Cav's Place

Noticed that I have been talking quite a bit about World of Warcraft lately, so I thought I’d write this post about it as well.

As you can see from the title, I can’t stand it and the reasons hardly have anything to do with game mechanics. It’d be quite hard to say bad things about the game itself since I never played it and never plan to. Equally hard to say good things, of course, but really don’t plan to say those anyway.
The only thing I can’t stand about the game itself is the need for groups, the fact that you can’t do well and get everything you need on your own. Being about as much a loner in my gaming as I am in real life, that in itself would be enough to make me stay well away from it.

However, the main reasons have to do with what it represents and the companies behind it. For starters, it’s a MMO with a monthly fee and I have a problem with all of them. I will not pay a monthly fee to play a game, period!
Not to mention that paying a fee in order to play it makes people play it more, at the expense of everything else, since they want to make sure they get their money’s worth. When you get a game and know it’s yours from that moment forward you can play it for a while, then take a break and play something else or even nothing at all, then maybe return to it… But when there’s a monthly fee you tend to stick to that one game, which is excellent marketing ploy and therefore a strategy that’s rotten to the core.
Also on that note, you can see just how this ploy is working if you look over sales figures for PC games. World of Warcraft is basically killing the market, it’s sales are outstanding while everything else drops drastically. It makes existing gamers give up on other games in order to stick to it and creates new PC gamers out of people who had hardly played, and never actually bought, PC games before, but doesn’t make them interested in anything else, they start and end with it.
The problem is that having sales drop makes everyone else invest less into putting new PC games on the market, which might result in fewer games and will certainly result in fewer good games out there, meaning that World of Warcraft’s popularity (with a little added help from the other MMOs) will eventually harm me as a PC gamer wishing to still have great single-player games in the future.

Of course there are many other games that try the same thing out there and the fact that World of Warcraft is the one doing this would say it’s really good, which was to be expected since everything Blizzard touches turns into a masterpiece, but there is also the pressure to play it. Honestly, as a PC gamer these days you feel quite a bit of pressure to play World of Warcraft. It’s like everybody’s back in high school and there’s a hot new trend that everyone must follow, which is extremely frustrating. That makes me wonder how many of those who play it now are actually playing it because they made an informed choice, they knew the options and decided this one suits them best, and how many just went with the MMO flow and didn’t even take anything other than World of Warcraft into account.

Then you have the purely financial aspect. World of Warcraft alone brings in close to 100 million euros per month. I think a lot of game developers would be thrilled to earn that much in an entire year from all their released games put together! I find it sickening that some earn that much and still want more. And the sad thing is that probably the one to blame for it is not Blizzard, but Vivendi, since they bought them.
I absolutely loathe Vivendi, their campaigns, their practices, their priorities, everything about them! And their latest stunt proves once again that all they want is to earn more than everybody else at all costs. Just look at the headline, which is on their official site. It says “largest, most profitable”, nothing else matters… Yes, of course many corporations are like that, and they’re also rotten to the core, but I really think Vivendi would win a “prize” in that aspect…

As a conclusion, about the game itself I could only say that it’s not for me, but that certainly doesn’t mean it’s bad or that others shouldn’t play it. The problem is what it represents and what the company behind it stands for. I find that absolutely sickening and that’s what actually makes me hate the game itself…