There’s been a lot of effort and thought put into working out why World of Warcraft has been so much more popular than other MMOs. Most numbers put them at ten times the active subscriptions of their closest competitor, though I don’t know of any that break it down by region. (From my memory of launch dates, I suspect there’s some interesting information buried in the regional break-down) In North America alone, WoW has a reported 2 million subscribers, more than any other MMO since the Lineage games at their peak.
The focus in these analyses of popularity usually tends to emphasize the game mechanics. There is, of course, the psychologically addictive behaviour created by epic loot drops and other intermittent rewards. There’s the sense of progress and development as your character levels or advances through raids. There’s the raid encounters themselves and the extreme commitment required to learn them. But really, none of this stuff is particularly original. It’s not even more smoothly-executed than other contemporary MMOs. Yes, the graphics are friendlier. The interface is slicker. Some of the high-level stuff is more casual-friendly. To some degree, “network externalities” (thank you, Bradford C. Walker) mean that WoW’s popular because WoW’s popular. But based on my experience playing WoW and watching others play WoW, I think this stuff is all a fancy side-show to the real deal.
WoW’s more popular because scattered across all these things, in bits and pieces that add up to a significant whole, is a game that’s much, much better at doing the thing MMOs do best than any of its competitors. It’s better at being a Third Place, an informal venue for socialization.
Continue reading ‘The World of Warcraft and the Third Place’