f13.net

Well I'm not particularly surprised, but it looks like this is over. Blizzard won on summary judgement with the eula upheld and the somewhat dubious copyright infringement (copying parts of the client into memory) claim upheld. A couple  (http://virtuallyblind.com/2008/07/14/blizzard-wins-sj-mdy/)of sites  (http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2008/07/blizzard-wins-v.html)are reporting it.

One of the key decision seems to be a clear affirmation that a game company has the right to run their game as they see fit and that the bot program intentionally interferes with that. That to me is the real issue, not the odd legal mechanisms to get there.

Not sure I agree on the Copyright infringement, but good to see the courts upheld the right of a company to determine how their game is run.  Even the EULA being upheld doesn't make me too annoyed.

"Not sure you agree"? It's a parody of justice, and a twisting of both the intent and the letter of the law. I have a great deal of difficulty puzzling out how any sane person much less a judge could rule that a botting program was copyright infringement. I fully believe this judgement was made solely due to the distasteful nature of wowglider's business and will not hold up in appeals.

Not sure I agree because I don't recall the details of it right off the top of my head.  Lawyers are tricksy like Hobbits. 

Norton sued for copyright infringment for copying WoW into memory during virus checks.

News at 11.

The judge probably got KS-ed one too many times by automated customer.

Calling copying something into memory "copyright infringement" is laughably stupid.

Windows is the biggest copyright infringer of all.

Not only are they illicitly copying instructions and data around in RAM willy-nilly but they also write it off into hard-disk, obviously for some nefarious reason. Heck, some of their OS's even take your private data and pad out disk blocks of entirely different programs with it!

Even worse they SUSPEND your programs from running whenever they feel like it, and then, to make matters even worse they give some of their own programs priority in execution!

Oh, yeah, class action?  Here we come!

Yes, but imagine what the world (of warcraft) will be like if this was not the outcome of the case (or if it gets beat down in a appeals).

It would mean the opposite is true.

That's because the opposite is true. :awesome_for_real:

I agree. IANAL, and I don't think there will be any appeals, but I can't see this being used as precedent for anything.

I do think MDY was pretty ballsy for insisting they had a legal right to build a business model off of selling an exploit utility for someone else's game, and would have liked to see a ruling on better grounds (such as EULA infringement).

I disagree with you there. I don't think this should be handled legislatively, and as a consumer I certainly don't want EULAs to hold up in court, not that they have in the past.

If game developers are concerned about botters, ban them. Yes that's difficult, yes it cuts into your profits, and yes it's a neverending arms race, but the government holds no responsibility to protect videogames from hackers. It's a game not a bank vault. They're magic swords, not trade secrets. Circle the wagons, protect yourself, and don't rely upon legislation to do it for you because next week some random chinaman or rooskie will code up another bot and then you'll be back at square one.

Actually, they are trade secrets, and it is a bank vault, as the ever-escalating number of keylogger injections on the Internet specifically targeting World of Warcraft accounts attest to.

Blizzard has one of the best records for exploit enforcement in the industry, but that doesn't mean they should ignore the pre-existing laws enforcing the rights to their intellectual property out of the kindness of their hearts.

(And given my day job I'm well aware of the impact of offshore botting.)

Accounts and gold/items have value in real money because they can be resold, yes. This indirectly impacts the developers, support staff, and the bottom line because it encourages botting. But they're still bits and bytes with no intrinsic value and are not trade secrets.

Botters don't infringe upon IP. They don't steal it, or copy it, or rebrand it and sell it as their own original creation, or encourage others to do the same. Nothing like that. They're breaking your rules, plain and simple, and the proper and measured response to that is to ban their ass. Not sue.

And not just because it's ridiculous to do so, but because it will ultimately prove to be a waste of effort because again-- some random chinese or romanian dude will take up the flag.

Really?

Really??

I'm going to stop you right there.  You just wrote that 99% of the internet is worthless because its not a trade secret.  It's just bits and bytes.

Yeah, the 'its just bits and bytes' is a bad way to go.  Your bank account is just bits and bytes, so I'm sure you dont mind if I hop in and shuffle a few 1s and 0s around now, do you?

