Blizzard has done well, creating something that appeals to a large demographic. Although it's difficult to attribute the success of WoW to any one element, it does boast unique features that the competition can't match. One innovation is "rest time," in which more casual players can gain experience faster after being away from the game for a few days. Blizzard is also meticulous about small details: the game have  attractive "mini-icons," and armor sets are beautifully detailed. The art styles of this game is considered more imaginative than that of competing MMO's like Everquest II.

Can Blizzard be hold on to this market dominance? One problem common to all MMO's is the fact that casual players eventually run out of content (no doubt, this has happened to you at one time or another).  Is their a way to deal with this problem? Richard Garriott, creator of Ultima, Ultima Online, and the upcoming Tabula Rasa believes he has an answer. 

"Lineage did something that turned out to be much smarter," Garriott says. "They released episodes. The episodes are really the same live team development, but just packaged as an episode. What they'll do is that they'll hold it back. Instead of saying, today there are new trashcans, tomorrow thereÂ’s tables, and after that new swords, which everybody thinks is cool, but by the time they see the new sword pretty much everybody else has already seen it too. Statistically, half the people will see every new thing before you.

"But if you save it all up as an episode and you release the whole three months worth of work all at once, everybody knows it's coming, everyone gets a chance to get in there, everybody gets excited about it and not only get in themselves, but they also bring new friends who have never played. At that point, we can see that the usage and the sales of the game go up in a big spike, every one of these episodes."

As Blizzard develops the next expansion for WoW, Garriott hopes that games like Tabula Rasa and others will move MMO's  in new directions. Whether or not the next generation of MMO games will be able to challenge Blizzard's supremacy, however, remains to be seen.

Via ArsTechnica