14 DAY TRIAL // Frank Pearce, who is a senior vice president at Blizzard in charge of product development, has told Gamasutra that, “Whether it's a Blizzard game or another great MMO, I think there's plenty of space in the market for great MMOs to share customers. We have players that burn through content in weeks or months that takes us two years to create. There are so many people looking to play these experiences so passionately, so many hours a week, I think there's plenty of space for the industry to grow.”
The executive believes that a lot of developers, although they have good franchises on their hands, ones that could make the move to the MMO space, lack the confidence to take the risk and create a game that will compete with World of Warcraft.
He added, “If people are looking at something like that and saying there's no space, then I don't know what to say. If you make a great game experience that's really awesome, there's always more room in that market.”
World of Warcraft will be challenged this year by the launch of Star Wars: The Old Republic, an MMO that is being developed by BioWare and has the distribution might of publisher Electronic Arts behind it.
The game is important because it uses a well-known game universe, one that might attract players that are not yet familiar with the MMO genre.
BioWare is also saying that its game will be the first in the genre to really take care to create a complex story, with mechanics specifically designed to allow players to make choices and significantly affect their universe.
Despite these unique features the executives at Electronic Arts are saying that they aim to launch a good profitable game and not to topple World of Warcraft.
Some say that The Old Republic has cost more than 300 million dollars to develop, but Electronic Arts stated the game needs to get 1.5 million subscribers to break even in the long term.