World of Warcraft

The MMO that brought the genre into popular culture is as stable as any game in existence these days, but such was not the case when the game launched close to a decade ago.

As is so often the case, the hype was real and the commercial reception dwarfed Blizzard’s server capacity. Queues stretched into the thousands; latency bogged down everything, including simple actions like looting.

World of Warcraft is still the most popular MMO in the industry these many years later, its fans a largely forgiving bunch, but the launch should have served as a warning to the myriad online games that came after it.

Unfortunately, we see history repeating itself more often than not, and we see one launch after another—even by the same company a la World of Warcraftand Diablo III—marred by server congestion, latency issues, and other problems.

Of course, World of Warcraft survived its launch fiasco, but it also held a unique position at the time as the world’s first truly accessible MMO. The times have changed, and the market has become far more competitive in the intervening years.

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Fortunately, the connection issues facing Grand Theft Auto Online won’t impact your enjoyment of the single-player game.

You’ll still be able to wake up Trevor on the side of a rainswept mountain, wearing nothing but a short, colorful dress. You’ll still be able to cruise Los Santos at your leisure, living the dream.

It’s not a perfect answer, but at least it illustrates one important point: there’s a real market for offline gaming still, and making online optional rather than required makes good business sense.

Imagine if GTA V had an online requirement from day one. This is a game thathit $1 billion in sales in just three days. There’s no way servers could have kept up with that sort of demand; even optimistic sales forecasts were left in the dust by Rockstar’s latest release.

Finally, it’s important to remember that a launch is just one piece of a much bigger puzzle. A more important question is what happens when the servers shut down. What happens to your game, that you paid for, when a company decides to pull the plug?

There’s a great benefit to be had from online gaming; but that doesn’t mean the benefits always outweigh the costs.


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