I was wandering around town at the weekend, on various unrelated errands I'd been putting off for a while, and enevitably ended up in the local computer game shop, "Game". They have a chart in there, in the PC section. I'm not entirely sure on what basis positions on this chart are calculated, but am not naive enough to suppose it's purely on 'copies sold' - almost certainly there's an element of 'what we'd like you to buy' to the whole thing too.
But regardless of method, I was suprised to see no less than five MMOs in the chart, which is remarkable considering how much of a niche MMOs are, compared to offline PC and console titles - or at least how much of a niche I thought MMOs were.
Anyway, the titles were:
- Guild Wars
- World of Warcraft
- Matrix Online
- Saga of Ryzom
- Neocron 2
I forget the actual positions exactly, but #1 wasn't one of ours. I've played some of those, heckled others, but regardless of what I think, it can only be good for the genre if more people are introduced to it, surely? Most of this is down to World of Warcraft's almost inconcievable success. Of course it sucks...they all do, but in terms of sheer numbers of new inductees to the genre, WoW is going to stand as a monument for quite some time, but all these new people are just now starting on a journey of discovery, imagination, escapism, and a not a small amount of madness and stoopid, that I've been on for six years, and still haven't seen the end of. Welcome on board!