He did make a few good points throughout the article, I won't disagree there. Where I see the flaws in his diatribe is the fact that he's focusing too much on WoW (being the 800 pound Gorilla it is) as being the central cause of the issue, which is only half true.
Blizzard is McDonalds and WoW is the Big Mac. At that, the Big Mac is on the Value menu.
This is the best example I can give as to where WoW succeeds where others fail...
One of my former bosses was going to be out for a number of weeks due to medical reasons. Because he's in his late 40s, wife works, and only child is grown up & living away from home, he was getting rather bored during his time off waiting for his surgery (a feeling I know all too well). So rather then continue playing Online Poker, he went to Walmart and picked up WoW. Now, he knew that several of us at the office played but he'd never really shown any particular interest in playing himself as he was unfamiliar with (basically) anything to do with any Blizzard games (or online games unrelated to poker). He bought it, installed it, picked his server (a pvp server at that, I guess he liked the name), created his first character (a gnome rogue), and began to play. When he came back to work, which was about 3 weeks after he'd started playing, he was already level 45 and had a pretty decent working knowledge of his class/play mechanics. To add the frosting to the captain casual cake, he began to insult me (in a playful manner of course) because I'm a hunter and he 'hates getting ganked by hunters'.
After having a few laughs about the whole thing, it made me think about the current state of MMOs. The article talks about the numbers. 500k+ Subscribers at the high point of Everquest, why? Not because it was the only game in town, but the only game worth throwing $15.00 a month at. What you can do in WoW (see example above) could never have been done in EQ, no matter how hard you tried. SWG, why was it a failure? I don't know...maybe because Lucas Arts (and Lucas Licensing Ltd) wouldn't allow Sony to use 99% of the material they wanted, the game was broken as hell, and it was rushed from beta to store shelves faster then the Millennium Falcon can make the Kessal Run...all on the premise that you can 'be a jedi'.
Now the low blow in this article to me is where he insults Mythic, claiming that DAoC wasn't a success based on its total numbers compared to EQ and its steady decline in subscriptions because of WoW, but also where he says that Mythic is relying on its experience with DAoC combined with the backing of EA and the Warhammer license to 'break through' (or basically to crawl out from underneath WoW's huge ass shadow). He then goes on to say that Mbj (Mark Jacobs) "wants WAR to be the second largest subscription MMO available, behind WoW". I keep a pretty close tab on Warhammer Online news (not because I'm a fan or player of the tabletop/figure game, in fact I've never played it before and know close to nothing about the lore) and not once has Mbj ever claimed that...ever. The closest thing he's ever been quoted in saying is "
I won't promise that we'll see WoW numbers anytime soon from any other game but you don't need those numbers to be very successful. That's one reason I have never talked about getting those kind of numbers for WAR, it's not going to happen.".
A few of us old folks are the exception to the rules because obviously most of us aren't your average gamer, and some of us may pay for more then 1 (or 2) subscription based games. But I'm pretty sure that none of us who do pay for 1 REALLY GOOD game (like I still think WoW is, despite its flaws) and 1 REALLY SHITTY game. One of the real beauties of WoW is that its one of the very few games that you can put down (or cancel your subscription) for a time, play something else, and come back later...to which in most cases you haven't missed a step (unless you were once in a raiding guild farming Tier 5 and now your guild is farming Tier 10 and fighting the Demi-God of Murloc's in the Plane of Aaaaaughibbrgubugbugrguburgle!).
Anyway..my 2cp
ps...Inc Khameir, King of the Murlocs....RwlRwlRwlRwl RwlRwlRwlRwl!!!!....the suit was a gift from a friend