Many MMOs have attempted to take the crown from World of Warcraft, but as with nearly all attempts to beat a product that has already cornered a market, such games have been unsuccessful. Nevertheless, there are some that believe they have what it takes to knock Blizzard down, albeit with unconventional methods.
Everquest lead designer Ryan Barker believes that WoW will be beaten, and it’ll be by “something totally different that we haven’t even thought of yet.”
“At some point someone will dwarf those numbers with a game,” he suggests in an interview with Videogamer. “If we can get past some of the barriers that are keeping people from playing with their friends, just because their friends happened to start the game before they did, and maybe started on a different server or whatever, if we can start to get rid of some of those social blocks, I think it can get even better.”
According to Barker, it is a social networking site like Facebook that will provide the key: “Facebook doesn’t care how long you’ve been on Facebook … Things like that show us that there are a lot of people out there that are interested in being involved in an internet community, especially with all the apps on Facebook, in playing casual games. At some point someone’s going to do an MMO that really caters to that group, and is going to have a billion subscribers or whatever. There’s another ceiling somewhere that we haven’t hit yet.”
World of Facebook confirmed? We shall see.
