The Daily Grind: Is it luck?

Because getting millions of people who had never even PLAYED a video game before to fork over $15 a month and $50 each for 3 retail boxes was all of matter of right time, right place. How lucky of them. *eyeroll*

It's successful because they made it simple enough to be accessible to non-gamers and deep enough to hold the hardcore player's interest. It's well-designed and has the polish that Blizzard games are known for.

If you think any other MMO out there would have the same type of success "had it just been released at the right time/before WoW," you're either lying or you're stupid.

Sidenote: Zero Punctuation's reviews are funny and worth watching, but he's more of a comedian than game reviewer. EVE and WoW have little or nothing in common and anyone who invests enough time in the game will find that out--sandbox vs. themepark, etc. He's funny, though.

I really don’t accept this notion that World of Warcraft’s success is something that can never be repeated. WoW did not start at 11 million players, nor did it swell to that size over night. As other people have mentioned WoW filled a space previously missing in the MMO market by providing accessibility and depth in a quality product, but it also had something else that no other MMO has managed to repeat since: brilliant word of mouth AFTER the launch.

It’s easy enough to ridicule this comment now when WoW has almost become a byword for Walmart or Tesco and is often used as a derogatory term amongst MMO gamers (we all know the phrase: go back to WoW!) but in the initial period after it’s release the word of mouth was almost universally positive and it was everywhere. Chances were you knew someone playing who was raving about it and considering that your friends play a huge part in what MMO’s you purchase this was a huge factor.

Most recent MMO’s spew forth incredible hyperbole pre-launch and while this sure ruffles people’s feathers (look at the almost militant attitudes regarding WAR and Darkfall pre-launch, and now KoToR) the only way to ensure another major success is to move those attitudes from “this will be” to “this is” a great thing and send people running out to tell their friends about what they’re playing.

Telling people that your product is the “next big thing” ultimately gets you nowhere with MMO’s (it works to a greater degree with console games because it’s a one off purchase) as people need to want to renew subscriptions - just look at what happened to WAR. It’s the customer base that has to spread the good word and once that happens no amount of marketing or cheap offers upon purchase can compare to the influence of a friend turning to you and saying, with breathless enthusiasm: “You NEED to see what I’m PLAYING.”

Well, it wasn't luck. But it was a conjugation of so many factors that it may look like luck.
There were initial factors. The ones that established WoW as a great game:
1 - Blizzard reputation of making great (nearly perfect) games.
2 - The facility to get in the game (it truly was casual friendly)
3 - A huge loyal Blizzard/Warcraft fanbase.

I got in the game because it was a Blizzard game, and a Warcraft game.
Afterwards, Blizzard got great reviews and by word of mouth (due to the quality of the game excluding the initial 3 months) it achieved critical mass.

However, the biggest factor for WoW's sucess is China!
And likely the reason why no other MMO will ever repeat WoW numbers. Just look at the restrictions that the Chinese government is imposing on foreign MMOs.
However, i believe that there is a couple of MMOs with the potential to reach a playerbase in the millions.
The most likely for me is SW:TOR MMO. Bioware is a company that competes with Blizzard in quality level, Star Wars is the most recognizable IP in the world (maybe LoTR competes with it). So maybe they will manage to make a great MMO that will subs in the millions.

Luck is a part of it because luck is a portion of everything, all the time. If you think otherwise, you’re living a lie because you probably think everything in your life is under your control. So, I assume every person has everything they want simply because they can make it so. Nope. So to be fair, it’s a trick question. We have to take that general question off-line and retool it. Let me play the semantic game and ask if luck was a SIGNIFICANT part of the WoW puzzle for success? Probably not. Yes, luck played a roll but Blizzard did all the right things, especially at the time. Over time luck plays even less of a roll and the work that went into the game, the cultural climate (hmmm, luck?), as well as the other MMOs on the market dictate this more. Blizzard knows what they’re doing and if they are being truthful, predicted some time ago, that their numbers would top out at 10 million (or was it 12?).

I have not played WoW in years but it is a great game. Blizzard is a strong company. They turn out great game after fantastic game. In the history books of gaming and online media entertainment this will be a punctuated point of the continuum that marks a qualitative change in the industry. This question will be bantered around for ages. If they write that chapter correctly, they will acknowledge the “lucky” variables and move on to the more interesting stuff.

Of course it has NOTHING to do with luck.

It has everything to do with extremely good game play and polish.

