It took WoW almost 6 months to hit 3 million subs, and at that point the firestorm was underway and they quickly shot up to 7, then 10 million subs. Instead of people burning out in the first month, this game will give a slow burn to players who are dedicated to the content, and I predict this will drive new people to sub. It doesn't have the hype train behind it that SWTOR/Rift/GW2 had, and that's what will make it successful. Remember microtransactions in Mass Effect 3, SimCity, BF4? Its because they see themselves as a business first, and an entertainer second, rather than visa versa.īethesda/Zenimax has a track record that shows they give a damn about their product, and the changes from beta to release even over the past month shed light on this fact for me. I love BioWare, but EA hasn't had the best track record in the last few years. It's because these dev's actually care about the game they are creating. You ask for a reason why this MMO should succeed? I gave you three yesterday, but I'll give you one major one. However this is facially wrong because WoW's sub numbers at one point were around 13 mil, that's 5 million players that have gone missing! These are free agent MMO subscribers floating in the nether, just waiting for a good hook. In other words, we know that there are at least 7.8 million people currently playing MMOs, and for ESO to be competitive it needs part of that market share.

What this means is that there is a market, but experience has shown that most MMO subscribers only play one game at a time. This is obviously false as WoW is still subscription and still claims around 8 mil subs ( 7.8 reported by Kotaku in February). The expectation that something is going to go FTP because most others have done so is based upon the idea that NO MMO can succeed in the market.

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