Steve Danuser has an excellent post, discussing why Blizzard succeeded with WoW. His conclusion, that it all comes down to Blizzard’s ability to execute, is in my opinion dead on. Ask any venture capitalist: ideas are cheap. Success comes down to the ability to actually put those ideas into action. Surprisingly, few game companies have that. Most end up attempting to do to much, and execute too little of it well.
Brian has taken umbrage at this statement, bizarrely (and in my opinion, very mistakenly). His pathway to Blizzard’s success is simple. Spend a shitload of money. Have a huge name. Have a huge fanbase. Ship when ‘it’s done’. Easy as pie. And all a factor in their success.
The problem, of course, is that it’s only part of the story, and in my opinion, it’s a small part. Consider the Sims Online, SWG, FFXI, and even to a lesser extent EQ2. All of them spent a shitload of money. All of them had huge names. All of them had huge fanbases. None of them reached WoW’s level of success (although depending on whose numbers you believe, FFXI may have gotten into the same league). Despite what Brian later says here, WoW’s circumstances aren’t particularly unique. Blizzard just took advantage of them better.
The one thing that WoW did that the others didn’t do, according to Brian’s list, is to ship when its done. And while shipping a well-polished, bug-free product is something I will always evangelize, it’s certainly not the only answer here. Even if the four products I had listed had shipped completely bug-free and stable, their growth would have been capped by some very fundamental game design decisions which limited their success. Are you trying to tell me that TSO just needed a bit more time to turn their pizza-making core gameplay into a 10M subscriber game? Don’t be silly.
The problem I have with this line of reasoning in general is that it seems to fundamentally disregard the importance of good design decisions. I’m always surprised when people are unwilling to acknowledge that World of Warcraft is fundamentally an extremely good and exceptionally well-designed game. If you disregard this, you are not only disregarding business reality which favors and mandates good design, you are also showing a severe disconnect with the core market. And the worst thing that a designer can do is to accumulate disdain for the player, and what the player values and finds fun.
If you disregard this, you’re just making excuses. “We can’t compete because we’re not Blizzard!” is nothing more than a cry for the whambulance. Take a look at the next big things: Kart Rider. Habbo Hotel. Club Penguin. Maple Story. All were made for peanuts. All had no name recognition. All had no existing fanbase. Most were shipped with a very limited amount of content. All of them enjoyed very strong success anyway – some claim that their numbers kick the shit out of WoW, and while that conclusion can be debated, they are definitely matching (and usually obliterating) the other four games I named.
And none of those four games are EQ/WoW clones.
To me, the answer is simple: vision, design, and execution. Figure out what your game is really about, focus on a thoughtful, well-rounded design supporting that vision, prune out features that don’t do so, and be sure that, no matter what, your execution ensures that you deliver on that vision better than your competitors.
Does money help? Do Blizzard, EA and Microsoft all have an advantage? Sure. But in terms of spending massive wads of cash and trading on name recognition for blockbuster success – WoW is the anomaly, not the norm.
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