A pertinent account of a recent phenomenon in online-game space: the fact that Worlds of Warcraft is 'completely owning the game space right now', leaving no room for competitors as accounted by this article in the IHT/NYT.

Now, the broader phenomenon is that so many contenders, including Matrix Online, simply cannot stand up to the overwhelming popularity of online gaming's new leviathan: "World of Warcraft," made by Blizzard Entertainment, based in Irvine, California. (...) "There are a lot of other online games that are just sucking wind right now because so many people are playing WOW," (...) Now, "World of Warcraft" has shattered earlier assumptions about the potential size of the market. Â "For many years the gaming industry has been struggling to find a way to get Internet gaming into the mainstream," said Jeff Green, editor in chief of Computer Gaming World, one of the top computer game magazines. "These kinds of games have had hundreds of thousands of players, which are not small numbers, but until 'World of Warcraft' came along no one has been able to get the kind of mainstream numbers that everyone has wanted, which is millions of players."

I like the conclusion:

Previously, many massively multiplayer games seemed to pride themselves on their difficulty and arcane control schemes. "This is what Blizzard always does," said Green, of Computer Gaming World. "They have an innate genius at taking these genres that are considered hard-core geek property and repolishing them so they are accessible to the mainstream. To do that without losing their geek cred is an incredible achievement."