If the fact that such neoprene crap as Neopets has been formulated into happy meals indicative of its success?

I’d suggest the reverse: it means that neopets is something that needs to be starved to death. It means it has lost the meme war for significance. It has become primal ooze again.

Blizzard, even though its wow formula smells and feels remarkably akin to the same wander-around setup we see in disneyland, is FRESH, new and inspiring and remarkable, even after me playing it two years. It is a BREAK from all that mass-consumer gluttonous filth I am seeing every day. It is the new thing, the urprise, the passionate and that which is (or appears) honest.

I have had it with anything that aspires to being in a happymeal. Once I see tauren shamans as happymeal objects (wielding two weapons!) I am quitting wow and moving for whats left being unspoiled and honest.

My definition of succes IS exclusivity. Once it becomes bigtime, it becomes Babylon. My definition of success is based on my loathing of the mundane, boring majority of mankind.

We do live in an overpopulated world.

This alone is what makes WoW so popular, and the guys who made this don’t turn bad over night. They have themselves been creating triple A titles for as long as the industry has been a mass medium, from earlier titles like Rock ‘n’ Roll racing on the SNES nearly a decade ago they have gone on to create the diablo series, the warcraft series and the starcraft series. Each franchise selling better than the last and each time the quality of the product gets better.

This has resulted in Blizzard aquiring the loyalty of millions of gamers world wide who have trust in the company to create an almost perfect game every time.

This isn’t something that is going to dissapear or slow down over-night, and the smart money should be on quality of product and services, with the aim of building a good production team over time – as opposed to your suggestion that the smart money is to basically run away in fear from Blizzards domination… where is the innovation and the will to improve the industry there?

I could see Second Life getting much bigger though, it has more of a wider appeal then does World of Warcraft, but I don’t think they would take customers from one and other.

Over at GigaOM Wagner James Au gives a report on a talk by Raph Koster on the Long Tail and gaming – including the astounding claim that Second Life (currently 400,000 subscribers) will overtake World of Warcraft (currently 7 million…

Secondly, it ignores the fact that “long tails” include category killers at the high end. The long tail isn’t just a slew of small games: there are massive hits still at the “left” side of the tail. What’s at the left side of the tail? Warcraft – or someone who’s prepared to spend $200 million to create a more popular game.

A good article by Wagner James Au was published. Here is a brief excerpt:So what comes after World of Warcraft, the massively multiplayer online game (or MMO) that became so, well, massive, that it turned into a category killer that rumbled the industr…