No way will the P2P trend ever END, and ESPECIALLY not in 2008, what with the release of Wrath of the Lich King? Are you Kidding me? Games are just getting better and better as far as game play and graphics and people WILL pay to play them. Only when the physical economy crashes (That is a whole other topic in itself) will people be UNABLE to pay to play.

Umm wrath IS world of warcraft....the article CLEARLY states that its the end of OTHER P2P games

no way P2P will end with wow
when WAR comes out, lot's of wow players will quit wow and start playing WAR as a lot of people are sick of wow and don't have a good alternative.

Aside from new expansions pulling in people to happily oblige to pay 2 play, there is also the fact of proper maintenance.

When a customer pays they have a continuing obligation from the company to continue making the game better and correcting issues. Most Free 2 play's are a one-time pay, for the game, and then that's it. What usually happens is that the game stays stagnant, not much change at all. Sure there may be improvements to some game play and ongoing bug fixes, but nothing near the overhaul and expansions that World of Warcraft has brought to the table.

It's rather simple, Blizzard has set the bar high, it's up to other companies to either reach it or breach it. If they can do that then they will certainly see numbers like that of WoW. After all, there is certainly more than 9 million people living in the world today.

Market oversaturation and the death of the pay-to-play model are not the same thing. WoW is proof that the pay-to-play model works, otherwise there wouldn't be 9.5 million subscribers. What this data shows is that WoW has acheived a level of market saturation that is only rivaled by the likes of Microsoft Windows.

F2P survives, because it attracts two major demographics. The first group consists of those who either cannot afford or do not want to pay for a subscription service. The other group are established players in pay-to-play MMOs, who want to play a second game

Other factors also have to be taken into account. Unfortunately, the American economy is not doing well, and when you have to choose between filling up your gas tank and picking up another MMO, more realistic choices need to be made. Just because I'm hardcore enough to give up the car and take the bus to fuel my gaming addiction doesn't mean everyone else is...

WoW is just like walmart... its just never gonna be topped and never gonna be accepted lol, its just too great, bottom line.

P2P games will ALWAYS succeed if they provide a great game play experience. the fall of P2P games currently has almost everything to do with WoW's success, and their raising the bar for P2P. if, and when, WoW is no long king of the hill, a great MMO will come along & people will flock to it, subscription or not.

I don't think WoW will ultimately destroy P2P mmorpg's, in the long run it will hopefully galvanise the competition. There have been far too many crappy mmorpg's that got a license from some big brand and then were ruined because instead of being able to concentrate on making a good game the developers have to make certain that the "brand" is portrayed how the IP holders want it to be (despite them -the IP holders that is- having no real knowledge of mmorpg's no doubt).

So many other P2P mmorpg's are not accessible enough to the "casual gamer" (remember lots of "casual gamers turn into hardcore one's after a few months playing mmorpg's) and that's why they stagnate. Wow has expanded and continues to expand because it is so accessible, many market sectors that would never consider something like the EQ series, EVE or UO will have a go at wow simply because it is so easy just to "pick up and play".

I've played rpg's of one sort or another since I was about 5, always loved them, 20 years later and I've played a LOT of rpg's and mmorpg's, but I log onto EVE for the first time.. and I'm slightly bewildered and intimidated by the interface.

I log onto wow for the first time and I'm very very slowly and gently guided into getting the interface working, the surroundings my character is in are "safe" and the interface is extremely simple and intuitive. The structure of how to start a quest and the heavily guided approach to tutor the new player make it an inviting experience for a person who has never really played an mmorpg before, as well as those who may have played many.

I'm sure Warhammer Online will be popular... and will likely get a chunk of wow's userbase, but it should be remembered that only a limited number of people enjoy pvp. It strikes me that while it is possible to avoid pvp combat in Warhammer Online, it's kinda geared towards it far more heavily than WoW.

I cannot imagine that WoW will be toppled anytime soon, for all the complaints players have about one thing or another, it's a fantastic game with a great balance (no game has a perfect balance... except maybe the original Unreal Tournament IMO, which of course is irrelevant lol).

I'm interested in the upcoming Star Trek Online... although it's development has been nightmarish in the extent and number of problems that have had to be overcome and I fear that like LotR and Starwars Galaxies, it will be just another crappy game with a IP license tagged on.

*EDIT*
So much for me being "interested in the devlopment of STO"... It's been stopped and the IP will be given to someone else... :P

I think it'll take a LONG time for an MMO to give WoW any real competition. As much as I hate to say it, everyone and their best friend plays the game and that factor alone will keep the game on top of the mountain for at least another few years. Heck, even I put up with how much the alliance gets shafted with unfixed bugs, etc. because nobody's on the other games anymore. The only thing that's making me consider leaving WoW is actually how bad the GMs have become.