The decision is not based upon the act of copying it from the hard-drive to the RAM creating an infringement. It is the copying from the hard-drive to the RAM in contravention of the EULA and TOS (i.e. the client in the RAM is now mixed with an EULA-violating program and usage) that results in exceeding the limited license Blizzard granted to you in the first place to have a copy of the game. It is that nexus of a copying in contravention of the limited license that is considered the infringement.  It's an interesting decision and seems pretty logically sound from a copyright point of view if you buy the enforceability of the EULA/TOS. I have problems with that on an adhesion contract basis, but once you get over that hump the copyright claim is relatively straight forward.

Direct Link to the decision in .pdf (http://virtuallyblind.com/files/mdy/07-14-08_Order.pdf)

On a side note, I had a piece of a case that I believe was in front of this same Judge Campbell where a guy claimed to have patented the process of internet commerce and sued every merchant payment processing company that ever did business on the web for billions.   :awesome_for_real:

I left my firm before it really went anywhere so don't know what has happened to it.

What, are we in kindergarten? Don't be silly. I'm referring to laws protecting objects (or data) with intrinsic value. Loot in videogames don't qualify as they have no intrinsic value, they only have value on auction sites in direct contravention of the videogame's rules. Maybe I'm being a luddite, and splitting hairs. I admit the possibility. Hell, US dollars could be argued to have no intrinsic value since we're off the gold standard, and I'm sure someone was just about to hit reply and post that. But what it comes down to is that I just don't see this as being something appropriate for the government to legislate.

I think it's entirely appropriate for legal action as long as it's using the more obvious argument that the bot seller is a third party interferer in the first party's EULA. Of course IANAL and there's people here who are, so you should probably listen to them instead. I'm just trying to make a living off this stuff.

Of course an MMO vendor should also use enforcement of in-game rules to try to stop botting and other exploits. An MMO vendor should use every legal recourse, as long as it's cost effective to do so. Hiring "enough GMs to stop exploiting" may be theoretically possible, but quickly becomes cost prohibitive. Blizzard has thousands of in-game customer support people, and clearly that's not enough. Should they hire hundreds of thousands? Are you willing to pay the monthly fees that would entail?

That's more or less what the ruling was based upon but they needed to go the vicarious/contributory copyright and tortious interference route because the bot maker didn't have a direct contractual/license relationship with Blizzard (what is known as privity).

As much as I want botters to be run through a giant cheese grater, I am dead set against this ruling.  Giving validity to the absurdity of EULAs and to the utterly recockulous argument that copying something into RAM is copyright infringement is absolutely terrifying.  Next up: Console makers sue Action Replay.  Malware makers sue anti-spyware makers.

That wasn't the ruling.

That linked .pdf gives some insight into the whole thing. Copying data into RAM isn't considered copyright infringement per se, but rather an act of creating data copy which in itself is neutral activity -- if granted by license from copyright holder, it's certainly legal. Copyright infringment apparently (and quite logically) happens if this act is performed without permission from the copyright holder, and in case of WoW this permission is limited in scope and requires conformity with all the petty EULA bits, that including prohibition of bot-driven gameplay. So technically someone who is running a bot is breaking that EULA, and as such no longer permitted to create copy of game data in RAM (or whatever other place). So when they do that, that's infringement.

They did sort of glide over the whole validity of EULA itself thing no questions asked, though, for whatever reason.

You say that like it's the only possible alternative. We've actually discussed this before, not sure if it was here or on another forum, but my answer remains the same-- behavior tracking and data mining. It's 2008; hardware is cheap, people are expensive. Even in bangalore.

Anybody else notice some of the companies listed in the precendent cases included companies that aren't really around any more?  MAI Systems?  Never heard of 'em.  But I have heard of Wall Data and if that company is setting 9th circuit software IP precedent we might as well all hang it up right now.

If you can prop up your bad design in court why would anyone make anything other than a Shiny Diku?  Unless it, like mob XYZ coordinates and gold pieces are the sole property of Blizzard (long history of making shiny clones for the mass market).  If this ruling stands it curtails the natural market forces of innovation and investment for the industry in general.  But that's ok, we like Diku.  Alot.

Pressing Fast Forward on your DVD is copyright infringement, now, eh?  Becaue they're gonna put it in the EULA for the DVD?

