Dear Aspiring MMO Game Developers,

Stop trying to make MMO games. You will not be successful. Even if you get a GREAT first couple months, players will drop off when they run out of content, get bored, and/or can’t convince their friends to quit Word of Warcraft.

You will never get a critical mass of subscribers to not only recoup the costs you wasted building the game and setting up infrastructure, but to fund the development of new content.

WoW was a fluke. It was in the right place at the right time, with a company and franchise behind it that most of the PC gaming world adored.

It doesn’t matter if your game is better. The graphics could be better, the gameplay could be better, there could be more variety, exciting combat, deep character building, and weapon crafting mechanics.

It doesn’t matter if you have a killer IP behind it. Star Wars, Star Trek, Warhammer 40K, Lord of the Rings, Dungeons and Dragons, etc - irrelevant.

It doesn’t matter if your subscription is cheaper. It doesn’t even matter if your game is FREE to play.

You won’t succeed because everyone who is into these sorts of games (eg masochists) are only playing WoW because that’s what their friends are playing.

This means that in order to succeed in this market, you need to “convert” entire guilds en-masse away from WoW - which isn’t going to happen; and even if you do, you’ll lose them as soon as Blizzard announces a new expansion.

How many of these titles need to fail, and how many dev studios need to close doors before the industry comes to realize this? Stop making them - please. Think of your families.

You’d have a far better chance at success with peer-to-peer, instanced, co-op multiplayer games like Borderlands, and Diablo which require no central server to maintain persistence, and won’t require you to charge a subscription to play.