As much as I have high hopes for WAR, I think it'll still suffer from WoW's population factor, thus setting up WoW to be possibly the last of the $15/month MMO giants.

Seems to me this is like saying Walmart killed Gucci.. People will always be willing to pay a premium for quality products. World of Warcraft just happened to hit that sweet spot where you're able to tap into a large amount of market segments. Wow is, in my opinion, the best MMO out there at the moment and it will be toppled at some point. I'd view it as the market now being so much bigger and stealing market percentages is now a lot more attractive than it used to be. Just have to make a better game, if you can't do that then people probably won't be willing to pay the premium for a worse service.

The cynic in me says that WoW is quickly becoming the only MMO which the consumers think is worth a monthly fee. If you get less, the price should be cheaper as well. If you want to have a pay-to-play MMO at a similar price range as WoW, it better be at least as good.

I think I have a slightly different take on why people are still playing WoW instead of moving to a new game such as Lotro - Time and Connections.

Hardcore WoWers are not going to up and quit wow because of the sheer amount of time they have invested in their toons. I played the free demo of Lotro, and thought it was a very good game, with some mechanics working much better than I would say they do in WoW. At the end of the day, I look at my WoW account full of high level toons connected to real life friends and guilds, consider the time invested, and have to ask myself, am I willing to start again? It's almost like moving to a new city... you don't know anybody, you don't have a social network to interact with, and you might have had to leave a bunch of your cool toys behind when you moved.

Beyond that, the time investment involved in being a "hardcore" WoWer, raiding multiple nights a week, farming the rest of the time to maintain raiding consumables, on and on, is prohibitive in allowing someone to pick up another game casually. I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm just saying that as a gamer, you make priorities, and if your priorities are to see end-game WoW content, then you will have a hard time fitting other games in.

When I don't have to spend 50g to respec a toon, hours farming honor for spare PVP pieces, >10 minutes sitting in a queue to play a 30 second 2v2 arena match... when the time sinks are removed from WoW, it will be more feasible to casually play another game and start making new connections, and start thinking about making a wholesale switch. Too bad that it's just not in Blizzard's best interests to see this happen.

I think there is very little truth in this article. Infact I think with time players will realise that WoW isn't really a P2P game. Its a game that makes new expansions every two years and very little in between. Where is the P2P in that? Most other MMORPGs have changed their aproach in this now and are realeasing content on more regulare bases.

At this point WoW is way ahead of other MMOs but I think we will be seeing drastic changes in 2008. Many WoW players are looking for something new atm. With Blizzard trying to change the game into more of a PVP game they have lost alot of the class balance and more and more players are getting frustrated cause of it. Game is beeing exploided in PVP showing that current system failed horribly. That means BLizzard can do mistakes and mistakes like that can be very expensive. PVE is starting to suffer big time and PVP is so unbalanced that a good balanced PVP MMO title will get alot of support from the pvpers.

But if games like WAR and AOC are gonna be able to get some support they will need to learn from WoW and take note of what makes it so good. We can't say thats the grapichs really. Its the gameplay. Its all of the tiny things that are working together to reduce the many frustrating things that many other MMOs are suffering for. For instance LOTRO is in many ways way better game in terms of lore and buildup. But seriously.. what is the need for good graphix if the basic animations of characters and creatures are SOOO crap. Ugly gear and itemazation. And maybe the biggest letdown. Just CRAP UI that looks awfull to say the least. Comon - get the basic things right.... There are sooo many good things in LOTRO but seriously this destroys alot of the pleasure of the game.

If games like WAR and AOC are gonna challenge WoW then they need to bring out almost perfect product at the start. It has to be very easy to get into the gameplay. No big term drawbacks like in LOTRO are allowed cause these games will only get one chance to make first impressions. And alot of players will be waiting for those first impressions from those first buyers.

Saying that WoW will destroy P2P is so wrong. WoW has alot of limitations in its game engine that other games will be able to explore. Like the poster below pointed out many are still playing cause they have invested alot of time into WoW. The time will come that you realise that WoW can't give you anything new anymore. And that time is closer than we think. Considering Blizzard are already working on next MMORPG.

But there is no way back in terms of gameplay. Every single MMO needs to provide top notch gameplay to beat WoW in that apartment.

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You want to know why WoW is lasting? Because it's an incredible piece of work, it is by far, and without doubt, the most balanced MMO I've played. And I've played a few. Everquest was a travesty of balance, which is to say, there was almost none to speak of. The PvP was almost non-existent. Star Wars Galaxy? Seriously, do I even need to go into the infamous bias towards classes this game had? It was ridiculous. The reason WoW is doing so well is because Blizzard CARES about their game.

