World of Warcraft: How Popularity Begets Popularity
January 4, 2010 4:41 pm UncategorizedFor the longest time, I assumed World of Warcraft was a solid-but-nothing-special game that achieved popularity based on Blizzard’s name as much as the game itself. It first arrived at the same time as Everquest 2, and after playing both of them for a few weeks, I chose to continue my adventuring career in Everquest 2 because — funny enough — it was less an Everquest clone than World of Warcraft.
Yes, World of Warcraft is just another Everquest Clone. But then again, so are 90% of the MMOs released in the last decade.
Recently, I’ve leveled up a Hunter in World of Warcraft, really giving the game a chance to show me what its got. And I’ve learned a few things in my time in the game. I’ve even compiled some Hunter tips for those that like to play.
But what have I learned most? That I was right all along.
I remember reading about a study where they divided people into several different groups on a website and allowed them to pick out the music they wanted to listen to while on the site. The website also displayed how many times a certain song had been played, thus allowing everyone to see how popular it was. What they found out was that popularity tends to beget popularity — what became popular early tended to rise to the top, given a certain lift by its own popularity.
The key piece of evidence was that songs that were popular among one group were sometimes among the least popular in the other group. It was the act of becoming popular that led to the song being played again and again — people would see that it was popular or hear about it from someone else and would listen to it themselves.
An interesting theory and one I think holds true. Popularity does tend to beget popularity, which is what we see with World of Warcraft. The game’s initial popularity is based on the Blizzard name — Blizzard being well known for producing good, quality game and having quite the fan following before WoW came along. Obviously, World of Warcraft itself is a solid game else these players would have quickly grown bored, but there isn’t anything that really sets it above Everquest 2 or its other contemporaries. Rather, it was good enough to keep the interest of the players, and the sheer number of those players caused it to explode in popularity.
Unfortunately, the genre has become quite stale over the past few years, leaving me to just dream up Frankenstein’s MMO.
