Sunday, September 15, 2019

Aion on the western market and why there is no WoW killer





Over the course of over a decade, many video games, more precisely MMO-RPGs were marketed as "WoW killers" yet, to this day, none of their predictions came true and World of Warcraft is still an undisputed king and reigning champion to this day.

As another internet user eloquently put it, "World of Warcraft is like a massive dam and every other MMO-RPG is just a salmon trying to swim and cross the damn, only to end up being smashed on its walls". With WoW recently launching its Vanilla server and starting everything from scratch, this debate came back to life once more. Turns out nostalgia is a big deal and servers were flooded when retail classic World of Warcraft launched once more. 

People came back running to play the game many of which grew up with. While we can agree that a lot of this popularity came riding on that sweet nostalgia, with people reminiscing the good old days of questing and playing with friends with no worries on their minds, 

that couldn't be the only thing making WoW this popular. It wasn't only nostalgia that made more people come to play reboot of the old franchise more than any other MMO-RPG on the market today. There are a couple of problems anyone who tries making a game to compete with WoW is going to run into. Firstly, simply the fact that every new game markets itself as a "WoW killer" is a nod to WoW's popularity and marketing for them on its own. Making a fresh MMO is a huge feat and requires plenty of resources. 

It's not as simple as making free online porn games. Once such an MMO launches it markets itself offering something new, fresh, innovating and tries to quickly create a huge player base off of that. However, what usually happens is that the initial hype quickly dies off. The game quickly loses a large portion of players and, considering that MMOs are all about large number of players, that number simply continues to drop. 

At that point, the game ends up in one of a couple of scenarios. Some companies go bankrupt and games are abandoned, some break even, going on for some time before pulling the plug before losing any money and then there are those who keep going. 

Aion falls in the third category and is still going strong, which is a success on its own. This third category, even though it doesn't take over the throne, pushes on. Sometimes budget cuts are being made to keep the business going, they might reduce staff, cut on advertising but keep everything afloat. Now, apart from having a competitor, there are multiple minor reasons why Aion wasn't as popular in the western market. Some disliked forced PVP, some didn't enjoy the type of grind to which Asian players are used to or found flying lackluster. 

Others prefer different art style or less RNG and some people simply enjoy playing best lesbian sex games instead.

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