WoW is the best joint PvP-PvE game ever created and Blizzard is by far one of the best gaming companies out there. Everquest and Galaxies slapped you in the face over and over with disappointment; they constantly made you pay for things that you shouldn't have to, and the only real rule I could find was "Release an expansion, make them pay more for it...". Blizzard is constantly releasing new content for absolutely free to the players. Battlegrounds ring a bell? They finally broke down and released Burning Crusade because there was such an enormous base of new content. We can expect the same quality well throught out content in WotLK, I expect.

There will always be complainers of unbalance in WoW; no game can be perfect. There are a few classes out there that require a bit more skill to beat than others, but there is always a class that tears even that one to pieces with relative ease (Warlocks are overpowered, but invite along a Rogue and watch the bloodbath). This game is popular because it's incredible and the company behind it, perhaps even more incredible.

But on to the point of the article. I think it's absurd, in fact almost laughable to say WoW is "Sucking up the cash flow"...I'm sorry but that's just plain stupid. The game costs 15 bucks a month. Very few people's excess cash flow is 15 dollars. I seriously doubt that people would be remiss to pay...GOD FORBID, 30 bucks a month to play another game that they truly enjoy. The thing is, THEY DON'T. WoW spoils you. Going back to other MMO's after playing WoW is like going from Heroin to Methadone. I don't think we'll be seeing the "Fall of WoW" any time soon, as most of the other companies are far too power hungry and money greedy to give the quality service both in and out of game as Blizzard does, and until somebody can inherit the relative modesty that they have as a company and make a game even half as good; expect WoW to stay on top.

I think lots of us would like to see WoW get toppled by a better game, but I don't see it happening any time soon. Historically, an MMO is good for a while, and then people move on when the frustrations inherent in that type of game pile up to the point that they're not willing to put any more work into it. Lots of people predicted that the BC expansion would "break" the game because it would upset players who had invested so much time in collecting high-level items. They might've ticked off that demographic, but clearly those people got over it.

I myself tried Vanguard: Saga of Heroes for about ten minutes before deciding to cut my losses and return to World of Warcraft. I did so for one reason: the game experience was so similar that I couldn't bring myself to abandon all the time I had put into WoW to start over. Plus, the system requirements for Vanguard were a bit more demanding and I didn't see any reason to invest in more computing power to play a game that didn't (I can't resist) wow me.

Games like Warhammer had better be very attractive from the start. In order to compete, they will have to offer people a lot of character progression at the very beginning. The end-game content is what people write home about, and figuring out the game mechanics gets old once you've done it with a single character. There may eventually be a time when people will be able to patiently level a character slowly again, but if the aim is leaching substantially from those 9.5 million subscribers, then developers will have to offer really rapid character advancement at the outset.

Finally, I don't believe that game lore is a deciding factor for most gamers. It pains me to say that, because the thing I relish doing during those ridiculously long install times is reading the lore that's in the manual. But anyone who's paid any attention to general chat knows that many of those 9.5 million subscribers are idiots who can't even read the objectives of a low-level quest, much less appreciate the creative writing that goes into game lore.

TL;DR please keep comments short and sweet.

There is one thing that WoW has that no other game in my experience has never had: a life of it's own. I've played your average free to play games and I'd played Everquest and Lord of the Rings even and nothing has ever captivated me like this. I have played WoW for a year and two months now and believe me that's a record. My best friend and I were looking for about a year to find a great game that both of us would thoroughly enjoy and we went through about 200+ games in that time frame. During the time I've play WoW, I've switched to games like Flyff and Ragnarok (believe me RO is awesome too) but I always found myself returning to the atmosphere of friends and foes that WoW gave me. It's like starting an epic journey. I've got a Troll Hunter and if you follow her from level 1 to 70 (and the various quests thereafter) you can see what hardships she's had to endure for the sake of the Horde. I've never had the pleasure of killing random people of the opposite faction and the thrill that comes with the knowledge that I just beat a character about 5-10 levels higher than me with my boyfriend. Not to mention the honor, not just in game but in real life your own self gratification. Yeah I've invested a lot of time in my hunter. Lot's of money too. But at the end of the day when I can play a lowbie toon with my boy or arena it up with my best friend, it's all worth every second of time. This sounds corny I know, but WoW hasn't brought ruin to any of my friendships, in fact, it's saved one. Numerous times. I don't believe that WoW is going to be the end of all P2P games but at this time, Blizzard has got the market and is working to make it a better game.

OT: I can see one reason why WOTLK is going to have a lot less sales than TBC. This time around, people know that it is a whole new MMO they are releasing. And Blizzard who are from what I can tell, stalling their game to have it be released alongside WAR, will have a nasty surprise when people take the release of the new expansion as a perfect time to switch MMO. Last time there wasnt really any opposition when they released TBC, this time theyre in for some trouble.

Someones a virgin... (Massey)