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One thing is obvious from a casual glance at Austin GDC's schedule: this thing is completely MMO happy. It's an online gaming focused show, but the number of MMO-related panels seems to rise every year, approaching some critical mass where the whole thing will explode in a mess of orcs, elves, and stamina-bonus leather belts.
As such, it's appropriate the event is kicked off with an appearance by Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime. World of Warcraft is the game half these people are trying to match. This is the guy with the 900 lb. gorilla on a chain, and that's an attention getter. Considering I got up at stupid o'clock in the morning for this, and I'm glad I did. The seats have filled up fast.
Morhaime begins by laying out how much the world has changed in a century. How without cars or planes it was "like WoW before you get mounts, with no flight paths." He flows into a discussion of how the rate of technological progress increases exponentially. Moore's law, the fact that if the airline industry progressed as quickly as semiconductors have since the year he founded Blizzard, we'd be able to fly from L.A. To Paris in two minutes. And just when I start to think he's become a Singularitarian evangelist, he makes the point. Blizzard has gotten big, but they began back in the good old days when "a couple programmers, a couple artists, and maybe a sound guy...they could make a game."
"I started Blizzard with two friends," he said. "My friend Alan... it was really his idea. Alan and I each contributed $10,000. I borrowed the money from my grandma."
That's not the company now. The number of employees at Blizzard had grown since the beginning, of course, but that's nothing compared to what WoW necessitated. "World of Warcraft has really transformed the company in ways we couldn't possibly imagine at the time."
There are a lot of lessons to be taken from his stories. Firstly, not to underestimate the importance of appealing to a hard core of users without alienating a wider audience. "The mass market doesn't have systems that early adopters have. If you purchased a system in the last three years, Blizzard games should run on it." I don't know how many MMOs have needed a whiz-bang rig to be even remotely playable at the time of launch. It's one of the many things WoW did right.
It also follows that there needs to be deep, nuanced gameplay for the hardcore, but accessibility for the majority of players. "Guitar Hero is one of the best examples. You can spend a lot of time mastering that game, but anyone can just pick up that controller and play."
More important than anything, however, he stressed one simple message. Put bluntly: finish your -bleep- games. No amount of money you earn back from a quick release will be worth turning your name into poison.
"We view our brand as our most important property. We want it to stand for high quality games, fun, polish...there's always pressure to release a game before it's ready. But we think that shipping a game early is a very risky thing. It can do tremendous damage to a brand or franchise."
It was a lesson they best learned when Diablo missed its holiday release date in '96. It didn't suffer for it sales-wise. Certainly not as much as it would have had it shipped without the extra polish. "Nobody looks back on Diablo and says 'if only it came out three weeks earlier.'" A similar situation occurred with The Burning Crusade. It missed its date, yet became the fastest selling PC title ever, moving 2.4 million copies on the day it hit.
"It's in the interest of everyone, even the finance guys, to make sure that a game is ready when it comes out," he says. Blizzard's willingness to sacrifice the short term bottom line in the name of quality and image is admirable and nearly unique in the industry, but hasn't always gone exactly to plan. World of Warcraft's launch wasn't without its -bleep- ups. The greatest of them being that the game was just too -bleep- popular for its own good. Just in case you forgot those early days of waiting in server lines for ages. "Our first big challenge was estimating how many people would want to play a game like this." And Blizzard overestimated how much a monthly fee would put people off. "We know that we're not going to sell faster than Warcraft III... Definitely not out the gate. We're safe if we think of WCIII as the ceiling."
That bar was just way too low. They had an excellent game that was playable about half the time. "We needed to scale up the entire business overnight. By scale up the entire business I mean everything. Development staff, IT staff, community management, customer service, human resources...when we launched World of Warcraft I don't even think we had a recruiting department. We were not prepared. At all. We had to shift our mindset that we were not just a game publisher or developer. We were now a service company."
And that's how an outfit of a few dozen guys swelled into a company with about 2,500 employees.
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Not content with reeling in millions of gamers, being turned into novels and even a trading card game, Blizzard's World of Warcraft is now entering the comic book world.
The World of Warcraft comic will be published by DC Comics, with issue one out on November 14 this year.
"When a human is found unconscious on the shores of Kalimdor, with no memory of who he is or how he arrived there, how will he survive? Enslaved by an Orc Shaman, he must fight for survival against members of both the Alliance and the Horde. Will he strike the uneasy balance with the other races he'll need to find the secrets of his past?" says the DC Comics website.
The first six issues of the World of Warcraft comic will be released with two different covers, one drawn by Jim Lee and the other by Blizzard senior art director Samwise Didier.
What next for The World of Warcraft? A branded bog roll or something?
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Developers who focus solely on MMO projects are \"setting [themselves] up to fail,\" reckons Paul Sams, chief operating officer for World of Warcraft creator Blizzard. He believes devs and publishers need to avoid being caught up in the \"blood lust\" of subscriber-led revenue.
\"I think a lot of companies that get a taste of what an MMO can do for their financial performance - they get this, and I'll use a Blizzard term, they get this 'blood lust' for more...
\"[At Blizzard] We think that having a portfolio that is focused solely on MMOs is going to set you up to fail. You're putting all your eggs in one basket, assuming that all the gamers are going to want to play that type of game over and over again.\"
Sams revealed his insider-advice to Edge magazine during the Blizzcon event in LA earlier this month. Blizzard's COO was also keen to point out that the heavy-hitting developer will be practising what he preaches, and not rushing headlong into working on a World of Warcraft sequel.
\"We need to give World of Warcraft time to breathe. That's why a lot of sequels don't perform, because players don't want to pick up and leave the community and all the things that they've done. They've put a lot of time and energy into it. To ask them to move is a big request.\"
Plans for a WoW sequel are afoot, however, with Sams hoping that Blizzard will \"time it right,\" while colleague Frank Pearce predicts WoW's lifespan to stretch between five and ten years. You can read Edge's full Blizzcon feature in issue #180, on sale from tomorrow.
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It's one of those hopes/dreams/rumours that refuses to lay down and die - will Blizzard's phenomenally successful MMOWorld of Warcraft hit the Xbox 360 and/or PS3?
It's a question that's been raised with the developer on numerous occasions previously, only to see Blizzard say nope, no console plans for WoW. And the company has re-iterated such in response to a post on the official forums questioning the arrival of the game on PS3.
Blizzard's response? \"We're madly in love with the PC and Mac platforms, and there are no plans at this time to bring World of Warcraft to any other platforms.\"
No plans \"at this time?\" That clearly means WoW on consoles in the future. Right?
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