f13.net

February 10, 2005
World of Warcraft Keeps Growing, Even as Players Test Its Limits
By SETH SCHIESEL
 
RVINE, Calif., Feb. 7 - It was 4:33 p.m. Thursday, and 263,863 people were reaching through cyberspace to explore the sprawling World of Warcraft.

On the windswept plains of the Arathi Highlands, priests and paladins battled creatures of elemental fire and water as they strove to free the spirit of an entrapped princess. To the south, leather workers and alchemists crowded around auctioneers in the bustling underground city Ironforge to hawk their wares while speculators sifted for bargains.

Meanwhile, high in towering Blackrock Spire, dozens of gnomes and humans, dwarves and night elves banded together to assault the legions of the fearsome General Drakkisath.

And in an unmarked building in a nondescript office park here, the builders at Blizzard Entertainment were assembling yet another challenge for the player-heroes of World of Warcraft, the colorful three-dimensional online fantasy that since its release 10 weeks ago has become one of the world's fastest-selling computer games.

From around a dark, windowless room, nine young men peered into the unfinished virtual interior of Karazhan, a haunted tower set in a forlorn mountain pass that will open later this year. "As you can see, the architecture is a little ornate, a little Gothicky," said Aaron Keller, a 29-year-old designer, gesturing to the 3-D model on the computer screen before him. "We're thinking about turning these arches into horse heads."

Twenty minutes of discussion ensued about animal heads carved into just a few spots of one segment of a tower that many users will never even see. It might seem self-indulgent, but it is just one example of the fanatical attention to detail that over the last decade has made Blizzard a premier developer of PC games and turned its Warcraft, Diablo and StarCraft universes into landmark game franchises. (The studio has a minimal presence in the console market.)

Not only have Blizzard's games sold more than 40 million copies over the last 11 years, but they have also inspired a level of enthusiasm that may most closely resemble an opera audience's rapturous devotion to a renowned diva.

Computer Gaming World, the game magazine, called World of Warcraft "a game world so insidiously addictive, so rich in imagination, so fun and beautiful and funny and charming that we have no desire to ever log out and resume our real lives."

Since massively-multiplayer games emerged into prominence with Ultima Online and EverQuest in the late 1990's, the genre has been considered the preserve of only the most serious players: young men with dozens of hours a week to spare grinding through repetitive virtual chores.

World of Warcraft has overshadowed EverQuest II, also released last fall, largely because it remains accessible for more casual players (say, by allowing them to accomplish meaningful quests in less than an hour) while also challenging the hard core (say, by including foes that require dozens of players to defeat.)

And unlike console games, which are basically finished once they are shipped, PC games played online, like World of Warcraft, can be enhanced and enlarged. In fact, users demand it.

Still, as stellar as Blizzard's track record has been, the company was set on its heels by the game's success. Overwhelmed by the sheer number of players, the game's servers conked out repeatedly in the early going, though performance has improved in recent weeks.

Like most massively-multiplayer online games, World of Warcraft requires a monthly subscription fee ($14.99 a month) in addition to the software ($49.99 in the United States for Windows and Macintosh systems; for ages 13 and older). Customer service has been one of Blizzard's hallmarks, but initially the company did not appreciate just how much more demanding customers become when they are paying a regular subscription fee, as opposed to simply buying a box with some disks in it.

While they almost universally loved the game itself, critics have slammed the company on the Internet over customer care and technical support issues.

Now, Blizzard is trying to remake itself swiftly into a full-throated customer service organization. The denizens of massively-multiplayer worlds are the most passionate and demanding gamers in the world. At the same time, successfully running such a game is one of the most technically complex and difficult tasks in cyberspace.

It all requires a tremendous amount of work behind the screens. Meanwhile, the company's executives are grappling with the wages of success: trying to accommodate growth without losing the informal-yet-disciplined flavor that made Blizzard such a hit factory in the first place.

"I think it's fair to say that we needed to restructure ourselves a bit in order to adequately support World of Warcraft's success," said Mike Morhaime, 36, Blizzard's president. "Normally when we ship a game it is basically done. We have worked really hard and we might want to fix a few bugs that have cropped up, but the work is basically over. In the case of World of Warcraft, we worked really hard and we shipped the product, but in some ways the work was just beginning."

An Unforeseen Scale

Most of the senior people at Blizzard seem to agree on the moment they realized that World of Warcraft had taken on a life of its own.

