayed with EQ as my main game for a few years after that, but in retrospect I'd have had more fun playing WoW.

(It'd be interesting to see what WoW would be like had the high end raiders not defected from EQ, and had the casual players not moved over too... it certainly gave WoW a big boost right at the beginning!)

[SL1200]

I have been through 4 pc's to keep up with wow's system requirements. I don't think any pc can run it.