Could a current MMO be overtaking WoW soon?

[Arcbound]

Well apparently upon doing some research, a sub in China conuts as someone who logs in for 20 secs in a month to check their mail. Keep in mind they only pay for 30 secs and not for a month. It would be interesting to see the profit per subscriber, that would be a lot more telling.

[Gimlix]

Lol FF14 actually has only 1M subbed accounts?
Lelz for those who thought 4M.

1M aint 7.1M

[Deleted]

it will be N1 for a while longer but there is other good MMO's out there with sweet ideas and wow is getting old.
What only makes me disgusted with wow is the old combat system.
Almost any new MMO has a new interface in combat and is really nice and clean.
This might sound dumb but once you play the games like Tera you can notice the combat system is awesome.

sooner or later another game takes over or is being created.
WoW needs a new engine or at least WoW 2 soon

[Thage]

FF14 has like 1.2 Million subs I think, but the way they said has really confused people into thinking they have 4.5 million. SE had a call at the beginning of the year that they had 1 million subs across Dragon Quest, FF11 & FF14. But im sure FF14 has had a bump in subs. But not that much.

This. FFXIV is doing extremely well for itself (coupled with mobile game sales, it nearly single-handedly doubled their profits last year) and I'd imagine it's seeing a massive influx of former WoW players (I've met more than a few of them on Behemoth and Famfrit NA), but it's not at four million active accounts just yet. As it stands there are many servers that are locked on character creation during primetime due to the servers being at capacity.

I think what Square had announced was 4 million total accounts that had an active sub at some point; I'm sure that the gap between total accounts that have had an active sub at some point and currently-active accounts has grown smaller with the release of Heavensward and the WoW community's growing disillusionment with the devs' apparent tone-deafness even amongst one another.

[Logwyn]

it will be N1 for a while longer but there is other good MMO's out there with sweet ideas and wow is getting old.
What only makes me disgusted with wow is the old combat system.
Almost any new MMO has a new interface in combat and is really nice and clean.
This might sound dumb but once you play the games like Tera you can notice the combat system is awesome.

sooner or later another game takes over or is being created.
WoW needs a new engine or at least WoW 2 soon

I wonder how a WOW 2 would be. And would it start as story now and continue or from the beginning?

[Thage]

I would assume it would happen after a WarIV and would play off whatever story developments were contained there in. Its really the only way it would happen, it would let them change up factions and races and nations otherwise it would just br a why bother switching over scenario.

Alternately, and I wouldn't be surprised if THIS happened given how creatively-bankrupt the lore team has been this expansion, they'd reveal that our timeline was one of the multitude of 'wrong' timelines, and it finally collapses under the weight of Blizzard's numerous and egregious retcons the timeline unraveling as a result of Kairoz's use of the Hourglass, and the starting 1-5-or-so experience is of us preparing for and holding a last stand at Stormwind/Orgrimmar (bonus points if they let us import our character and use our current transmog as a set of legacy starting gear) against the Legion, buying Nozdormu time to send us to the 'real' timeline.

[Evil Midnight Bomber]

Poised means actively overtaking in your version of english I guess? Cause as far as I knew it meant in a position to. Which it is, everyone knows it that manages to maintain some measure of being unbiased. It all depends on what Blizzard doesnat Blizzcon.

Poised would mean that they are ready to make the step to overtake WoW. And they are not. Not for quite some time yet. Maybe not ever.

[mickybrighteyes]

I wonder how a WOW 2 would be. And would it start as story now and continue or from the beginning?

If I had my way.... WoW1 would stay active as some sort of free to play thing or buy to play thing with a final tier setting teh stage for the opening of, say, warcraft 4 or some book/movie.

All shit goes down... all the shit.... legion, old gods, all out war... lava, fire, TOTEMS and shit. Break teh world all over again and start up WoW2 as some pseudo sandbox thing with a wrecked azeroth to explore.

Looking at stuff like No Man's Sky, Star Citizen, or similar stuff really makes me want to see some sort of high fantasy game do something like that (but with better asthetics than Deadfall or Mortal Online)

[High Marshal Sigismund]

FF14 will go on a big decline before WoW reaches their number.
No game can stand against WoW. The true #1.

This sounds like wishful thinking to me. Masked by a fake aura of confidence.

