With the Leipzig convention well underway, the 2007 Games Convention Developers Conference began discussion panels for each segment in the game industry. And one of the first GCDC-related news, as you dear readers can plainly see, was the topic of four online game developers in a panel tackling Life After World of Warcraft.

 

"There's plenty of life after WOW," said Jeffery Steefel of Turbine Inc. (Lord of the Rings Online). Jeff Hickman of EA Mythic (Dark Age of Camelot), Robert Westmoreland of independent Cryptic Studios (Marvel Universe Online), and Matt Firor of Zenimax Online Studios (under Bethesda) agreed with Steefel.

World of Warcraft, recently hitting the nine million subscriber mark, has become the MMORPG to beat. Game developer studios have vowed to create their own WoW-killers before, but Blizzard's cash cow continues to reap success, even as it nears its third year. "They had an established franchise, a frantic customer base, and they executed extremely well," said Westmoreland, pinning down the the prime strengths of the game.

But Westmoreland believes that it was a one time fluke - "an anomaly" - that allowed Blizzard to catapult to the top. The panel was sure that even when while WoW rolls on, there was still a place for newer games, such as NCSoft's Tabula Rasa, to carve its way into the market. "The market will segment and diversify, and that's beginning to happen. That's why all these games can exist at the same time," Steefel said earlier.

But Westmoreland warns against tracing World of Warcraft's footsteps, saying, "I think it's an anomaly, and you can't just focus on that because you'll get yourself into trouble." Instead, the panel encourages the age old way of finding that suitable formula. Westmoreland says that if a game is fun, it will take care of itself.