I wanted to post this graph (from MMOGCHART.com) just because it is somewhat mind-blowing.

Look at the size and growth rate of World of Warcraft compared to all other massively multiplayer on-line games. At what point does WoW start to take over the entire planet?

The important thing to look at in this graph is not just the fact that the bright green line is dominating all others (it is) but the fact that other games, some of which predate World of Warcraft by a few years, have a shape like a camel's hump. They start out, gain rapidly at the beginning, then hit some maximum point and tail off. Look at Lineage I and Lineage II, two games that were very huge in Asia but not so big in North America. They are both in the tailing-off phase now.

What this graph tells me is that networking effects are starting to come into play in the MMORPG world. Network effects are when the usefulness of a network increases because so many people are on the network, which then prompts huge growth that makes the network more useful, and so forth. At some point one standard emerges where the network effect eliminates all others (or at least marginalizes them to irrelevance). We've seen this happen with telephones (there were other competing phone networks at the beginning, but one of them won out) and with computer operating systems (Windows won that one, sorry guys).

I myself got into WoW because of the network effect: I had a friend who was already playing give me a "trial key" that allowed me to play for 14 days while interacting with her character and of course I subscribed after that. I then told other friends about WoW and some of them got into it as well. Now we're at the point where you hear people talking about WoW on buses, and commercials for the game run on network television and feature William Shatner and Mr T.

Is it already past the point of no return with World of Warcraft? Or will other games come along to supplant it at some unknown date in the future? At the very least, it seems hard to imagine another "sword and sorcery" MMORPG supplanting WoW any time soon. Why would you want to go on, say, Warhammer Online, or Dungeons and Dragons Online (ironically this one uses the original D&D property that started computer games in the first place!) when more people are playing WoW? The numbers show that most people wouldn't want to. And they don't.

I'd write about this some more, but I have a Paladin to level.