World of Warcraft Has Peaked

After some talk at the MI6 conference on the fact that there's an 800 million possible MMO audience out there and World of Warcraft has only managed to capture around 10 million of them, more WoW critiques are on the horizon, this one coming from THQ executive Jack Sorenson, who is involved in the creation of an Warhammer 40,000 -based MMO.

To Sorenson, World of Warcraft is a good game but it can't keep its dominant position forever. He says "However long it takes World of Warcraft to go through its cycle there will always be people on it, probably always be millions of people on it, but does it keep at that peak? And I think that, I wish I could see the numbers, but my guess is that it probably already has peaked - but it's still a great business. Who wouldn't want that?"

The Warhammer in space setting was said to be turned into a persistent on-line game as far back as March 2007, but little details regarding it have emerged since then with developers at THQ saying that they'll only release details when the game hits an advanced production stage. THQ president Brian Farell has already revealed that the game is "probably a couple of years out" but that, in Sorenson's view, is a very good sign that the game will get a proper development period and proper resources allocated.

Sorenson says THQ is learning from the World of Warcraft game history. One of the most important lessons is that quality from day one is a critical aspect. "That's certainly one thing that World of Warcraft's proved: not only do you have to do it well, it has to be great from day one. There's not a tolerance like there used to be, when Ultima came out... All those games were buggy and horrible, and eventually got there. You can't do that anymore, which has lengthened the cycle for good-quality MMOs," says the developer.

The THQ man also believes that a strong intellectual property base can make the Warhammer 40,000 MMO a real success, on par if not superior to WoW because: "There's a lot of commonality there that just comes right out of what Games Workshop has developed - the fiction, and the rest of it is incredibly deep. I think if we're true to that and do it at a high quality, then people will come."

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