If a third party is meeting demand for your game, look at what demand they are meeting and offer the same services.

WoWGlider allowed players to bot their characters to where they wanted to be. If WoW offered the same service - instant powerleveling for $2 per level, say - that was officially sanctioned while also cracking down on the competition, there would not be the same problem.

Alternatively, how much would it have cost for Blizzard to buy this program and release their own, more beneficial-to-WoW version? Draconian enforcement isn't the only way to deal with these kind of issues.

Sounds like a stray bullet just caught a perpetrator of crime. Case closed. If you spray n pray long enough you might get lucky and get a head shot in this sort of slippery case. Especially if you have unlimited ammo.

What ?

Do you have an idea of how many "pure souls" would quit WoW on the spot if something like that should ever happen? On the contrary, same pure souls are so happy that the Blizzard Tank steamrolled what they see as cheaters and cheat producing companies. That's the reason why Blizz sued in the first place, not because they felt "hurt" in their pride/copyright by the bots. If selling bots or levels could earn Blizz more money than forbidding it, they would have followed your suggestion ages ago.

Thanks for clearing that up, Abo, and not making me look like such a raging idiot.  :grin:  This is why I said I wasn't sure on the CR issue.  I'm not a lawyer, and I hadn't read the details of the ruling, so I wasn't about to go off half-cocked without doing so AND seeing the opinions of actual legal eagles.

Like I said above, lawyers are tricksy, like Hobbits.  A ruling usually applies to a very strict set of circumstances, not the blanket interpretation the internet likes to apply.

Another classic example of Abagadro coming in and dominating with a clear synopsis of the issue, and everyone else ignoring him and continuing to rabble rabble rabble. 

If there is credit card or other personal information available that hackers can potentially get their hands on through a video game, the government sure as fuck has a responsibility to protect videogames from hackers.

Sorry, I meant to write botters, not hackers. Of course actual hacking is illegal.

Yeah, but he uses all those big words.  :headscratch:

I'm not sure if you've noticed, but we're getting that anyway. We were getting that before this ruling, and we're going to be getting it for a while still.

Diku sells... because people are fucking idiots and most MMOG developers are clueless halfwits with fuckfinger design skills and delusions of grandeur. Present company excluded of course.

A lot less now that they've won this case.

Bleh.  Why don't I ever get to write fun cases like this?  I guaranteed the judge here had no fucking idea what WoW was.  It was probably written by a clerk that was keylogged  :awesome_for_real:

I've got no idea how many 'pure souls' WoW has. I've also go no idea how many people used WoWGlider, but I'm guessing a lot.

Please don't rise to defend poor innocent Blizzard here. They have in the past launched lawsuits at anyone they see as stepping on their turf. Gold famers / external RMTers who used bots to maximise their returns are the target here, which is exactly where Blizzard feels 'hurt'.

That WoWGlider potentially does have some legitimate uses - such as by the handicapped - is overshadowed by its gold farming use. That Blizzard has shut that door to those players means very little to them.

At the moment Blizzard is very happy with the sub model. Moving to a combined sub+micro trans model would take some internal changes, but why bother for a MMO that's brining in $1.2 billion per year?

I wonder what impact this finding is going to have on third-party apps further down the line. It would seem that any RAM-accessing third party app that a company sees as violating the license of their game is now open for legal action on these grounds.

Meh, as I alluded to earlier, there are lots of legitimate reasons why one parties data may be read off a disk, manipulated and written somewhere else without the data creator ever being asked for permission.  If the crux of the case is that some segment of Blizzard code got read and manipulated into a second set of code without Blizzards permission then the whole thing is a sham.

Go ahead, Zip a file, I dare you.

Is Blizzard supposed to annotate the EULA with every exception to their copyright?  How is that even a reasonable concept?

Maybe I don't understand the ruling, judges tend to be fairly clever, but I don't like the way this smells.

Have any of you people actually been to court?

I'm just speculating seeing how I live in a different country with a different legal system, but I've been to court, read about different cases from here and the US, and I can assure you that expecting some sort of fair or reasonably ruling in every case is just stupid. Which is not to say that this ruling was or was not reasonable, I have no idea on that score.