It was in the evening, right before the game was formally released on Nov. 23. Blizzard had arranged for producers and designers to sign copies of the game at midnight at a hangar-size Fry's Electronics outlet in Fountain Valley, not far from Blizzard's base in Irvine, 40 miles south of Los Angeles. The company had set up a similar signing for an earlier strategy game, Warcraft III, and about 700 people showed up. Planning optimistically, the company had about 2,500 copies of World of Warcraft on hand.

"So I planned to roll over there around 11 p.m., and as I tried to get off the freeway I look over and I see this gigantic, dark, surging mass around Fry's, and I'm like, 'What in the world is that?' " said Paul Sams, 34, Blizzard's senior vice president for business operations. It turned out that the pulsing was more than 5,000 people.

"The cars were backed up on the off-ramp," he said. "I parked like a mile away, and when I get there the line is looped around the building, and then looped around the parking lot. It was like a football tailgate, with the R.V.'s and barbecues in the lot and everything."

By the end of that first day, about 240,000 copies of the game had sold across North America, Australia and New Zealand, the product's initial markets. The game has now sold almost 700,000 copies in those markets, and at peak hours about 250,000 people from those areas are playing the game simultaneously.

World of Warcraft was introduced in South Korea, a huge market for PC gaming, on Jan. 18. At peak hours more than 100,000 Koreans are playing at the same time. This week Blizzard plans to begin selling the game in Europe, in English, French and German. It appears that World of Warcraft is on a pace to generate at least $200 million in subscription revenue this year, in addition to more than $50 million in retail sales.

"The happiness became terror on the first day," said Mr. Sams, adding that the company surpassed its one-year subscriber targets in less than a week. "We have a lot of high-class problems right now."

He sighed and leaned his elbows on his office's conference table, which was covered with building plans. The company started developing World of Warcraft in 1999, and two years later Blizzard still employed fewer than 200 people. Now that figure is pushing 750 worldwide. The company is bulging out of its 63,000-square-foot headquarters and is about to take over an additional 22,000 square feet in a building nearby to house its expanding customer-service department.

"I used to think that I knew everything that was happening in this company, and now there are so many pieces and so many elements that I go to meetings and I'm frustrated that I don't know all the answers," Mr. Sams said. "I keep asking: 'When is this going to slow down? When can I reduce the number of e-mails in my in-box below 2,800?' "

From Players, an Earful

Mr. Sams has it easy. At least he doesn't have people calling him an incompetent, lying, moronic hack every day. In public.

Just down the hall, Paul Della Bitta and Daniel Chin, both 28, have learned to cope with that. Every day, World of Warcraft players post more than 150,000 messages to the game's English-language Web site. As associate community managers, Mr. Della Bitta and Mr. Chin swim with the sharks and post to those forums as two of Blizzard's five official representatives to the World of Warcraft community.

"Let's just say that you develop a thick skin and a sense of humor," Mr. Chin said.

Mr. Della Bitta chimed in. "Our players are certainly very passionate about the game," he said, seeming to pick his words carefully.

Mr. Chin laughed and said, "Uh, that's an understatement."

World of Warcraft encompasses two huge continents, eight playable races, hundreds of monsters and thousands of quests. And the game's hundreds of thousands of players have questions, concerns, gripes and outright complaints about just about all of them. The players want answers now, and when they don't like the answers, the community managers are the ones who hear about it, loudly.

Whether it's a rant that the rogue class should be nerfed, or made less effective, or the latest discussion on the appropriate manner to tackle the Molten Core, the game's toughest dungeon, a single popular discussion topic will often be read more than 100,000 times in just a day or two.

And in sifting through all of the messages (or as many as they can get to), the community managers have developed a rich understanding of how people's real and game identities can intersect.

"You literally can see a 68-year-old doctor arguing with a 13-year-old about some obscure gameplay issue, like how paladins should be nerfed," Mr. Della Bitta said.

"The only real way to determine status on the message boards is the level of your character. If you're Level 60, what you say immediately has weight. But if you're only like Level 5, you could make a perfectly valid point on something and everyone will be like, 'Shut up, what do you know?' And if you're a doctor or lawyer or something in real life, you're probably not used to that, so we see the frustrations."

A World That Keeps Evolving

Ultimately, all of these passions, all of the money and all of the construction and new hiring have to be based on a game that lots of people just think is plain fun to play.

Back in the Karazhan design meeting, artists and developers were debating whether the horse heads' eyes should move to follow players exploring the area when Chris Metzen, Blizzard's vice president for creative development, poked his head in.

For 10 years, Mr. Metzen, 31, has been creating the rich stories and plotlines that have girded Blizzard's success. In his silver-rimmed sunglasses, shorts and hiking boots, he strode to the monitor as the others explained the concept of the horse heads.

"Well, I'm not so sure it makes sense just because it's a carriage house," Mr. Metzen said. "But check it out: in Warcraft 1 it said that Lothar was part of the Brotherhood of the Horse, and I thought that was kind of lame then, but maybe a horse head will work because of that. Yeah, that's hot."

Within a few minutes, Mr. Metzen determined that the history and culture of the tower's long-dead inhabitants decreed that the architectural animal motifs progress from horse heads at the tower's base to eagle heads a bit higher, culminating in lion heads at the grand opera house.

"But don't put these heads all over the place," Mr. Metzen told an artist. "Just sprinkling them in here and there will really sell the history to the players who are paying attention."

And if Blizzard has learned anything from its World of Warcraft experience, it is that the players are certainly paying attention.

"It's the difference between an immersive experience and a mechanical diversion," Mr. Metzen said. "You might spend hundreds of hours playing a game like this, and why would you keep coming back? Is it just for the next magic helmet? Is it just to kill the next dragon?

"It has to be the story. We want you to care about these places and things so that, in addition to the adrenaline and the rewards of addictive gameplay, you have an emotional investment in the world. And that's what makes a great game."

"You literally can see a 68-year-old doctor arguing with a 13-year-old about some obscure gameplay issue, like how paladins should be nerfed," Mr. Della Bitta said.

Mike Morhaime, 36, Blizzard's president

Customer service has been one of Blizzard's hallmarks

Wow, that's an awfully written story. I had to laugh at this, though:


In what world?

Paul Della Bitta

"It appears that World of Warcraft is on a pace to generate at least $200 million in subscription revenue this year, in addition to more than $50 million in retail sales."

$200 million / ($15/month * 12 months) = 1,111,111 subscribers per month on average. Now, that's probably not possible, because they only sold 700K copies; it's the payments from the cybercafes that distort this. So we still can't be sure how many people are playing in South Korea, but at least it's putting us in the ballpark.

Bruce

"You might spend hundreds of hours playing a game like this, and why would you keep coming back? Is it just for the next magic helmet? Is it just to kill the next dragon?

"It has to be the story.

Are there any more foreign markets left for them to enter? That could be part of the 1.1 M subscriber estimate to get to 200M in revenue.

Pretty sure they haven't actually launched yet in Europe - they're still in Beta.  Heck of a market there to expand into.

Well, they never mention subscriber numbers, unfortunately. I knew about the 700K figure a few days ago, as well as the fact it was getting lots of playtime in the Korean cybercafes.

I'd say there are at least 500K subscribers now. Potentially 100-200K more if you count Korea. But unfortunately, that's only an estimate..

I found more interesting this passage:

Wait, isn't the general consensus that only 1/8th of all subscribers are logged in nightly? So if that is even remotely true, they would somehow have over 2 million subscribers?

"I think it's fair to say that we needed to restructure ourselves a bit in order to adequately support World of Warcraft's success," said Mike Morhaime, 36, Blizzard's president. "Normally when we ship a game it is basically done. We have worked really hard and we might want to fix a few bugs that have cropped up, but the work is basically over. In the case of World of Warcraft, we worked really hard and we shipped the product, but in some ways the work was just beginning."

An Unforeseen Scale

Pretty sure they haven't actually launched yet in Europe - they're still in Beta.  Heck of a market there to expand into.

Yah, ok.  1 million isn't impressive.   :roll:

A MMOG making blockbuster-movie type money in one year is newsworthy.

Schild crying because WoW shrunk his e-penis is not newsworthy.

The reason why WoW >>> EQ in Europe is certainly not because WoW has lower system requirements. It helps inflating the number of people who can join in, but it's not the main reason why WoW so easely outsells EQ2, not in Europe at the least.

The interest in Europe for EQ2 was simply limited, even among people without knowledge of it's system requirements. It seems Europes MMORPG market is more PvP-driven as the NA market. EQ, EQ2 and FFXI all had some succes, but were hardly smash hits. DAoC and WoW however have been the biggest names in the past years.

Even more so, most people who prefer EQ2 over WoW seem to do so exactly based on the graphics. But that's just an impression I have.

Which I would guess is between 15 and 30 million (in North America and Europe, excluding Asia because of the pervasiveness of netcafes).

Living in holes much? Do you KNOW a teenage boy that hasn't or doesn't play games? Do you know how many teenage boys there are in America.

Microsoft Game Studios and Ensemble Studios today announced that the award-winning Age franchise has sold over 15 million copies worldwide. The Age titles, comprised of the Age of Empires and Age of Mythology series, have been consistently in NPD's top ten sales charts throughout the life of the franchise. According to NPD, Age of Mythology has been a top 10 best-selling PC game title for 26 consecutive weeks, 18 months after its initial ship date*. The latest Age release, Age of Mythology: The Titans expansion pack, will reduce its estimated retail price on May 12 to $19.95 (U.S.).

If I understand correctly you're basing your analysis on boxes currently sold - not taking into account further box sales that will occur throughout the remainder of the year?  I read the statement in the article as a forecast - which implicitly would include some growth from the current sales base.  Put another way, how many more box sales would be required beyond the 700K to make the projected revenue target realistic?

Anyway, I'm still baffled by the fact that if they've passed EverQuest in terms of subscribers, or gone over 500K, why haven't they SAID that?

Let's be fair and divide 15 by 3. I know I bought AOE1, AOE2, and AOE2 expansion. Anyway, that's 5,000,000 gamers. Hell, cut that in half and you still have 2.5million. Point being. Lots.

No shit.  Patch in some content now, motherbitches.

Because they can't keep enough servers up to validate it? No, I'm not joking.

...the fuck?
If you've already seen all there is to do in WoW in the couple months since release, seek sunlight and the company of breathing human beings.
If you burned out because you were in the beta, quitcherbitchen. Your own fault.
The game's been out three months and you want content added already? Amazing.

Anyway, I'm still baffled by the fact that if they've passed EverQuest in terms of subscribers, or gone over 500K, why haven't they SAID that?

My guess is that they've been waiting to see how many people actually subscribe after their free period is up before announcing subscriber numbers. When the original press release went out, most people, probably, were still on their free period.

Schild crying because WoW shrunk his e-penis is not newsworthy.

If EQ has remained more or less intact with its sub base - would this mean a massive expansion in the genre?  Has anyone put numbers on this yet?

So yes, it's been a massive expansion of the genre.  Mark Jacobs appears to have been right and I was wrong; a "good" game can still grow the market substantially.  However, I would note that cannibalizing 20% of existing subscribers is pretty significant, even if it is far less than I expected (I was predicting closer to 50%).  And I just can't imagine this trend continuing.  I suppose DDO has the potential to draw in lots of RPGers who don't do MMOGs yet, but are there really that many people out there willing to play, say, MEO or Tabula Rasa who *aren't* already playing World of Warcraft, if nothing else?

Bruce

Sorry - "DDO"?

Chairman, Non-Partisan Anti-Elven League

Dungeons and Dragons Online

Schild crying because WoW shrunk his e-penis is not newsworthy.

SIGGED!

That's usually what I shout after my turn being on top.  Pwnd just sounds too l337.  If the phone rings I generally yell, "Diverged!"

The company started developing World of Warcraft in 1999, and two years later Blizzard still employed fewer than 200 people.

1999?   Wasn't that the year EQ1 was released (Spring) and AC1 was released (November)?

I wonder if that date is correct, unless 'started developing' means, 'we had a guy start looking at this MMORPG thing'.

However, upon closer examination it is revealed that RuneScape also grew by some 60,000 subscribers during that same period.

If you're gonna drop $30M on a game's production, you gotta aim higher than the competition. You've gotta get at least two baby steps ahead to really outpace the rest of the market. The MMOG industry is cutthroat and full of vermin that will stop at nothing to win. Blizzard should have noticed that and taken that extra step.

blah wow sucks gw mechajesus blah

Note that WoW sold ~380 million copies its opening weekend in Europe.

380,000, right? If it sold 380Million I'll eat the cock of a monkey on live television.

Keep calling it hate. I call it reality. Blizzard aimed low. They aimed at EQ2 and the rest of the EQ1 clones. They've won and Smedley admitted it, thus adding more validity to my claims. Take a look at the numbers - while one of the fastest selling - it will also be, in the long run, the worst selling of Blizzards big 3 franchises (starcraft, warcraft, and diablo).

If you're gonna drop $30M on a game's production, you gotta aim higher than the competition. You've gotta get at least two baby steps ahead to really outpace the rest of the market. The MMOG industry is cutthroat and full of vermin that will stop at nothing to win. Blizzard should have noticed that and taken that extra step.

Of course, it's all moot if they don't get Every Single Server Issue Fixed in the next month or so. Even though most diehard fanbois will eventually give up and just go back to EQ. The Blizzard fanbois will just go back to whatever Blizzard game they were playing, probably until Guild Wars is releasesd. There's no doubt in my mind that GW will be marketed just like a Blizzard game, and I'm sure at some point right before release, they'll make a public stab at Blizzard for using Bittorrent.