Once upon a time, everything you'd ever want to play was available at Walmart. The time was about 2005, and the everything was console games, computer games, handheld games, roleplaying games, collectible card games, and everything else gamey, nerdly, and techy.
Then Blizzard entered the MMO market. With the rise in broadband access and cheap proliferation of internet access and a networking-style game based on a popular franchise in the same genre as the newly released Lord of the Rings movies, it sucked up huge amounts of market share to the point that little else was available on the shelves aside from deer hunting and console games. It was the One Ring that ruled them all, the AOL of MMOs.
There were some software stores in malls that did a healthy traffic of consoles and console games and second-hand items, but they didn't really start to flourish until about 2007, when people started to get sick of WarCraft. Up until then, for two solid years, World of WarCraft had an unbreakable grip on all of us. We slowly struggled to gain our freedom, and until the release of the Cataclysm expansion we hadn't felt like Frodo had succeeded in tossing the mind-controlling ring of MMOs into Mt. Doom, breaking its hold over us.
Those who broke away earlier have been playing mostly consoles and some 1st person shooters (Call of Duty, for one), waiting for the rest of us to come around. At the end of 2010 Cataclysm popped and the spell was broken for many of us. Some of us fled to the land of consoles, some for single player games (Dragon Age, et. al.) and some headed to a replacement MMO, Rift.
And now, there is a great divergence. Sensing that the next event that will semi-unite us again is long on the horizon in the form of SWToR, we are staying in touch but sampling different games. I'm full into Rift, and enjoying it. I play a little MW2 on the side, but Rift is it. A couple people are playing The Show, a career baseball game for the PS3, and some are looking forward to the new edition of Mortal Kombat. My son is fully into Minecraft and loving it, although he misses WarCraft sometimes.
The subscriptions and attention slide away from WarCraft, and the community prospers as a result. There are now a larger number of people who appreciate daily electronic gaming as a pasttime, but don't want to play WarCraft to fulfill that need, so there's plenty of money to go around again for other titles.Which is good, because with this economy we need to reinvest in our sole industry of dominance - entertainment. (Preferably, the electronic version.) Coin up - Buy American!
