Social Games - World of Warcraft

Creators: Blizzard Entertainment

Platform: PC

Overview: World of Warcraft, essentially known as one of the best games in the Fantasy Gaming Market today. Released in 2001 its got a massive reputation as being the most popular MMORPG with the most subscribers compared to other MMOs.

Being the most subscribed MMO there is on the web, there has to be a lot of graphical and game content to keep the lead on this. It really does live up to that as the world a player is in is incredibly big and from an explorative aspect, it has a lot of content to go find in the world and discover new aspects. With a fast game play style to the game, where you press pacific buttons to certain actions such as defend, attack and cast, they can create these actions multiple times on the battlefield, either against enemies of the game or other game-players. A lot of social aspects become available to a player such as trading, talking to each other in game messaging, making sure you'll probably gain allies and friends in the game to either verse or help you in your game progress.

Interesting Game Components:

-Expanding on the Game: Blizzard are always making more content for the game and new quests with content that already exists. Making the game very replayable and making a player keep playing the game without getting bored of doing the same stuff over and over again. Making the player want to keep playing the content that gets released, giving Bizzare Entertainment more money each time they do so. Good way of keeping the game going while money goes into the Creator's pocket.

-Social Grouping on Game-Play: How Bizarre actually made the social aspect of the game a more interesting and "basically" core component of the game as it was essential to have if you wanted to do some of the quests. Even though most of the quests and tasks are possible on your own and can be easily done, some are designed for you to co-operatively work with other players with different stats and specialities to face more complicated tasks and tests set out for you to do.

-Virtual Sales: Online Trading via NPCs and shops you find around the world are the most popular way of getting items that help you through the game so, as most companies would, they take advantage of this fact and make it so a player has the ability of buying online items to use in games with real money which will have more of an effect then items found through the game. As this game is also a game you must buy an membership to play on it, they also use this to get money and downloadable content to kepp the game lively having replayability.