As is the case with most traditional stories, there are many tellings of the tale of the Geryon. There was a particular way I have heard it told which I am very fond of.
Once upon a time, there was a monster called the Geryon. The Geryon was a giant, muscled humanoid warrior with three torsos with a total of six arms and three heads joined onto a single pair of great legs. Each of its pair of arms carried a spear and a shield; each torso was a capable fighter in its own right. Perhaps some great warrior might be a stronger combatant than each individual torso, but in combination, the Geryon's trio was peerless.
The legendary hero Hercules was tasked with killing the monster, as it had been ravaging fields and stealing farm animals. Seeking advice in this endeavor, he consulted the Fates, the mistresses who say what shall be and what shall not, and they proclaimed, "Geryon shall be slain by none else."
With this said, even the gods concluded that the Geryon could not be slain by Hercules. The hero was not dissuaded in his task by god or man or even the Fates themselves. Tracking the Geryon, observing it, the hero noted that one head preferred beef, another pork, and the third, venison. So he cunningly laid out wagons of beef, pork, and venison at equal distance from the Geryon's cave. Geryon took notice of them, and the three heads each had different ideas as to where to go. The Geryon's three heads argued, and finally its six arms raised spear and shield against each other. The Geryon lay dead, a bloody mess. Geryon was slain by none else.
And so there was never another Geryon.
....
My point here is not to merely to repeat what has become the cliche that World of Warcraft can be killed only by itself, or by the greed of the producers, or attempts to pander to this or that audience. To be sure, I agree with all that, but that's not the point. My argument isn't that WoW will die - all things come to an end - my argument is that there will never be another WoW killer, or another WoW.
World of Warcraft, like the Geryon, is not one monoclastic entity. There are many other MMOs and other games that will no doubt prove superior to WoW to most who now play it. But there will be no one game that alone seizes most of WoW's audience. And I do not believe there will be any such game in the coming decade that managed to do what WoW did, which was appeal to many different kinds of people. World of Warcraft was a great game because, as with the Geryon, the whole was greater than the sum of the parts.
Does anyone really believe that kiddies, housewives, and the middle-aged will take up Guild Wars 2 or the Star Wars MMO or Titan the way they came to WoW? I'm sure those games will be far superior to WoW in terms of their appeal to young males and maybe their girlfriends, and maybe some younger nerds or social misfits who play the game even though they are not considered cool or interesting by their peers. As for those other people - outside the typical gamer demographic - WoW may be what got them into games, but what they will be playing won't be what other people are playing after WoW's inevitable demise. Inevitable as in, we're all going to die - eventually.
It's widely forgotten by the community, the world at large, and even Blizzard themselves that WoW's success was an accident. Vanilla WoW was in many ways Everquest 3, and it wasn't really intended to transcend EQ's scope and success beyond merely getting bigger sub numbers. Yet it did, and it did precisely because it was an accident, and not something contrived like a politician's persona.
People don't grasp that WoW really is much more than the sum of its parts. WoW players identify with a certain playstyle - PvE, PvP, RP, casual, hardcore, whatever - but there is a shared experience, a certain wealth to that experience, and each of the individual demographics in the playerbase owe each other a debt even though they do not realize it (and often vehemently contest that such a bond exists), or see it in narrowly financial terms - who pays for and who uses what content and whatnot.
The WoW community was vibrant and interesting because there were all sorts of people playing the game, and that gave it a certain allure. No game now on the market can replicate that allure. It is most definitely interesting when people who are very unlike each other can mutually relate to a shared fantasy world. Whether you're a pensioner or a college student or a housewife or some kid, the Stormwind theme sounds the same, and you have to find Mankrik's wife, and you zerg down Karazhan with nine other people who may not be young or male or middle-class. There's something to that.
My prediction is this: There will be no single WoW killer, nor will WoW "die". In the same way there will be no one superpower that succeeds America, but an unstable world of many different countries of different shapes, sizes and ways jostling for power and status, and in the same way that the decline in American power will not end with the destruction of our country but merely a gradual descent into stagnation and mediocrity, what will displace WoW will be a multitude of contrived games that are relatively narrow in scope.
I believe there will ultimately be another WoW, but it will not be released by EA or Activison or any other name we've yet heard of. The next WoW, that takes the MMO genre, the entire paradigm of MMOs to the next level, will be a low-budget indie production that will play like an SNES game. It will be talky, execution-based, and have a lot of activities with no intrinsic rewards. The underlying technology may be advanced, but the UI and mechanics will be extremely simplistic and intuitive. The game will grow slowly at first then catch fire. What will guarantee its success is that the game will start small but grow organically and prove highly scalable. The game will live a very long life, probably in the centuries (yes, centuries), and change very, very slowly. The subscription fee will be low, the content will be horizontal, and there will be no expansions, only endless morsels of new content, often released by surprise.
If you want a real world example of what I'm talking about, look at things that aren't MMOs - like eBay, or the Roman empire, or electricity, or the American constitution - things that started out small and slowly grew to immense proportions to be something they were never intended to. Things where a simple and rational framework proved viable for purposes and a scope far transcending the original purpose. eBay started out as a doll store. The Roman empire started out as an obscure village of belligerent young males. Electricity started out as a curiosity used for some narrow purposes like telegraphy. The US govt started out as a bunch of disgruntled colonials agreeing on some basic principles. The big Super Mario Bros. of MMOs will be the same thing, something that wasn't intended to be a WoW killer or even a successful MMO. We'll probably start hearing about it in a little over a decade.
Of course I could be wrong and it will add up to the same thing =) but consider this merely food for thought.
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