[TheramoreIsTheBomb]

This is going to take WoW, just like it was put on steroids at launch to do. It will finish its new job.
People are going to say "no it wont lolz"
Not kill WoW but take its title of most subscribers
Watch what happens.

[Thage]

I would argue that they are ready to make the big step, I don't know that SquareEnix wants to however. The content is there, the loyal playerbase is there, the fan culture is there. I think by the time they get to the next expansion theyll be getting close to 5million active.

Generally-speaking, it's obvious from interviews with Yoshi-P and other devs that they simply don't care about WoW. They're not gunning to steal its players or whatever--they're doing what WoW's devs did back when THEY got started: making the best game they can and showing that they're hungry to succeed. And that's why they're poised to deal WoW a serious blow if another WoD happens.

I mean the word of mouth advertising alone can be doing nothing but good things at this point. Plus keep in mind they don't have to overtake WoTLK WoW, they have to overtake post WoD WoW so the bar is set lower regardless.

There's that, too. Square has been brilliantly marketing A Realm Reborn by pointing at the original launch's failure and going "We fixed the SHIT out of this. Come give it a look-see!" It's like they took the best aspects of WoW and TOR, and put their Final Fantasy spin on it--Heavensward almost feels like they're openly making fun of Blizzard in some cases, despite my above assertion (which I still hold true; I don't think they honestly care whether or not they 'beat' WoW because that's not how Japanese companies compete).

I think it will happen amd maybe much sooner than even the diehard FFXIV crowd thinks depending on Blizzcon this year.

This Blizzcon will be worth a watch either way, I feel. Either they're going to release an absolute love-letter of an expansion to make up for WoD, or they're going to stay the course and the Q&A panels are going to be well worth the virtual ticket fee. Either way, the community wins.

[Deleted]

This is going to take WoW, just like it was put on steroids at launch to do. It will finish its new job.
People are going to say "no it wont lolz"
Not kill WoW but take its title of most subscribers
Watch what happens.

With star wars battlefront coming out in a few months and going to pull alot of players of SWTOR into it i dont see subs going up for it this year.

[mickybrighteyes]

With star wars battlefront coming out in a few months and going to pull alot of players of SWTOR into it i dont see subs going up for it this year.

different games, in different genres with different payment options.....

[TheWindWalker]

Lol final fantasy wont overtake wow not in a million years.

Considering it plays almost identically to WoW it could. It's major flaw is that it's more like ~TBC-era WoW so threat is a bit too high maintenance and healers step on each other's feet and run out of mana and the DPS classes have finite resources so a support class (Bard, which is labeled DPS but still) is needed for long bosses. (Also there's more mechanical variety between the three Warlock specs in WoW than there is between all the melee classes, tanks included, in FF14, but that's a separate issue.)

[Dezx]

I always felt that Blizzard were the only ones that could kill WoW, and as of right now they are doing a great job of it. It's a great opportunity for a different MMO to jump ahead at this time I would say. I have been hearing a lot of positive things from Final Fantasy.

[Ossandran]

Maybe, until the 7.0 hype train that I won't be riding this time

I am so ashamed I was hyped for wod

[Adoxe]

Even at it's current state, WoW is not beatable. It's going to take atleast another 10 years before it's even near that status.

[howareyou]

Even at it's current state, WoW is not beatable. It's going to take atleast another 10 years before it's even near that status.

We shall see, but now it can be achieved by the others. That's if GW2, TOR, and FF14 can bring it. MOBA(LOL) beat WOW, we just going to speculate until it happens.

[Kokolums]

The way to dethrone WoW is to build an MMO that caters to extroverts. That means no LFR, no anti-social matchmaking tool, and global chat mandatory. That would foster a community feel and build a proper playerbase. As it currently stands, no MMO is designed this way. They all suffer from antisocial features.

Only Grinding Gear Games seems to understand the importance of social tools. Path of Exile is not an MMO. Its got a limited graphics engine. But it caters to extroverts and its playerbase is in the millions somewhere. If GGG would design a genuine MMO they'd blow Blizzard out of the water. But they aren't.

Path of Exile just MIGHT wind up having a larger playerbase than WoW but only if they have an incredible expansion.

[High Marshal Sigismund]

What about ArcheAge? Seems solid right now with all the new content patches. Really loved sailing in the game.