According to Xfire, the “leading social service for gamers”, more people are playing League of Legends right now than World of Warcraft.
Many are hailing this as not only the dethroning of WoW but also the future of the entire online gaming industry; free-to-play games that make their revenue through micro-transactions for in-game items or minor fees associated with certain services.
That’s not to say free-to-play games don’t have their downsides, or that they will completely take over the market. Most free-to-play games seem to start you off pretty easily with lots of quick progress but after a while they bog down. Then the player has to decide whether to put in some real money to speed things back up or settle in for a long slow slog to unlock the later game content. There’s something to be said for just forking over your $15 (or whatever it costs) to pay a game subscription and know you have access to all the content within that game; though micro-transactions are even creeping into many MMOs now.
Of course, the other question is how much of this is due to the (perhaps temporary) success of League of Legends, and how much is due to people simply burning out on World of Warcraft. League of Legends, like Starcraft and other RTS type games, relies almost completely on PVP interaction for replayabilty. This is a pretty solid approach, really, as players will always be coming out with new and interesting strategies. The PVP element is also, of course, why EVE has been so successful.
WoW, on the other hand, has primarily utilized the PVE model where content is consumed and then new content is released to keep players playing. Lately, though, it seems Blizzard simply can’t, or won’t, provide many players with enough content to keep them interested. Reading this Gamespy article on the 4.2 Firelands patch for WoW is actually quite depressing; not only was the new top boss killed within 4 hours (on normal mode anyways) but there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot else there. Waiting months for a patch that players burn through in only a few days just doesn’t seem like a sustainable model for WoW. Of course there are always things to grind for but I think WoW really is starting its final, slow, long decline in terms of interesting new content.
In fact, the feature that attracted me the most to Cataclysm (aside from the restructured zones and leveling of course) was rated battlegrounds; it was a more fulfilling PVP experience I was looking for, and I have now found it instead in League of Legends. Rated battlegrounds turned out to be a bust for me, being much less accessible than I had hoped; basically they required a full raid. League of Legends I find to be much more approachable, yet also a much more in-depth and fulfilling experience; and that with only two maps vs. the many battlegrounds for WoW.
good article. nuff said
You still feel like WoW is toast? I haven’t played in a long time but I was kept in game with about BGs & Arenas. Looking at LoL or HoN for an alternative.