Money hat in every Blizzard employee's stocking.

[Furiously]

I AM... in a world... of shit.

Are you quitting on me? Well, are you? Then quit, you slimy fucking walrus-looking piece of shit. Get the fuck off of my obstacle. Get the fuck down off of my obstacle. Now. Move it. I'm going to rip your balls off, so you cannot contaminate the rest of the world. I will motivate you, Private Pyle, if it short-dicks every cannibal on the Congo.

[Lordofchance]

I might have to give WoW another look, but from past experiences I have found the WoW players/Comunity to be worse then the majority of the Counter Strike Community.  Which was the main reason I stopped playing it so fast.

[Nebu]

Ack... the "For the hoard" baby is back!

[Lordofchance]

The who in the what in the where is back?

[Megrim]

Your avatar, caker.

[Lordofchance]

What does my avatar have to do with WoW and the Horde?

[Wolf]

Haven't felt this way since a pal asked on the guild forums what "O RLY?" is a couple of weeks ago

[Lordofchance]

hah never saw that avatar before.  Hrrmmm I guesse I will be needing to find a new one.  There seems to be some fond hate for the horde baby around here.

[schild]

Someone here used that avatar for a long time, that's all. There's no hate. If it hadn't caught on so fast, I'd have used the O RLY owl as an avatar. It cracks me up.



Lol, internet.

[Lordofchance]

I really wish I could get this avatar to work but it stays a still image rather then a moving gif.

[El Gallo]

Mi Tes I think.

[Mi_Tes]

I brought it back out of retirement just for this thread.   

[HRose]

But I still have to see a concrete proof that this isn't just a myth.

You'd have to assume that every player that went to WoW and GW, even just in the U.S. alone, abandoned their existing game entirely to assume the genre hasn't enjoyed growth in 2005.

I didn't say that there wasn't an overall growth. This is already obvious, we have already the proofs.

What we don't know is whether the playerbase of a specific game is increasing or decreasing. Eve seems growing up steadily but it's also an exception. DAoC players went down, EQ players, probably, went down, SWG players went down, CoH's players went down, Shadowbane doesn't seem growing. All the other smaller worlds lost players overall (AC2 closed, AC1 lost quite a bit).

So what I say is that the market *is* increasing, but this doesn't seem to benefit the smaller companies because their space seem shrinking instead of growing bigger.

You cannot just "exist" right now. This worked when the market was static. Now it's moving and crushing those who cannot offer something worthwhile.

[Margalis]

Welcome to "what inevitably happens in every industry."

[Azazel]

MMOGs meanwhile are still mostly planned-purchase, as in, someone hears about it goes to the store (or Amazon, or eBay, or wherever) to buy it. The genre itself is still hardcore enough by requiring a credit card just to start and a dedicated internet connection to play. This is long been my reason for not linking MMOGs to holiday sales. All the growth that successful games have enjoyed over the years has been through incremental account establishment over that year. There's occasional spikes, specifically at launch, but (and again, unlike CoH), MMOGs are games people purposely go get.

I think WoW gets around some of this to a decent extent with the Gamecards. I know other titles have had the cards in the past, but they seem to be a huge Retail[/] seller in the places that I shop/browse in (which is only like, 8 stores) but the turnover of gamecards has got to help retailers stay happy on keeping the Retail Box in stock and with good shelf space. Essentially Blizzard is keeping the retailers happy by cutting them right in on the sales of the Razor Blades to go with their new Shaver.

Compare that to EQ1 where the local distributor stopped even releasing the retail boxes in this country several expansions ago, before WoW, because the poor sales due to online downloads made the last one they offered (Gates of Discord) a poor seller that retailers are even now struggling to get out via the bargain bin. Admittedly, that expansion was so bad it almost killed EQ, but the point here is that in Australia at least, EQ1 shelf space = maybe 1 copy of "Everquest + shitloads of semi-recent expansions" vs a whole row of WoW.

Wasn't there an interview, just post-Christmas 2004 that blamed slow overall PC game sales on the success of WoW, that people weren't buying their regular incemental EA shit that year because they were spending all their PC game time playing WoW instead? Anything like that happen this year?

 

[Azazel]

Someone here used that avatar for a long time, that's all. There's no hate. If it hadn't caught on so fast, I'd have used the O RLY owl as an avatar. It cracks me up.

Lol, internet.

Probably because I live on a different continent, maybe because I'm old and crusty. But what in the blue fuck is this whole "O RLY" and Owl thing about?

And yes, I noticed that the new Goblin Auctioneer in Booty Bay is called "Auctioneer O'Reilly"

[Merusk]

Wasn't there an interview, just post-Christmas 2004 that blamed slow overall PC game sales on the success of WoW, that people weren't buying their regular incemental EA shit that year because they were spending all their PC game time playing WoW instead? Anything like that happen this year?

Yes, but this time they didn't talk about slow PC sales, and blamed slow Console sales on Microsoft not supplying enough X-boxes.

[HaemishM]

What we don't know is whether the playerbase of a specific game is increasing or decreasing. Eve seems growing up steadily but it's also an exception. DAoC players went down, EQ players, probably, went down, SWG players went down, CoH's players went down, Shadowbane doesn't seem growing. All the other smaller worlds lost players overall (AC2 closed, AC1 lost quite a bit).

Actually, we don't know any of that because NO ONE RELEASES THESE FUCKING NUMBERS ANYMORE.

Eve and DAoC release numbers, everybody the fuck else shuts up. We have no way of knowing if Shadowbane is growing, or if AC1 lost "quite a bit." We do know AC2 closed down, that's about it. Stop trying to be Bruce.

