Wizard101: A Full-Blown Rebirth?
This is a standalone but does follow up on a previous article, found here (Medium) or here (Substack).
The MMORPG genre is a complex creature. In all my 90 seconds spent Googling, I found little evidence in the way of an average lifecycle.
In 2021, Wizard101 will turn 13. If your game account is aged at 13, you are able to use a heavily filtered form of text chat. Fickle restrictions mean that you are chained to that age, as years don’t progress so linearly for accounts on Kingsisle servers. Yet also, 13 is oft considered unlucky. For Wizard101’s 13th birthday, a game which does certainly age, I don’t think anything luckier or indeed (to me) more surprising could have happened.
There is scope in an article like this to bring up graphs: quarterly earnings, genre averages, maintenance costs. If nothing else, bear that in mind, as I explain and give thoughts on the ~$126 million Kingsisle acquisition by Media and Games Invest (hence, MGI). $126,000,000 dollars for a company almost exclusively built on an almost 13-year-old game.
Already MGI has been good on their word and dissolved Kingsisle’s mobile division (many employees since forming a new company, Wimo Games). This has fuelled excitement in the community, largely gleaned from my experience on the Wizard101 subreddit. Many see it as the first of many promises fulfilled — the hopeful second, and to many the most enticing, is the rejuvenation of Wizard101’s sister game, Pirate101.
This bodes well.
My experience with Wizard101 since the previous article (originally written in the summer of 2020) is a certain sense of continuity. That this game which many wrote off still has legs, since outfitted with new running spikes, and has lately been taken under the wing of a new coach (whose resumé is quite positive indeed). To find new life in Pirate101 too could be MGI’s crowning moment to a community once in desperation.
Spells, which drive the game, its combat, and appeal with creative animations, are still being audited. Most recently, a promise of quicker, if clunkier, updates to old, long, slow, AoE animations. New spells have been released, along with a new level 140 world, “Karamelle”; “spellements” promise (after a clunky and expensive-seeming integration) to inject new diversity to the combat; finally, male characters are promised pink. There is even talk of guilds.
MGI, it seems, knows what makes the community tick. They are aware that many players are decade-old veterans by now. And, perhaps, to the hopes of many, they are aware that two games can be better (or at least more profitable?) than one.
Unfortunately, my hope in a gamble-free game seems unlikely, though at least there may still be any game at all when I inevitably flock back for a month of playing with the siblings. Who knows: perhaps you’ll see Juan Dream flying around the Commons, ahorse his ghostly pegasus, all coloured in skulls and every shade of pink.
And none of that’s to mention a recent resurgence in Hero101…
Thank you for spending time reading this little work. I hope you enjoyed it enough to stick around for more!
A couple of questions for the comments:
What is your experience with the lifecycle of MMOs?
and:
Whether in insider or outsider to these games, do you think a buyout like this can be positive? How does it bode for the future of the game? What sort of comparisons do you see?
Appendix:
I haven’t touched my Wizard101 account in a while. A lot of my information comes from randomly recommended YouTube videos, the Wizard101 subreddit, or this extremely concise and insightful Twitter account (@theatmoplex).
