There have been countless MMO’s since WoW’s debut that have hoped, but haven’t gotten nearly as far, in achieving what WoW has. Granted, games like Everquest and DAoC were extremely popular predecessors to WoW, but to date no game has reached the amount of subscribers Blizzard has. WoW is quite simply the most popular MMO (and probably game) in history.

Despite the fact that no game to date has been able to topple the giant, that doesn’t mean Blizzard isn’t listening. Looking back at the release of The Burning Crusade, there were several MMO’s released that year (2007) that had built a lot of hype. Many WoW users themselves were looking forward to these games, but obviously ended up disappointed. These games included Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, which is infamous for it’s pre-mature release (due to budget problems); Age of Conan, which is still an incomplete game to this day; The Chronicles of Spellborn, which had a release that almost went completely under the radar (no one even knew about the game!);  and Lord of the Rings Online, which turned out to be a well-polished game, but in the end could not compete with WoW as intended.

And then as we all know Wrath of the Lich King came up in 2008 and games such as Mythic’s Warhammer Online (though in my opinion a good game in it’s own right) has suffered since with severe population problems.

Ryan Barker, Everquest lead designer, seems to think that, despite the past four years of complete WoW domination along with countless attempts made by other well-to-do gaming companies, an MMO on Facebook will overturn the MMO community away from WoW:

The main problem, Barker thinks, is simply getting people into the game and not intimidating them with long-time veterans and powerful player characters. “At some point someone will dwarf those numbers with a game. If we can get passed some of the barriers that are keeping people from playing with their friends, just because their friends happened to start the game before they did, and maybe started on a different server or whatever, if we can start to get rid of some of those social blocks, I think it can get even better.”

So, he suggests, why not something like Facebook? “Facebook doesn’t care how long you’ve been on Facebook … Things like that show us that there are a lot of people out there that are interested in being involved in an internet community, especially with all the apps on Facebook, in playing casual games. At some point someone’s going to do an MMO that really caters to that group, and is going to have a billion subscribers or whatever. There’s another ceiling somewhere that we haven’t hit yet.”

SOURCE (The Escapist).

The majority of the community is more or less laughing at the assertion that some social networking website will just walk in and take over the MMO player-base. That, and not only is “a billion subscribers” reaching maybe just a little too far, it is very unlikely any MMO will completely overcome WoW at all. In my opinion, when WoW’s graphics and gameplay becomes dated, it will still take several MMO’s to destroy their player-base. But, to Barker’s credit, I will say that if any game were to take out WoW, an MMO on a site such as Facebook which already has a user-base of millions might just be the best way to go granted that the game is well-polished and fun.