Jamie Fristrom, whose been known to pontificate himself from time to time (when his blog is up and running, that is), had this to say:

But didn’t WoW itself fight fire with fire by taking the best features of the best MMO’s and combining them?

An excellent question. The copout answer is that, inside the games industry, Blizzard is a law onto themselves. But I’m not satisfied with that, of course. The books I’m distilling this line of philosophy from (Positioning and the 22 Immutable Laws of Branding by the esteemed Al Reis) are full of examples about how unbeatable titans like Coca-Cola, Xerox and Volkswagen screw up because they extended into new territory with a me-too product. So let’s dig further.

The second tempting quick-and-easy answer is that WoW is simply a better game. But that doesn’t really work either. As human beings, we are so accustomed to advertisers saying a product is better that we no longer hear it. We just assume that everyone trying to shill us a product is going to try to convince us it’s better. And besides, how is it better? UO has a more fascinating world model. EQ2 has a more advanced graphics engine. Shadowbane has better PVP. The original EQ has an order of magnitude more content. People might come to the conclusion that something is better, but they need a reason first.

What WoW did do, though, is look at the marketplace. What they saw were games that were all relatively hardcore – hardcore, squirrelly interfaces, high system requirements, insane play pattern requirements, buggy code. They saw a way to truly differentiate themselves from the market – and in particular, the market leader, Everquest.

If you were to sum up WoW’s position, it would be ‘an MMO for the rest of us’. Or ‘an MMO that Mostly Works”. Or ‘a Casual, Polished MMO’. They put a high premium on simplicity – only 9 classes, only 8 races. Binary good vs evil conflict. Less painful advancement, with quests that lead you through the game by the nose. They also put a high premium on a smooth and polished interface, and colorful graphics that run on lower-end cards.

In fact, the decisions that the make that run contrary to this stick out like a sore thumb. For example, WoW’s BitTorrent patch solution is a hardcore patch solution that requires some users to reconfiguring their router to really work at a reasonable speed – what the hell is it doing in this game?

Some would see this as fighting fire with fire, but it’s not. WoW consciously made an effort to do what EQ didn’t do. And it turns out that that’s what the market really wanted – an ‘easy to play’ MMO. Fighting fire with water.

WoW isn’t the first people that tried to do this, of course. E&B had insanely in-depth tutorials. SWG made casual gamers a priority. Shadowbane has a much inflated levelling speed – faster by far than WoW in fact. But WoW made it their PRIMARY point of difference from the competition. And beyond that, people associate the name of Blizzard with a high level of polish. It was easy for them to make the sale that they would pull this off. Whose more likely to give you a game that’s polished and easy to play: Sony Online, makers of EQ, or Blizzard, makers of Starcraft? Did we really need WoW and EQ2 to come out to tell us the answer to that? Would you even believe me if I tried to tell you otherwise?

Here’s the catch: is WoW really that much more casual or simple to play? Really? Turns out, it doesn’t matter that much. Are Volvos really that much safer than other cars? Have you checked the stats lately? Me neither, but in everyone’s head, they’re going to be thought of as the ’safety car’. And WoW is going to be thought of as the ‘Casual, Polished MMO’.

It should also be noted that their recent login problems and downtime woes directly contradict their ‘It’s Casual, It’s Polished, it Just Plain Works’ market position. As such, they should be even more freaked out by those issues than your average MMO. After all, what would the ‘Volvo’ brand mean if Volvos started to explode?