MMORPG genre in the year 2006
Looking back to what happened in the MMORPG genre in the year 2006 the short summary is: Not much. World of Warcraft is dominating the market to a degree that other games fail to make news or take off. Is that the end of history? Have MMORPG stopped evolving? Fortunately not. Just 5 years ago it was Everquest which dominated the market, and today it’s down to a 1.6% market share. World of Warcraft is just another Everquest, taking the center stage for a few years before disappearing into history. While doomcasting World of Warcraft usually ends you up with egg on your face, I think that 2007 will be the year in which WoW peaks. Inevitably the Burning Crusade expansion will bring back a lot of people into the game who had stopped playing sometime during the last two years. So in the first quarter of 2007 the number of subscribers will hit a new record. But by the middle of 2007 that growth will at least stop, or there will even be a decline, although you won’t read about that anywhere. Blizzard isn’t likely to release declining subscription numbers. You’ll just notice a lack of new press releases announcing
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