The point, in my laymans position: This case is not a big deal, it's just some small fry getting smashed by a big company and inevitably losing. Don't bother trying to break down if he should or shouldn't have lost. There is a lot more money to be earned by lawyers before any position on the "legitimate reasons why one parties data may be read off a disk" is determined.

The problem is that such things create precedent. Afaik, the area of third party apps, EULAs, TOSs and how they interact is a bit of a grey area. Well, some of that grey has been stripped away in favour of saying "The vendor sets the license". It has a much wider potential impact that just stopping gold farming for RL cash (which the industry could do a lot to stamp out if it was willing to take a more pragmatic view over an ideological one).

From my limited reading around the place this thing sets jack all precedent.

I have.  But now instead of them scratching their heads going "huh, maybe we should come up with something people don't hate so bad they automate it" they just transfer the blame to the "exploiters" and the "cheaters", calling their lawyers, suing 30% of their market and neglecting the rest of the potential market.

Just sayin', people who think this is any kind of good are just rationalizing in a bad way.

I wasn't, I won't. I don't like Blizzard.

Your position holds if the majority are botting, like L2.  The majority aren't botting in WoW, it's not even your fantastic 30%.  Again, some people LIKE DIKU. Just because you don't, doesn't mean everything about it is shit.  :awesome_for_real:

It doesn't matter how fun it was or how super-awesome the gameplay was, there will always be people who will automate it regardless. WoW is designed around a reasonably long haul to max level and sequentially shinier equipment sets after that. Apparently 12 million people just love that model. The 'if people want it then the developers should offer it themselves' argument is a very weak one because doing what the players want regardless of whether it's good for the game is never a great idea. Even if a lot of players want something it doesn't automatically make it a good idea. In this case completely turning the design decisions that underpin WoW would be a very odd call to make.

I'm not going to argue that games should be more fun, of course they should, I'm just saying that for some people it won't matter, they'll cheat anyway and for a game like WoW, 'some people' becomes 'a fuckton of people' when you're scaling up to the sorts of numbers they deal with.

The Hand of God goal clearly shows that FIFA is in the wrong for forcing those poor oppressed football palyers to not use their hands. They need to cater to that market. Likewise Bucky Dent's corked bat, proves that the MLB is a big old nasty bad company for not rethinking their game if the game is so horrible that players resort to cheating.


Actually a friend tells me a WOW account is worth more than a credit card number on the hacker market these days.

 :heart:

The 30% number includes RMT, which, right, it shouldn't, because it's not all about that.  Lumping in the Peons4Hire federal suit and the IGE class action suit.

I did like Diku.  The first 100 days of it.  I would still like it if botting weren't against the ToS.

I think the big problem here is people consider it cheating.  I don't.  It doesn't give you super strength or super speed or perfect aim or anything.  But people want to feel like they are FIFA stars or MLB stars playing with 12 million other stars.  So if it takes a court verdict to make your achievements real, or to make cashing out more lucrative, more power to ya.

I've heard that before.  But I don't buy it because gamers are the most sophisticated set of users ever.  Game communities far outpower their developers almost immediately when a game is launched.  This problem isn't going to be solved by game companies, it will be solved by the community.  Rulings like this do not encourage anybody to do anything to help.

 :awesome_for_real:

BWAAAAAAAAAAAA HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA


*pant pant pant*


BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH

You slay me. Really, you do.  :awesome_for_real:

Oh god, that's good stuff there.

Have you fucking MET gamers? Apparently not.

Most gamers would make the world's shittiest game developers.

What a charming idealist.  :-)

Yeah, one or two.  You're probably right, we are just a pack of whiny curs that never amounted to anything.

Still, I think amateurs make better games.  Because they don't have the pressure to grub quarters with the same tired boy-band formula they've been using for years.  Wasn't necessarily talking about that, though - more the third party developers.

Idealist?  Nah, I don't think for a minute if you take people's tools away they will "reform" and continue paying you.  It's a strong addiction but it ain't nicotine or heroin we're talking about here.

Happy to have been able to entertain you all for at least today, anyway.

*raises hand*

I like good DIKU. Doesn't mean I don't want the genre toe evolve. Doesn't mean I'll happily swallow any old shit in the name of it. But I've been playing WoW on and off for like years now. And I fucking hate botters. I hate trying to level a character in, for instance, Nagrand, and some fuckwank hunter bots are farming the bloody clefthoofs and have been there every single hour of every single day for weeks.

