MMO Snooze

The foreseeable future for the MMO industry is pretty lonely right now. With World of Warcraft controlling about 52% of the extire market, and no other MMO that can challenge it will be out til sometime in 2007.

One MMO I have been following somewhat is Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. For those who don't know, Vanguard is being made by Brad McQuaid - the main man behind Verant's Everquest (well, THEN Verant's).

There has been some wrangling and drama related to the development of this game, mostly relating to Vanguard switching publishers from Microsoft back to McQuaid's old company S.O.E., a seemingly dry Beta with weird Beta invites, and the game being pushed back to Q4 2007. However, after cutting through the BS you realise these folks have to deliver a game at the end of the day, and the competition will be fierce.

WoW has had 2 Christmas holidays to amass almost 7,000,000 subscribers. Sounds like they will get another. By the time Vanguard ships, it's feasible that WoW will have 7,500,000 to 8,000,000 folks subscribing. That's quite a bit of catch-up work to do, especially when working with an I.P. that no one has heard of.

I relate WoW to the I-Pod - if you're going to enter that space and confront either of those products, you had better have something to offer that's going to better it. From reading the Vanguard website, hearing descriptions of it on Massively Online Gamer and VirginWorlds Podcasts (respectively), and plain old looking at the screenshots, all I can think of is they're making the same mistakes that EQ2 and other games that are coming out are making. The game systems sound needlessly convoluted, the graphics are nice but not exciting, and it's a tired, clogged genre.

The challenge presented to Vanguard is to gain some sort of market share in a game genre that has a dominating force possibly greater that Microsoft has in the PC industry. If tey released Christmas 2006, maybe - however a full year for then is just too long a time to wait.