G4 Fails In An Epic Fashion

As seen on Massively, G4 decides every MMO released since WoW doesn’t exist in their world.

A quick look at 2004 and 2005’s E3 rundown reveals dozens of MMOs either in development or planned. WoW killed or crippled all of them. The reasons are many, but a huge contributing factor is simply how good World of Warcraft is as a game.

But what makes this an epic fail: G4 apparently forgot that their two examples for post-WoW MMOs, SWG and TSO, launched before WoW. Clearly, WoW transcends time and space.

Arguably, you could say that they were simply saying the MMO market itself was destroyed by WoW’s launch, and launch dates are irrelevant. Of course, then you have to ignore Eve, and City of Heroes, and Lord of the Rings, and Everquest 2, and… OK, I’ll stop, since almost literally every MMO launched in the past decade has been profitable, and continues to be in the post World of Warcraft world.

What G4 fails to realize, since WoW’s numbers are sooooo huge, is that you don’t actually have to be #1 in the market to deliver a good return on investment. MMOs traditionally have fantastic ROI, even with budgets the size of World of Warcraft’s, simply because players keep paying to play on a regular basis. The longer an MMO runs, the better that return. Assuming Ultima Online still has ~ 100,000 subscribers, that means that EA is collecting $1 million a month on a game which completed its original development ten years ago.

But that’s boring. Better to mock everything not WoW, preferably with pictures of lolcats. That’s most assuredly the way to get some innovation!

G4: Home of awesome MMO commentary.