So I'm pleased to see wowglider lose this case. If it means less bots pissing me off damn right I'm pleased. If it means the ores and skins and flowers my girlfriend collects on her lowbie chars (she got a level 60 last week, her first after 2 years of playing) sell on the AH for reasonable money instead of being constantly undercut by bot alts then yeah, damn right I'm happy about it.

Bots probably have the least impact on the hardcore players and the MOST impact on the players that Blizzard have brought into the MMORPG genre that nobody else ever managed to - the first-time gamers and the total newbies. Whatever the specifics of the court case are (insert my usual rabid anti-capitalist rant about just who's courts are they anyway blah blah) I really couldn't care less. If it means less botters infesting the game in the end then I say GOOD.

I can't imagine a clearer case of tortious interference.  If "I'll sell you something I designed for the sole purpose of helping you breach your contract with Blizzard" isn't tortious interference, the tort would no longer exist.

I know jack about copyright law, but that ruling seems reasonable to me.  There is some concern about the ease of turning contract breaches into copyright violations, but there are important countervailing interests as well (you wouldn't want to make it impossible to lease a copyright without waiving copyright protection entirely) and it seems sensible to say the latter outweigh the former in this particular case.  On the plus side there's a new way of identifying people who know nothing about law every time an IP issue arises on the Internet. I think "COPY TO RAM" will soon earn a place in the pantheon along with "EULAs aren't contracts" and all the catchphrases that developed during the Napster era.

Everybody keeps saying this, but it's just not true.  The best independant information available (http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/001365.php) indicates that WoW players are pretty much like EQ or DAoC players, what WoW brought in a big way were a lot of single player gamers who were drawn by the Blizzard and Warcraft brands.  If you project overall market growth for the US/European market, WoW-based growth beat the established trend by about 9-12 months.  The simple fact is that it was time for a million-player game, and if WoW had never existed EQ2 would have hit around 2M.
--Dave

I have trouble believing that's true. It's a counterfactual, so we'll never know for sure. But one of the reasons WoW won over so many single-player gamers is that WoW is comparable in production values (and even in gameplay) to a decent single-player game even when evaluated as a single-player game.  That might be true of EQ2 now, but it sure wasn't on launch day.  EQ2 had shit word-of-mouth because it was a shitty game when it was released.  Given the lack of any evidence (that I'm aware) that a MMO of any significant size can recover from a launch like that, I don't think it's likely that EQ2 would have.

So it was just "time for a million player game"? What do you base this on? Saying that EQ2 could have reached 2M is laughable. EQ2 was a deeply flawed game upon initial release.

There's no need to invent an invisible hand of the market to explain WoW's success. WoW succeeded and expanded the market as a whole because it's a great game. EQ2 didn't because it isn't.

This is just what Devs say to make themselves feel better. It's been happening since '04, along with "Nobody can compete with Blizzard. They're just too good at what they do!"

 :awesome_for_real:

The US/European MMO market has had 60% year over year growth at least as far back as UO (before that, you have discontinuity of business models, plus nobody was really keeping track).  Some games would beat the trend for a while, but this would be followed by plateaus.  This includes WoW, it beat the trend by a *lot*, but the plateau afterwards was also longer.  At the time of EQ2 and WoW's launch, the trend called for a 2M player game (US/Europe).  WoW doubled that, making a 4M player game (just counting US and European subs), followed by a 3 year plateau.

When you consider that the last 3 major US/European MMO launches have all had 1M+ people signed up for beta, it's obvious that the market is ready for another big game.  The game has to clear the competitive bar, and WoW does set the bar, but the first game that does so will clean up.

If EQ2 had not launched in the same window with WoW, it would not have been considered a failure even if the lack of competition had done *nothing* to increase its playerbase.  It did, after all, reach 250K paying pubs in the first quarter, something no other game had ever done, and although it was woefully short of content and unpolished compared to WoW, it did not compare badly with every other game on the market at the time.  What size a particular game reaches is indeed the result of the quality of that game, but only as evaluated in the context of the market it launches into (overall size, unsatisfied growth, and competition).

