The Business: The Unspoken Strength of Network Dominance

Speaking of "competition from within", Blizzard's doing a certain degree of Return To Form after getting a scare from Final Fantasy XIV.

Much as TSR and Wizards of the Coast change how the game plays when they make new editions of The Only Game That Matters, Blizzard does the same with every expansion of The Only MMORPG That Matters.

What they have done is nuked the capacity for Addons to read combat data and thus tell the player what to do during a fight, triviallizng all but the most difficult encounters (and yet somehow not stopping Bob there from standing in the fire; it's been 21 years, and he still stands in the fire- you've been kicked from every raid group in the game for a reason, Bob)

The reason is to regain control over encounter design. The cover is FF14, which has maintained a total ban on Addons since A Realm Reborn and nukes the hell out of those that get caught, demonstrating that--contra the naysayers--such a ban is viable to implement and enforce; now Blizzard is doing just that to go live with the next Expansion release next year.

The reveal of the new Player Housing system is also a reaction to the (very flawed) system in FF14.

In both respects, this is Blizzard returning to form; taking the most successful elements of a competitor's offering, clone it, and refine it to perfection. Blizzard does not have a single original thought and never has; they copy, steal, and refine- they do not innovate at all.

You may not think that this is enough to neuter any threat from FF14, which is the only MMO to present a challenge in years and only because WOW shot itself in the foot with Shadowlands while Square Enix had a one-two punch of fantastic Expansions (Shadowbringers and Endwalker) followed by a massive disappointment (Dawntrail) while Blizzard recovered with Dragonflight and started doing Memberberries hard with its Classic and Remix seasonal servers.

Blizzard, once again, neutered a rising threat by Embracing, Extending, and Extinguishing the threat's most popular elements.

Now we have The WOW Bubble, which includes the private servers (despite Blizzard's wishes), slowly choking out all other MMOs- starting with those closest to it.

This is why Network Effect-based dominance is so hard to beat; you have to wait for the leader to massively fuck up, exploit that fuckup, and then continue to beat that leader like it owes you money--preventing its recovery--until you pull off the Sith Succession Strategy and usurp the Network to become the Dominant property.

Blizzard with WOW, like TSR/WOTC with D&D, have fucked up HARD more than once but the would-be coup-masters always run out of gas before they can seal the deal so when the inevitable comeback hits they get shattered and tumble down the rankings below where they started (most of the time). That's what happened with WOW, and more than once with D&D, but now both properties are so dominant that an Out Of Context Blcak Swan now has to hit--and to hit directly---like a Colony Drop to allow any future wanna-bees the chances that others squandered.

We are now in a world where, if you care about actually playing the game no matter what, you are stupid to defect from the Network; you just find a specific iteration within it. This story is yet more proof of it.