Blizzard’s Titan is “casual” MMO, says Sterne Agee analyst

Can you get paid a lot of money for being an analyst? Like, would someone pay me to analyse/guess/state the obvious if I made it look good on some letter headed paper or a nice PDF?

Casual MMO from Blizzard?

Vg247, who you post this? It’s not even funny.

@ Erth,

I think you could class WoW as a “casual” MMO as that is how a lot of people play it. It just caters to more “hardcore” people too. It’s an almost “one size fits all” MMO.

Unless that’s what you were saying and I misunderstood.

@3, if you can class WoW as a “casual” MMO because of a lot of people play it. Then ok, no compains here.

@4, It really depends on what kind of context he meant it I guess. I consider WoW as a casual MMO only because I consider(ed) myself as a “casual player” of it towards the end. It was more of social thing.

Without trying to sound like a fanboy of Blizzard (which I’m not, however, I will accept being an MMO fanboy) but I do think that once Titan hits it will wipe the floor with anything else out there.

If there is one thing about WoW that Blizzard didn’t directly create is the outside unofficial community that surrounds the game. Blizzard seem to know exactly how far to extend their influence over players and when to just let them go wild.

Any good MMO is casual.

viralshag has it right. People may elect to spend a lot of time on it, but essentially there’s nothing about it that’s very taxing, beyond the initial grinding, and then coordinating those 25 guys (or however many are raiding these days).

Do this rotation. Stack this stat. Move when he does this.

Congrats, you’ve won at WoW

Won’t be interested in anything Blizzard says until they start talking about WC4. Don’t even play WoW so I couldn’t care less about another MMO.

This is going to be a next-gen console release.

I’m pretty sure of it.

A Microsoft exclusive possibly, too.

@ 8,

I think there must be some sort of link to a console about it somewhere as it seems silly for them to ignore such a large portion of the gaming market.

However, if you mean console exclusive with MS or something I just can’t see that happening. Bliz don’t strike me as a compnay stupid enough to drop their fans/subs like that. I think they will be looking to gain an increase in people playing thier games without losing what they already have.

I think they know they need to cater to that 11 million or whatever it is these days in order to retain their market share.

@8 You are not serious ?!
Game will be probably announced on this BlizzCon but release at 2013/14 for PC only !

@8, Microsoft exclusive and next-gen console release shows that someone lives in the world of dream and not the reality.

MMO’s aren’t popular on consoles and no one is so stupid to make something that massive from Blizzard as exclusive to the next gen console which will have almost zero fanbase.

PC only game. Someone need to be brain dead if he thinks it will be exclusive to specific platform. Blizzards dev kits in most cases are PC only and thats where the money is these days.

Even large publisher like Sony have SOE which makes a lot of MMO’s and they are releasing not only for PS3, but for PC too.

It’s the same thing where you said that to run Crysis 1 on max you need 7900 Geforce and pentium 4. Great knowledge.

@11 seriously calm down you sad cunt

@12 FU, yes i am trolling but theres no need to swear at Erth, it’s not his fault he’s a nob.

Actually @12 you’re trolling, so you’re a sad cunt.

@13 ok i think your took one to many there…..

@14 ^what^?

PC and ‘xbox 720′.

Blizzard were admittedly in discussions with MS about their next-gen console ages ago.

Knowing that and the likelyhood that the PS4 will come after the ’720′, I reckon MS will be desperate to get ‘WoW on console’.

They’d be stupid not to go for it.

A huge exclusive killer-app from the get go.

At some point someone’s going to have to bring an MMO to the consoles. I don’t think it’ll be Blizzard on the “720″ though.

At least that would mark a major shift for them. They’ve never really been innovators in the true sense, they’ve just taken what was already there and made it ten times better, all the way from Vikings to WoW.

I think their return to consoles is going to be in the form of Diablo III.

With XboxLive you have the element of double subscription. I don’t know, but that’s definitely a tougher sell, not something you’d want to go exclusive on while 99% of your current fanbase are on PC.

