Runes of Magic has been getting a lot of attention from the blogosphere lately. Though obviously heavily inspired by World of Warcraft, this Taiwan import adds multi-classing and many other little twists to the basic formula. It’s been in beta for months, goes live in March, and today sent me an email saying they had over 450,000 players worldwide.
That’s not just beta signups – that’s implying there’s 450,000 people – worldwide – playing Runes of Magic. And that is a very, very good thing.
Why? Well, the more successful MMO games in the genre, the more willing companies will be to make new games and try new things. Recent high profile MMO failures can only be making investors dubious about the whole genre. The success of Runes of Magic, WoW-like though it may be, can only say to the devs of the world that if you have a strong vision for your MMO (ie, copy World of Warcraft), keep your costs down, team reasonable and goals within reach, you don’t need to spend fifty million dollars or more and fail. You can spend considerably less, and succeed.