Mogtalk interview with yoshi p

[KisaiTenshi]

I get four or more people responding to me on posts sometimes, each with multiple points. I cull my responses so I'm not writing massive books each time I make a post.

Nobody on the forum has the attention span to read a novel, so the longer your post, the more likely someone will want to argue that one thing that you didn't think was important enough to elaborate on by suggesting you've never played the game. I had actually written a munch longer post in response to the WoW statement but decided that nobody would read it...

And why exactly did people go to WoW with their new PCs and internet, rather than to the games that were supposedly better...?

The old games were already established. They were already well known and didn't need as much marketing efforts, they already had friend circles playing that the new guard could join and their product had more time to mature and develop, with less bugs and server outages. Yet, people went for WoW. Because it's worse. That just doesn't quite make sense.

Wow's popularity had more to do with broadband yes, but the fact that it was casual-friendly, if not braindead easy is why people dragged their friends to it. It's very hard to drag a friend to a grindy (FFXI), expensive (Korean MMO's), punishing (Wizrdry's permadeath), PvP-oriented game. But you can drag your non-gaming friends into WoW because you can skip all the content and not be behind for 10 years.

Each country is not the vacuum everyone makes it out to be. There's three major markets, Korea, Japan and US.

Korea has many MMO's that westerners may recognize like NexusTK, Maple Story, Mabinogi, Dragon Nest, Ragnarok Online, Lineage, Guild Wars, Tera, Blade and Soul, Aion, Archeage, and so forth.

Japan's MMO's have largely made no inroads to the west (largely due to arrogance https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2...japanese-games ), with only FFXI and FFXIV being present, despite foreign players wanting to play Wizardy Online (which briefly was here as a freemium P2W game), Dragon Quest X, and PSO2.

In the west, WoW is popular but it's not exported to Japan, as Japanese players are not big PC game players. There are localized versions for Korea and China however.

Europe, Runescape was a UK MMO. Minecraft was from a Swedish developer, who later sold it to Microsoft. EVE Online is from Iceland. Everything else I could find for Europe was mobile P2W rubbish. Of these, these games Minecraft's popularity explosion was like WoW's, it offers a casual environment that can be played with a low-spec computer and even works on mobile and consoles.

Sony before dumping all it's MMO's, was working on Everquest Next (later, before being canceled, Landmark) which was a much prettier Minecraft as a MMORPG. It's kindof a pity it was canceled because the resource gathering in that game put all existing MMO's gathering "nodes" to shame. But this is what some companies thought people wanted... a pretty minecraft, not "a casual friendly game free of grindy combat"