This bit feels naive, in 2007:

> While there may have been some money in it for a few select games, most were not profitable - they were created for other reasons, such as genuine intrigue in mechanics, users' fun, and curiosity.

2007 places us well into World of Warcraft territory. Online games were already a juggernaut and highly profitable.

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goodroot 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Agreed.

It's a fair point, but there's definitely more to the history.

Ten years earlier, let's look at 1997:

- Final Fantasy VII

- Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

- GoldenEye 007

- Banjo-Kazooie

- Fallout

- Age of Empires

- Diablo

- Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire

- Grand Theft Auto

- Planescape: Torment

And crucially... It was 2000 when we received Counter-Strike. This game undoubtedly started the competitive gaming scene, and opened up new avenues for expansion and profitability, with the potential of vast sportlike eyeballs and sponsorships.

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shimman 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Don't disagree, but Quake already had a competitive scene before counterstrike with prize pools + tournaments too.

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goodroot 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Yes, crucial omission - and that was 1996!

	▲	StilesCrisis 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		One big difference to note: Quake in 1996 didn't host central infrastructure or have any expectations of recurring revenue. By 2007 things had changed. WOW was built around Blizzard-hosted infra and recurring revenue as central design pillars.

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eska 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

For context, initial WoW was developed until 2005, and up to roughly 2003 Blizzard was going to release it only for the US and Korea, because they thought “Europeans only play racing games” (source: WoW dev diary by Staats)

	▲	StilesCrisis 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The release date was late 2004. It's definitely true that Blizzard massively underestimated demand. They expected the initial printing to last for months, and it sold out immediately. They needed to race to roll out more datacenter capacity as fast as possible. (This was pre-AWS) Source: was there
	▲	anthk 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		That's because both Americans and Asians see Ye Olde Europe as somethiing fancy to stay and/or meet and for us Europeans it's just fancy but old, boring trash from the old town in our cities, something to run away from... or to look from a distance with a nice scenery ;) I mean, when you can see a 12th century church daily by just taking the subway in 20 minutes, Medieval stuff gets boring fast. Even more if you own volumes at home older than the half of the US' history like nothing... From that perspective, what you want to know and met it's the new, fancy, technological futurist stuff. The US loved Ultima and maybe FFVI and medieval ARPG's. Europeans... maybe urbanites, townsfolk people loved racing/soccer games and futurist games like Half Life and Deus Ex.

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chasd00 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Doesn't Everquest pre-date Wow? There were support groups for people married/in a relationship with someone addicted to Everquest. I know someone personally that almost dropped out of college because of "Evercrack".

	▲	giobox 37 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		If Wikipedia is to be believed, Ultima Online and Everquest would have had circa 500k-1m subscribers between them by 2003. Ultima Online had 100k subscribers as long ago as 1998.
	▲	StilesCrisis 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Yes, it does, and also quite lucrative AIUI.