Blizzard's Warcraft Booty

CNN's Game Over column tackles the big daddy of MMOGs this week, with a column on World of Warcraft's financial success. From the article: "By 11pm on Nov. 22, there were over 4,000 gamers queued up to be among the first to get a copy of 'WoW' (as it has become known). The problem was: there were only 2,500 copies of the game in the store, and no one had thought to hire security for the event. By raiding other nearby locations, the retailer was able to meet demand. And the Blizzard crew knew they had a hit on their hands, one unlike anything they had created before."

Not unlike...

[KDan]

Blizzard have had a fair number of hits, excellent games which were very well made and sold many copies. Warcraft 2 was a major hit. Diablo 2 is *still* selling copies. Stacraft - don't get me started. Warcraft 3 itself is hardly a failure. I'd say they're pretty used to publishing successful games. I doubt that WoW's success came as a shock to them.

Daniel

Re:Cash CoW indeed

[MattW]

Um. How many copies do you think blizzard expected to sell? Do you think that their financial plans for the game were contingent on it being the most successful MMO ever? Not likely.

WoW has been a runaway hit, on a level that I doubt even the most pie-in-the-sky dreamer did not imagine. I'm not a fan; I played it for a couple months, got bored by what felt like repetitive and uninspired play, and quit. But there is no question that WoW is the breakaway hit of recent memory.

Not only is it surely profitable (the development cost was $72M; large, but not really when you think of 4M people buying a box and paying a monthly fee), it is, as the article said, a cash cow. This is the "wildest dreams" scenario.

I was at the launch

[PhosterPharms]

And it was insane. I was one of the first people in the door because one of my rugby teammates had set up camp near the front of the line. When three more of us showed up to join him no one really said anything. There were seriously a ton of people though. The line wrapped all the way around the store and out into the parking lot twice, and then snaked down the road into a residential area. The doors opened at midnight, and I heard some people didn't get in until four or five in the morning.

The whole thing was more than worth it though. I have a Collector's Edition box signed by the whole dev team, and the night was a lot of fun in and of itself talking to people about what servers they were going to be on and what classes they were going to play and whatnot. There was also a lot of chat about whether or not they were going to run out of games (which they did), and there was even a Tauren walking around trying to get people to make the best warcry.

If you want to see some pics from the launch, check out Blizzard's report on the launch here. [worldofwarcraft.com]

Re:A better solution

[yasth]

They didn't want to sell every possible copy. With the copies they realeased they had enough trouble meeting demand, physical copies in this case served another purpose, to restrict the number of players (at least initially).

Re:Cash CoW indeed

[Tilmitt]

"At over 4 million players multiplied by 15$ a month, that makes 720$ million a year. Almost a billion dollars."

$720 million is not almost a billion. It's only 72% of a billion. That is no where near "almost" a billion, it is a significant amount less.