[Neric]

Originally Posted by Shaof

Sounds like you're the one who doesn't understand business practices in this industry. All MMO's on the market benefit from any game in the circle building the entire pool of users. It has nothing to do with taking users from other titles. A failing MMO is bad for all MMO's. A successful MMO like WoW is good for all MMO's.

If you look back to the EQ era, EQ, DAoC and AC had to compete from that same pool of players, because it was limited. Blizzard grew the pool by using a business model that took a loyal fanbase from other genres and migrated them into a fun MMO. That only helps the genre as a whole. It's a good thing for the gaming industry.

You are making an argument for some sort of cooperation between publishers. Sure, it makes sense for them to grow the overall size of the market, but only if unlimited growth is possible. I don't see it, because WoW doesn't have 10 million subscribers yet, which they should have by now if their curve was going up at a stable rate. Obviously there is a peak and because of that, taking users from other titles is one of the main marketing concepts.

DAoC had horses and dye, why do you think EQ got the same in Luclin? It was a direct reaction to get customers back or to prevent some from leaving.

When Brad left SoE, he had something to prove. He wanted to show them that he could make a better and more successful game. With a limited market this meant that he had to draw customers from EQ2. That goal became obsolete with the merge. Shortly after, Vanguard started to adopt massive WoW features...

You probably never followed the F/22 competition the military contracted out to two companies. The short of it is, both teams helped each other when needed because the success of both aircraft was necessary for the success of the program.

That's a nice example going in the same direction, but once again it's not describing the situation. Both airplane companies tried to get a contract, here Blizzard already has a contract. For Blizzard it makes sense to protect their interest. You can be sure that they are not willing to lose customers to SoE to server some idealistic reason. It may sound cruel, but there is no friendship in business, at least not when we are talking about profit worth millions of dollars.

But whatever. The last thing Blizzard needs to worry about is losing subs to competition. If you saw Bill Gates in the news prior to the release of Vista, he was asked how he felt about the latest attack ads by Mac. His response was, 'It doesn't bother me. We have 90% of the market share'.

Quite arrogant isn't it?
The point is that Gates knows that his customers are tied to MS, because 100% of the business applications run on Windows. With MMOs it's different. People are tied to their characters and to their guilds, but if they get burned out they leave. If only 5% of them decide to give Vanguard a try, we are talking about 300k subscriptions. 300k x $12 = $3.6 million.

I don't know about you, but if I was in charge, I'd rather see my company make 3.6 million more each month. Looks better in my vita. If you have a different opinion on it, you are too good for this world.