[Shockeye]

In a recent interview Ashen Temper said Shadowbane is a making a profit. That's all we can go by.

Hey Ubiq, Shadowbane 2 alpha access please.

[Nebu]

I love me some Hoarde baby.

Lordofchance: Good call on Elf.

[MahrinSkel]

No offense to you guys (or myself) but I can personally attest that most Blizzard developers have no idea who I am, or any "Diaspora of Lum". They generally keep to their own forums, and don't usually attend trade shows (when they do, it's very much in packs, surrounded by frenzied prospective employees brandishing resumes). Blizzard is very much the "rock stars" of the gaming community, for good or ill.

I suspect that PR was aimed at industry analysts who continue to quibble over what a "customer" is defined as, especially in Asia. FF11's reports have much the same verbiage.

I think that the source of this was an argument me, HRose, and Sir Bruce were having in the blogosphere back when they hit the 2M mark.  We were trying to decide which definition of "customer" Blizzard was using, and Rob Pardo dropped into the comments for one of my blog posts and said they were only counting active (paying) subscribers and Korean baang players (this was before the China release).

--Dave

[Glazius]

Probably because I live on a different continent, maybe because I'm old and crusty. But what in the blue fuck is this whole "O RLY" and Owl thing about?

4chan is a primarily Japanese image-hosting site with a large English participation element.

There's one subboard devoted entirely to random noise, and instead of bumping threads there to keep them alive people will go O RLY - YA RLY - NO WAI! - YAH WAI - SRSLY? - SRSLY, et cetera.

To discourage constructive content on the random-noise board, the moderator will filter random normal words to be other words.

Some time ago, "reply" was filtered to "owl".

The rest is history.

--GF

[HaemishM]

There's one subboard devoted entirely to random noise, and instead of bumping threads there to keep them alive people will go O RLY - YA RLY - NO WAI! - YAH WAI - SRSLY? - SRSLY, et cetera.

Once again, the Internet reaches new heights in gay.

[Righ]

Nothing new, its just got a bigger audience these days. Getting stoned and posting inane comments, word associations, puns, repetitions  and absurdities has been around for as long as electronic communication has existed. Even before BBSes were common, folks were doing it with email lists. Er, or so I hear.

[El Gallo]

And 5.5 million, breaking 1M in Europe.  http://www.blizzard.co.uk/press/060119.shtml

They added more customers than EQ had at its height in one month, over a year after release.  Even the money hats have money hats.  Sadly, they are covering heads at Vivendi.

[Jobu]

Awhile ago Slashdot had an "Ask the Developers of WoW" questions thing going. I posted a question, but it didn't make it. But I asked how their company is dealing with this huge amount of cash and profit coming into them. I'm really curious if it's affected the company culture at all, if it's been shared with all the people who worked on the game. With the game still growing so much, it just fuels my curiosity. I mean, how could suddenly having $50 million dollars plus a month not screw with your organization. Maybe Vivendi sucks it all up for hookers and blow. Or... ummm, les hookérs et champagne? or whatever passes for corporate excess in France (summer picnic in Amsterdam!!).

[Shockeye]

Maybe Vivendi sucks it all up for hookers and blow.

I seem to remember reading something about Vivendi only doing well because of WoW, so I assume all of WoW's money is being used to offset all the failures or disappointments in other areas of Vivendi.

[HaemishM]

if it's been shared with all the people who worked on the game.

Magic Eight Ball says:

Not a chance in fucking hell.

[Yegolev]

It is being funneled into those shitty Universal theme parks in a vain effort to compete with Disney.

[Viin]

Yah where have you been?

If you work in Tech and you end up making your company 10million that year, you'd just be lucky to have your job at the end of that same year. If you are still there come performance review time, *maybe* a few hundred dollar bonus, but if you get that then you don't get a raise.

[Yegolev]

Viin is right.  For those of you who do not work for global giants, you might be interested to know that while a company might report revenues using thireen digits, the guy who cleans the toilet still makes minimum wage.  Year-end bonuses might roll out to some "important" people, such a line managers, but for hourly people it's a crap shoot.

[shiznitz]

I might get egged, but put me in the camp that wonders why hourly workers should get profit-sharing by default? Bonuses should go to decision makers. These are the people that make or break a company. The people that do the guts of the work on a successful  project now have that project on their resume and can use that experience to get a higher level position somewhere else or get promoted internally. This is called "working your way up." While it is not a pure meritocracy due to politics and personal relationship influences, it works pretty well. A system that rewards everyone of a certain level equally will encourage mediocrity at that level.

[Hoax]

Umm it wasn't much of a fucking choice whether Blizzard should make a game...

Hrm should we have the most adored game company evar(!!!) make another game?  Even better a game designed to be played by a million people+ and that involves subscriptions?  Gee I dunno, instead lets just announce that DiabloIII will come out in 17 years.

Everyone who had anything to do with making WoW "the golden turd" should be given some cash.  From the guy who churned out art assets to the guy who wrote the quests -some of them were funny.  Hell the person who came up with green/blue/purple/orange/red(?) for items deserves a big bonus too.

There was no genius at the helm of WoW, hrm lets make a game like EQ1 but with less suck and more blizzard.  Fucking brilliant!

[HaemishM]

I might get egged, but put me in the camp that wonders why hourly workers should get profit-sharing by default?

Without ditch diggers, decision makers decisions don't turn into actions. It's a symbiosis.

I'm not going to say everyone should be rewarded equally, but they goddamn sure ought to get some bonus compensation for such a huge hit.

[schild]

Hell the person who came up with green/blue/purple/orange/red(?) for items deserves a big bonus too.

That would be the people at Flagship Studios and Arena.net. It might be hard to give them a bonus....