WoW is the target for The Old Republic, says LucasArts and EA.
Executives are CLUELESS IDIOTS.
Lets make it clear, the reason WoW is “THIS” successfull and has “11 million subs” is because it is not tied to any certain culture.
And it doesn’t actually has those subs, either.
What they do have is a significant portion of these so-called subs coming from Asia and they’re not exactly buying a copy of the client and paying monthly fees, no, the income from there operates in an entirely different way.
So, while yes, WoW has a huge chunk out of the North America gamers, and some in Europe, the reason it is successful is because it has ZERO ties to anything other than a privately owned (or licensed) Intellectual Property that has nothing remotely resembling anything familiar to a certain culture or another, thus allowing it to be something that the Asian market can relate to.
As such, unless Warhammer or StarWars are as big a smash hit thing in Asia as they are in the USA and, perhaps, some of Europe, they’ll never be able to draw in the kind of crowd numbers WoW is talking about.
Simply because they’re rooted in Westren cultures which the East has no feelings towards.
A BattleTech or Gundam MMO, on the other hand, have very high chances of being a “WoW Killer” since they’re properties which speak to both the East and the West - the entire globe.
This is what it would seem all these studio heads have failed to figure out.
Something anyone who worked on single player games and publishing them knows by now - if you want to breach onto the non-america territories, you need to have a sort of IP that can bridge over/through the cultural gap.
If you have an IP that was born out of the USA, it is much likely to fail even in London and Finland or Norewegia, much more so in Japan, China, Korea, Malaysia, et cetera.
Disclaimer:
I’m probably entirely ignorant and SW IS a huge thing in Asia too.
Isn’t warcraft essentially humans vs orcs which is dated to basic D&D…was D&D any good in grabbing hold and turning the Asian teenagers onto devoted dungeon zealots?
I think I overloopd, and under-grammared, and I’m not even entirely certain this was said in English or Americaneze or anything resembling a spoken tongue.
But I’m hopped up on 5 smith apples, 500grams of Belgian choclate and…I stopped counting the alcohol literage…it’s been a hard day, OKAY!?