Nice article.
And yeah, this year is really a make or break one for the MMO industry, although I have said elsewhere that the only thing to kill wow or capture its audience will be whatever Blizz do next. Wows an elephant in the room and only blizz can get it out. Others - specifically SWTOR (if it doesnt flop) may capture some of its market, but not all.
A large part of the wow market are the first time pcers, the folks for whom wow is their first proper game past flash games on dodgy websites and facebook, and these are not the type to go to something like SWTOR just because of the IP behind it, for them it will have to give them what wow does, but from experience of biowares other products, easy sense of achievement isnt in their lexicon
Saying that though, if SWTOR - Rift, GW2, even DCUO wont really compete with wow no matter how polished they may be on release etc - manages to capture the hardcore folk from wow (and from some of the boards I use it probably will) with sufficient enough challenging content, then they could lead a charge towards it of the more mainstream folks (who no matter do look up to the world first types while openly bashing them in /g etc). Kinda like happened when Blizz actually hired some of the better EQ players back in 2003ish for the WoW dev team.
Certainly going to be interesting to watch is this year and all these releases.
