BioWare: ‘The MMO market has never been bigger’

The director of Star Wars: The Old Republic insists that the MMO market is more popular than ever.

The MMO sector has seen declines amongst its traditional big hitters, such as Blizzard’s World of Warcraft. Yet James Ohlen tells MCV that the recent success of Activision’s Destiny and Ubisoft’s The Division highlights how the genre has expanded.

The MMO genre is much bigger than it ever has been before – it’s just that people misunderstand what the genre actually consists of now,” Ohlen said.

If you think about it, everyone thought about [MMOs] as hardcore PC games, but the genre now includes two of the biggest new IP launches of the last three or four years – The Division and Destiny. Both are MMO games, they just don’t call themselves that.

If you’re familiar with MMOs and play them, you know that’s exactly what they are. It’s expanded into mobile games, you have a lot of games that are essentially MMOs on smartphones. It’s just expanded beyond the classic PC MMO. Obviously, Star Wars The Old Republic is very much a classic PC MMO game, but we’ve been very successful because we are Star Wars, we are BioWare and we are focused on differentiating ourselves with story.”