The Dangers of Mimicking a Juggernaut

Trying to one-up others developers is often unwise

Game design is inherently tricky; perhaps this is one reason why every game these days is inspired in some way by something that came before it. The ability to look at a pre-existing design and push it in new directions has led to some amazing games over the years. However, it’s also true that some games attempt to directly borrow systems from other titles without pushing them further or reinterpreting them.

It’s this latter point that I want to discuss here. For this purposes of this article — and for reasons that will soon become clear — I’m going to call this concept the “WoW effect”.

Let’s start by explaining why I’m referring to WoW (otherwise known as World of Warcraft).

World of Warcraft’s dominance

World of Warcraft’s impact on MMO design and on video game pop culture is absolute. This was the game that took over the market, and has earned an absurd amount of money. With that fame and renown came the MMO boom of the mid ’00s with developers all chasing after it. During this period, you couldn’t throw a metaphorical stone without hitting a game with “Online” in the title.

It’s probably true that no developer really thought they could dethrone World of Warcraft. But many developers did apparently believe they could peel off a small proportion of the WoW audience with their own MMO offering. But in retrospect, this is arguably what did not happen.

The WoW effect

This is the phenomenon where a developer directly apes another team’s design, perhaps attempting to steal away a chunk of their market in the process. You could theoretically replace World of Warcraft in this example with Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, Fortnite, or any other massively successful and genre-defining franchise.

Remember, I am not referring to games that are inspired by other titles but that still do their own thing (franchises like Assassin’s Creed, God of War and even games like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild fit into this category). I’m talking about those games that attempt to directly cash in on the success of a popular game or genre.