--Dave

I follow your reasoning, but that trend is an artificial construct roughly describing a complex scenario with little context beyond sales figures (probably from SirBruce, right?), it certainly isn't the market itself, and its predictions while interesting are not necessarily accurate. Even without the WoW juggernaut EQ2 wouldn't have hit two million subscribers, because it wasn't a good game. I suppose if you say something like "a good but not great game released at the end of 2004 could have potentially hit 2m subscribers with no competition" I'd have to reply with something like "I guess, sure" but you need so many caveats to get there that it's lost all meaning.

AoC is a good but not great game released in spring 2008, and it only hit 500k subscribers. If your trend requires the game to surpass WoW in quality and polish to have a chance of beating it in subscriptions then... hey, wait uno momento... I think everybody agrees with that, right? And then we're back to "build a great game, there is no 2, profit".

There were million+ player games in Asia before WoW came along. Are those "great games"?

And the "great game" theory misses out a huge number of factors, like: the publicity blitz Blizzard went on, that broadband in residential areas had hit decent numbers, that the barrier to play WoW was low (in computer specs and in its casual orientation), a solid release and a stack of other factors that include game design but aren't the only thing. WoW had a perfect wave to ride in on and has taken full advantage. Great games flop the same as mediocre games if the circumstances aren't right at release.

It's not the case to say that if WoW hadn't hit 2m players, then EQ2 would have. Something else may have risen to take its place though.

It's too early to say what is going to happen with AoC, but the fact its launch has suffered probably means it is going to have to spend a lot of time rebuilding its reputation and hope that those players come back (and some will). However, 500k subs in the first month isn't really something to sniff at - what sub figures followed WoW's first month, anyway?

I believe Lineage 1 was the first game to break a million.  If anyone tries to tell me that was a "great game"....

There's a tendency to argue that success implies virtue, that if something is hugely successful, it's because of some inherent superiority of nature.  Well, WoW was a better game than EQ2 in many ways, but what it really had going for it was huge branding and a shitpile of money to spend making it so polished and creating so much content.  Not that the designers at Blizzard weren't good, but they weren't supermen, either.  Without the money, the brand, and the timing, they simply couldn't have done nearly as well.

Admittedly, there's an elitist counter-current that anything that is hugely successful is automatically crap.  That's equally idiotic logic.

--Dave

After reading that article about ZT online (http://www.danwei.org/electronic_games/gambling_your_life_away_in_zt.php) I feel pretty secure in saying that the asian market is totally alien and I'll never understand it, so for the sake of this thread lets just agree that they don't count.

Maybe not in a statistical sense, but I personally knew about a half dozen people that never played an MMO before that are hooked on WoW.  Of those, half of them never played computer games.  I'm not saying that this is anything other than an anecdote, but to say that it isn't true that WoW brought non-gamers into an MMO is pretty much shot out of the water by my personal experience.

Exactly.  Plural of anecdote != data.

I know several people who physically cannot play most modern videogames because they get nauseous watching 3D scenes in close areas (caves, hallways, tunnels, etc).  Statistically, they are insignificant, as the reasons these people don't play games are dwarfed by the numbers of people who are too busy, too serious, or too poor.

--
Alkiera

There hasn't been a difinitive study/ survey asking "is this your first MMO?" of wow players that I'm aware of, despite Dave's implication.  All it THAT info says is, "wow census data seems in-line with survey data.  Here's the age breakdown, too."  Urm..

Until we get a real survey it's going to be a point of contention as to how many MMO newbs started with WoW, and 4 years down the line it's a bit late to do it.

I am well aware of that.  However, it's true that I know of at least 3 people that WoW has converted from non-gamers into gamers, so to say "It's not true" is simply false.

It might not be as common as it's made out to be, but it's equally nonsensical to claim it doesn't happen.

I won't deny that WoW brought in people that had never played an MMO before, and it probably did so in larger proportion than most games.  But that it brought in a lot of complete non-gamers, that I don't believe.  This survey is not WoW specific (http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/001496.php), but it does indicate that most MMO players have at least "some" prior video game experience, although female players will tend to be far lower on the scale that should hardly be surprising.

A "definitive" study almost has to be done by the operator.  If someone did such surveys for an operator, he'd probably be contractually bound not to disclose the results with any specificity, and have to point at publicly available data that supported his knowledge.  I'm just saying.

