2009 Roundup & Decade Review

[Morreion]

2009's Most Interesting Stories, Part One (MMORPG.com)

*FusionFall Launches.
*No new MMO actually makes it onto the 360 or the Playstation 3.
*Darkfall and Fallen Earth Launches.
*Mythic is Gutted.
*Champions Online Charges for Respecs.
*Tabula Rasa Shuts Down.
*Blizzard Provokes A Governmental Crisis.

More Top News Stories of 2009 (MMORPG.com)

*WoW's New Expansion Announced
*Free Realms Launches
*Warhammer's Endless Trial
*Star Wars Galaxies and City of Heroes Release Player-Generated Quest Systems
*Aion Launches
*DDO Goes F2P
*Blizzard Dips A Toe In Microtransactions

The List: Top Five Lists of 2009 (MMORPG.com)

The breakdown of the Top Ten MMOs Since WoW:

#10 Vanguard
#9 Fallen Earth
#8 Atlantica Online
#7 Pirates of the Burning Sea
#6 Maplestory
#5 Aion
#4 Club Penguin
#3 Wizard 101
#2 Guild Wars
#1 Lord of the Rings Online

The Daily Grind: 2009's defining moment (Massively)

Out of all of the things that happened this year, what struck you as the most defining moment? Was it something major, such as the end of Tabula Rasa or The Matrix Online? Or was it something minor that other players might not even notice? Did it make the whole year better, worse, or was it simply a turning point? What seems like it's going to stick in your memory when you think back on the year as a whole? And as a connected topic, what seems like a big deal at the moment that you're pretty certain isn't as important as people say?

Massively's top 5 news stories of 2009

#5 -- Goodbye Tabula Rasa, we'll miss you
#4 -- One Universe // One War: DUST 514
#3 -- DDO goes F2P
#2 -- The crash of The Matrix Online
#1 -- The Twilight MMO Scare

Scott Jennings: 2009: That Horrible Year (MMORPG.com)

The Great Recession: When “Developers, Developers, Developers” turned into “Layoffs, Layoffs, Layoffs”

Facebook saves the gaming industry! Not.

Free to play or Subscriptions? Oh hell, let’s just do both. No one will notice.

Richard Aihoshi's Free Zone: An Intriguing Year for Free to Play (MMORPG.com)

*Continued growth despite the harsh economy
*Continued growth despite limited visibility
*Larger development budgets
*Smaller development budgets
*The entry of SOE and Turbine
*More instance-based games

Top 15 Events in the Past Decade of Gaming (Popular Mechanics)

*The Sims
*PlayStation 2 and Unreal Engine 2.0
*Second Life and Halo 2
*Nintendo DS and World of Warcraft
*Xbox 360 and Guitar Hero
*PlayStation 3 and Wii
*Zynga Poker and the Hollywood-Thrashing Games of 2007
*iPhone SDK and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

Game of the Decade: World of Warcraft (Massively)

Well, the fans and readers of industry site Gamasutra have voted for their game of the decade, and their choice is simultaneously surprising and yet unsurprising. In a list that's full of single player games, the MMO that redefined MMOs has hit the top of the list: World of Warcraft.

[Regolyth]

Wow, I didn't know that about WoW, with the whole Chinese regulatory thing. Seriously, bare bones are unharmonious? The Chinese government is overly protective and just insane at times.

[Morreion]

Victor Wachter: A Decade in Review (MMORPG.com)

A look at MMO history from 2000-2004 (part 2 to follow next week).

Scott Jennings: 2010 A Year in Review (MMMORPG.com)

As an industry pundit, I've always had one simple rule - if you don't want to go wrong in predicting the future, predict stuff that's already happened. Unfortunately, that's going to be difficult for 2010, since... um.... the past year has been pretty wackily crazy.

So really, there's only one thing I can do to salvage this - the old standby of bad Star Trek episodes. Time travel. Thankfully, I have an iPhone. They can do anything.

QUANTUM CARRIER WAVE CONNECTION TO apps.google.com/docs/2011....
CONNECTING...
CONNECTION ESTABLISHED.

Welcome to my end of the year recap for 2010. Let's get right to it, shall we?

An entertaining year-in-review of 2010 from the future!

Anti-Aliased: How the game of the decade haunts us (Massively)

But it's just not WoW!

First up is the "It's Not WoW" syndrome. This, in my opinion, is one of the reasons that games that try to break away from the design of Warcraft tend to have a high degree of failure. The concept behind this is quite simple: A Warcraft player drops away from WoW to seek a new title to play, picks up the game, and then immediately drops it when it presents a foreign game design that make take some work to understand. They don't want to learn something new, they just want to do what they've always done.

WoW changed how people play MMOs, and it's done it so well that everyone thinks that all of our games should do something similar. We cry out for innovation, yet when something truly innovative is brought to the genre, like The Chronicles of Spellborn's combat for example, no one plays it. The game fails and people begin to think innovation is useless. People just don't want to deal with having to learn something new, which leads us to developers doing:

It's too much like WoW!

A perceptive look at the 800-pound gorilla in the MMO room.

[Regolyth]

WoW syndrome. LOL

[Morreion]

Massively Reader's and Staff Choice Awards results for 2009

And here's some of MMORPG.com's awards:

Aion: Best New Game of 2009

Dungeons & Dragons Online: Eberron Unlimited: Best F2P MMO of 2009

Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures: Most Improved Game of 2009

Here's what Keen and Graev's Gaming Blog has to say about 2009:

The MMO’s of 2009: A Slippery Slope of Inadequacy

Only one word truly describes this year’s MMO releases: dismal. It was disappointing and inadequate. One hopes that each year there will be steps taken in the right direction, ones that will better the industry, but this year saw steps taken in the wrong direction or in a direction that simply makes no sense. Let’s look at a few of the big ones of 2009.

Keen’s Regrets of 2009 and Resolutions for Next Year

[Morreion]

EVE Online: 2009 Game of the Year (MMORPG.com)