@ 16 & 17,

I think that’s correct. It seems logical and probable that someone will have to make a decisive move to capture the MMO genre on the console market. Blizzard have the experience of the MMO market and Activision have the console marketing power to make something work.

^KAPOW, that was my first attempt at my Viralshag: Analytical Services bollock talk. Feel free to quote me on that VG247. This one’s on the house.

I still think the control and communication options of the console is what really hinders it from being a viable platform for an MMO. Saying that, if OnLive can really produce a service like it says it can, I see no reason why they could not offer keyboard compatibility that would enable an easy way for people to play an MMO without a PC.

^BOOM.

MMO? Consoles? You’ve all played COD right? I mean Blops was £40 on release, with what 4 map packs planned? So that’s £80/90 over the year a COD player has forked out & that’s without the upcoming Elite service sub.

How far of is that from what a Warcraft player spends on their game per annum?

“The basic one-month subscription plan costs €12.99 per month (£8.99 in the UK).
The three-month plan costs €11.99 per month (£8.39 in the UK).
The six-month plan costs €10.99 per month (£7.69 in the UK).”

So at a max £107 a year sub, it’s not that far off tbh and I’m sure they could work it to being a little bit cheaper.

I think Blizzard will play it safe and follow the overall WOW model. They’ll target PC/Mac and charge a subscription fee. They may provide some access to the game from mobile and integrate it with social networking somehow but the core will be a basic PC MMO. They’ve made too much money on WOW not to use the same basic approach….just my humble opinion.

You can find all currently known Titan information laid out nicely over at http://www.titanwatch.net and then judge for yourself.

Everything we know about the game hints at it being prepped for console IYAM.

“Casual”? Does that mean we don’t need complicated m/kb controls? Can we use a controller, perhaps?

It won’t “compete with WoW”? Surely that means it won’t be focussing on the PC MMO crowd?

Why in the world would they put the WoW brand to one side when they could just release another version, or a WoW-lite?

I could be wrong, but I can’t see MS and Acti-Blizz not trying to take advantage of a potential money maker like this.

I don’t know how they’d do it with the subscription issue, but with all that money to be made, I’m sure they’d be able to work something out.

@22

I’m not sure. Lest we forget that Bungie’s Activision published forthcoming MMO is console bound sometime in late 2012/early 2013 and as such, I just don’t see Activision canabalising themselves in that way.

It depends on a number of things.

It wouldn’t be a problem to release them both in the same year, two quarters apart.

Also, if one’s an MMOFPS and one’s a traditional MMORPG, they wouldn’t be competing.

Blizzard and casual gaming just wont fit in a sentence. If titan was a casual mmo, why would blizzard make so much effort in bringing as many as ppl into wow. Titan wont be a casual MMO otherwise blizzard wouldn’t give its subscribers free friend invites with a free classic wow and 30 days of gametime with no restrictions whatsoever. It wouldn’t make a f2p till lvl 20 thingy that is going on right now.

WoW is not a casual MMO either, it’s a game that has so many content for so many people and everyone can find something to like in it. At the release of each new content they’re targeted for the core crowd, nerfings happen when a new content is set for release to make the core crowd move onto new things and make things a bit easier for those who found those stuff difficult give it a shot again.

So, in my expert analysis, TITAN wont be a casual call from blizzard cuz it’s unlike blizzard and they currently have a good thing going with all sort of players in World of Warcraft.

AHAHAHAHAHA.

“Also, if one’s an MMOFPS and one’s a traditional MMORPG, they wouldn’t be competing.”

Not in the traditional genre sense perhaps, but I know that as a console gamer at least, I would only have time for one and not the other.

My theory is it’s going to be their own version/take on the “real life” mmo theme. Like playstation Home, second life.

@27:

They’re different markets though.

It’s like when EA release NFS, FIFA/Madden, and an FPS every Q4. They all usually end up shipping millions of copies even though they’re released weeks from each other and aimed at a similar demographic.