MMO's seem like an unlikely gateway into gaming.  There's a lot of assumed knowledge inherent in playing them, I doubt many non-gamers would be attracted to them, or find them enjoyable if they started them.  Maybe if someone they knew personally was giving them a personal tutorial.

--Dave

I think you're underestimating the watercooler effect. In workplaces, colleges, cafés and so forth around the world, people were talking to each other about their characters in WoW. You can't buy that level of proselytising no matter how much your ad spend is. I know many people personally who recruited wholesale from their offices - guys who weren't really computer gamers but wanted to try this thing out that everyone was talking about. Likewise I have friends who aren't particularly into computer gamers who got sucked in through people they worked with. Yeah that's all anecdotal and, as you say, any real study would probably be confidential but I doubt my experiences are so far off the bell curve as to be written off.

The box was on Wal*Mart checkouts for ages, right up with the gum, the crappy magazines and the impulse stuff. How many people got exposed to it that way who'd never even consider browsing the software aisle of the store let alone go to Gamestop? Plus when they turned the box over and looked at the requirements, they found their crappy 4 year old E-Machine could run it. Genius!

The crow flies at midnight, the crow flies at midnight.  The chair is in the living room, the chair is in the living room.  John has a long mustache, John has a long mustache!

WoW could be a gateway MMO, but it brought in established computer game players (even if they are just 'light' players), not non-players in huge numbers.

WoW is not the Wii of the MMO world.

My ex-wife had never played a video game before but Diablo got her hooked. And my current girlfriend had also never played a video game before but now has her own wow account with about 150 levels spread across 8 characters.

Maybe it's just that Blizzard have a high "oooh that looks purty" factor?

Maybe it was just you  :grin:

I'd have to test that theory further before leaping to conclusions  :drill:

This. The only MMOs that could even be considered gateway are the browser-based ones. People didn't jump from Halo 2 to Club Penguin. They probably came from AIMing with their friends.

WoW is a veteran focused MMO for gamers. One of its biggest success factors is rooted in it being a gamer centric IP, both in the word "warcraft" and in "Blizzard". Neither one of those mean dickall to non gamers. If 500* people worldwide came in to WoW never having played any video games before, but just happened to have a good enough computer to play it on, I'd be shocked.

* 499 of them being the lawyers  :drill:

There is a difference between never have played a computer game before and being a computer gamer.  I had several friends who were definately not the latter who got into WoW far more than any of the unfinished, quarter-played games they tried before.

While it is anecdotal, everyone seems to know at least one person who wasn't a gamer that ended up playing WoW.  Not "I know a guy who knew a girl who had a cousin".  All of us.

Yeah. A girl I know started playing WoW to hang out with her boyfriend when he got a job out of town. Her sister saw her playing, said "that looks cute" and started playing too. Neither of them have a character at 70, and aren't bothered by that. One thing about WoW, which wasn't true in EQ, was that you can play really casually without a lot of skill, and still level up. The rest system is a really good idea for non-gamers.

To be that guy in an argument, I don't know anyone who didn't play games that started playing WoW. I know some casual players who played WoW casually and I know some RPG nerds who played games who picked up playing WoW, but no non-gamers who started playing WoW.

Neither do I. In fact none of my friends, all of who are or were gamers, play WoW or have even tried it.

(One of them, a lifelong Nintendo fanboy, does have a Wii, though.)   :awesome_for_real:

See, it's not even the gamers who are supporting WoW anymore?  We've ignored it or moved on.

I like cake.

Extrapolating this data out I am able to determine that everyone in the world likes cake.

And looks like Zod.

Cake-specced Zod's are SO overpowered. The nerfbat is swinging your way if Blizz ever get a clue!!1

I also like cake. This should be self-evident, but I just wanted to confirm.

I do not like the cake.  The pie, however, is deeleecious.

This is impossible, as you can see my from careful and very scientific (compared to the rest of the thread) extrapolation above, everyone likes cake and looks like Zod.

My carefully collected data has no room for people who look like Heath Ledger and like pie.

P.S.:  I'm drunk, so I'm sorry that I beat you over the head with my point, the sad part is:  I think some people in this thread still won't get it.

:mob: