There used to be a time when online games where few and far between. Months would go by without an online games getting published or developed.
The ever growing population of gamers and advances in computer and information related technology has led to a significant rise in the gaming population. The rise has been so high that companies are now willing to invest so much money in developing videogames.
There are many different types of online videogames. First person shooting games and MMORPGs are arguably the most popular kind of online videogames out there.
First person shooters
First person shooters have always been popular with the PC gaming crowd because they had easy access to the internet and computer peripherals made it easy to play. Console FPS games have always been about the single player experience up until the release of Halo.
Halo was the first great console FPS experience that had a good enough single player to merit the purchase and a great multiplayer that made it popular for competitive players. Never before had a console game made an online FPS multiplayer experience as great as Halo.
However, the game that gave FPS games the impetus it needed to become the dominant form of online gaming for consoles is Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.
Most gaming pundits agree that COD 4 was the game that made online games on the console market such a big deal.
Blizzard’s WoW cash cow franchise
World of Warcraft, or WoW in gaming parlance, is Blizzard’s mind blowingly successful video game franchise. Funny enough, this game is actually a spinoff of their then more recognizable franchise Warcraft, which is a game that fell into the Real Time Strategy genre.
What allured most people towards WoW in the beginning was the amount of lore the series had. See, even before WoW was ever made, Blizzard already had a reputation for writing good stories set in a world rich with lore. The mythos was a big enough appeal for most people.
However, Blizzard would not be the company it is today if it had not made excellent games. In fact, this company is famous or infamous for delaying or cancelling games until they have been deemed perfect.
Blizzard’s WoW series was released and people were amazed with the game’s production quality. The leveling design, lore, and gameplay all came together to deliver an experience that was unrivaled.
Even today Blizzard’s latest WoW expansion, Mists of Pandaria, is one of the most popular online Fun games with around 10 million subscribers with most of them paying $14.99 a month.