Above someone said he didn't understand it because War was by far the better game (sic)/

It is obvious some people indeed have a very bad taste when they like a hampered clunky gameplay vs. a perfectly oiled games machine like WOW.

The fact that it remains on top now is that the others are sooooo much worse.

And the longer it takes to topple it, the longer it has its firm grip on fantasy mmorpg's.

Be sure that about 25% of those 11.5 million will stay with it "till the end" and that could be a very looooong time if viewing the fact that UO and EQ are STILL being played after 10 year.

Luck as nothing to do with it. Bad competition, yes.

Forget it.

LOTRO turns around 200 K subs. Compare it with the millions of Tolkien fans. Not even peanuts.

SW IP has nothing to do with launching a computer game. There are and were HUNDREDS of SW computer games.

The Lore has been milked out of a 20 year old fat ugly cow and it is useless to an MMORPG because it doesn't work that way.

You know any multi million PC blockbusters on very well known non gaming IP's? Nah.

And the risk of SW is that if will be set far too much in the Fantasy setting. People might try a complete other theme, but SW is too fantasy to pull away massively Wow players from their created fantasy characters.

MMORPG (good ones !) are VERY conservative when it come to players intrests.

In my opinion Bioware should flesh out the Mass Effect universe with a sequel and then with a Strategy game a la "Sins of a Solar Empire" and then launch an MMO.

There's a reason Elvis became #1 rockstar of the last century. It was pure luck as Jerry Lee Lewis, another great artist of that time, ran into trouble when people learned that he'd married his very young teen cousine.

Combine this luck with his, for his time, unique style and you'll have a winner.

Elvis=WoW, regardless of what you may think of them both.

Agree? Disagree?

Blizzard had advantages that nobody else had, and that maybe nobody else ever will have again. But neither luck, nor timing, was one of them. Here's what Blizzard had going for them that no other MMO company has had, andy maybe no other company will have:

OPTIMIZATION SKILL: I swear to Prime, every day I see more evidence that Blizzard is hiring every single computer scientist (as opposed to computer programmers, IT graduates, certified game developers, or other code monkeys) who's willing to enter the gaming industry. Blizzard, and it seems to me ONLY Blizzard, bothers to optimize their games for performance; everybody else expects you to run out and buy a thousand dollars a year worth of new hardware every one to two years for the privilege of playing an MMO. Almost no MMO yet (except World of Warcraft) has run as smoothly as we all remember Diablo II running. Now go back and look at the hardware requirements for Diablo II. Your cell phone has a faster processor and more RAM. Why can Blizzard do this, and nobody else can? Because Blizzard has the only people left in the entire industry who know how to read the results of an optimization benchmark pass. Nobody else will pay what they cost. Which leads to the second advantage Blizzard has that nobody else has, or maybe ever will have:

DEEP POCKETS: World of Warcraft took almost three times as long to develop as they had budgeted, cost more than twice as much as they had budgeted, and shipped with almost none of the post-level-30 content complete. The WoW development and launch processes were disastrous. Blizzard, and only Blizzard, had the huge income stream *and the willingness to spend it* necessary to keep the game in development until it was as close to both finished and optimized as it was, and to keep from having to do the one thing that kills more MMOs than any other, namely laying off all the actual computer programmers.

Sony has figured some of this out. They, and it seems like only they, have noticed that only one MMO in the entire industry runs at anything like usuable, anything like tolerable, graphics settings on a 5 or 6 year old computer with a five or six year old graphics card, and, coincidentally, it's the only MMO making real money. That's why they've announced that Free Realms will run at full graphics settings on any computer shipped since 2001, and why they're using the good old fashioned Quake 3 engine as the base for the client for The Agency. And Sony, the corporation, has deep enough pockets to keep the programmers on staff indefinitely. But Sony has never yet shown Blizzard's legendary skill at optimization, and with every MMO launch they've been involved in so far they've shown no patience for long-term expenditures once the game launched. So they're probably not going to make it as big as WoW, either.

And, frankly, nobody else in the industry seems to understand even as much about why WoW succeeded as Sony does, or else they wouldn't be spending so much money on games that require Crysis-Plus rigs to run and budgeting their game development around the "inevitability" of cutting programming staff 1 to 4 months after release.

The one and only reason why wow has 11 million (especially after the fail of the latest expac) is summable in one simple sentence.

There is nothing out there that doesnt suck but wow, the current 11 mil is there as there are no alternatives.

Thats about it.