Sony's Ryan Barker Thinks A Facebook Inspired MMO May Eventually Trump WoW.

But Sony's Ryan Barker doesn't think such popularity will last forever.

Barker worked on Sony's decade-old Everquest and he reckons that Warcraft will be topped by “something totally different that we haven’t even thought of yet.”
[quote]
“At some point someone will dwarf those numbers with a game. If we can get passed some of the barriers that are keeping people from playing with their friends, just because their friends happened to start the game before they did, and maybe started on a different server or whatever, if we can start to get rid of some of those social blocks, I think it can get even better,” he told VideoGamer.com.</blockquote>

Barker cited Facebook as a possible inspiration:
[quote]
“Things like that show us that there are a lot of people out there that are interested in being involved in an internet community, especially with all the apps on Facebook, in playing casual games. At some point someone’s going to do an MMO that really caters to that group, and is going to have a billion subscribers or whatever. There’s another ceiling somewhere that we haven’t hit yet.

“It’s mostly going to be how the social interactions work. There is still somewhat of a stigma with the fantasy genre. It’ll be some weird mix of something we haven’t seen before. A lot of the standard video game genres I don’t think will have the breadth of appeal that would be necessary for something like that. It might not even be a game world per se; it might be something totally different that we haven’t even thought of yet.”</blockquote>

It's going to take something pretty monsterous to overtake Warcraft, which currently holds the Guiness World Record for most popular MMORPG.