The Thin Red Line

I have a new theory. Related to an earlier post, where I asked, do we even need MMO’s?

Perhaps the question wasn’t need. Rather. Want. Do we really want them?

My theory is that this year saw quite a bit of interest in MMO’s in the PC gaming sector because it was a bad year for anything else. Look like the big guns, EA and Activision, were holding out on everyone, waiting to play their hand in time for the holiday season. This left the MMO industry as the only players launching new stuff prior to end of year.

My theory is that most MMO gamers aren’t as one dimensional as people seem to think. We generally don’t obsess solely about our WoWs, our EvEs, our Aions and our Champions. We like to play the field. That’s why a lot of us try a lot of MMO’s, and it’s also why we’re seeing a lot of blogging about non-MMO related gaming on typically MMO centric blogs of late.

My theory is a simple one. We just like good games. And there have been a dearth of them on the PC platform lately, causing us to sample all these MMO’s. MMO’s that probably wouldn’t have otherwise caused us to bat an eyelid. Had, say, Modern Warfare 2 launched at the same time Champions Online did, no-one would have cared a less about Cryptics little niche game. Launching these MMO’s in dry spells created hype that otherwise would simply not have existed. And I think the likes of Cryptic know this. They know that the demographic isn’t strictly divided down some line between MMO gamers and non-MMO gamers.