11 Innovation Lessons From the Creators of World of Warcraft

Ant writes "Colin Stewart's OC Register Inside Innovation blog has up a post discussing Blizzard Entertainment's success in the games industry. According to the site, Blizzard has learned eleven lessons on innovation that can help almost any business. The industry leader used these innovation methods not only to create the world's most popular massively multiplayer online game, World of Warcraft, but also to keep the game fresh and challenging for more than 10 million players. Because many of those customers pay $15 a month to continue playing, Blizzard's ongoing creative achievement is worth more than $1 billion a year in revenues, not counting the multi-millions it tallies from its other games."

Re:Congratulations on inventing MMOs

[Sanguis Mortuum]

Exactly what I was thinking when I read this. Everything WoW does was done before, WoW just happened to do it better and marketed it in a way that appealed to more people...

Supermodel at Fat camp

[Foo2rama]

Sorry but Blizz is a supermodel at fat camp when it comes to talking about things.

First they do not listen to critics, If it gets placed on the test realm it WILL go live.

Not that much fun to work there, most people that have worked there would not go back, and rather work for other firms.

They are pretty much the only gaming company that is their own publisher, they do not have to answer to the money like everyone else does. Who else can postpone a launch until after the holiday season?

Re:Congratulations on inventing MMOs

[Wilson_6500]

Don't milk the cash cow until its teats fall off: Blizzard's managed to get what, one expansion out so far? SOE has put out how many for EQ2 that was released at the same time? Sure, your balance sheet looks better if you can say, "I'm going to get 200% revenue from my begrudging players this year." It actually looks even better if you say, "I'll stick with 110% revenue from 2000% of the number of happier players."

My MMO playing friends would from time to time claim that the continuing fees of MMOs were there at least in part to ensure that there would be continuing updates and new content, aside from server maintenance costs. Naturally, I'd look at it as a slap in the face if, having that attitude, a company asked me to pay an additional charge for that content in the form of an expansion pack.

Something I've always wanted to see would be a serious, impartial, disinterested observer sitting down and going through a point-by-point comparison of WoW, Guild Wars, and Diablo II, and maybe throw in FFXI or some one of the other popular MMOs, just to see what is objectively different between them. It would be interesting to see in light of all the noise of fans crying that such-and-such is an MMO, is worth the money, etc. Of course, that latter point is nearly entirely subjective. Most of what people claim to get out of modern MMOs I was able to get out of games like Halflife--and that without paying every month for it.

Not the best example

[propanol]

Blizzard's not exactly the best example when looking for innovation. Sure, they've made some solid games, but all of the ones I'm familiar with (that is, most of the major ones save WoW as I don't do multiplayer-only) were awfully derivative; the RTS stuff from Dune 2/C&C, Diablo from Rogue/Nethack etc.

Re:Totally Crapified Article about Egomaniacs

[VGPowerlord]

You may think this list is silly, but certain other MMO makers haven't grasped them.

Sony Online Entertainment, in particular, tends to piss off its userbase on a regular basis. They even totally changed (read: trashed) one of their properties [starwarsgalaxies.com] with about two weeks notice a few years ago.

Re:Platitudes

[Swampash]

They basically took the best parts of Evercrack, UO, and D20 systems and made a pretty game out of it. End of article.

Way to miss the point, genius. The article wasn't about WoW, it was about Blizzard's internal policies and processes.

The REAL 11 lessons of WoW

[Anonymous Coward]

As others have said, the list in this article is fluffy and useless.

However, I've been following the design of MMORPGs over the past decade, so I will offer a list of things that Blizzard *actually* did well, that together (combined with the strength of their pre-existing brand) are what I believe are responsible for WoW's overwhelming success.

1. Polish, Polish, Polish! -- WoW is probably the most polished MMORPG ever to be released. It makes a huge difference.
2. Smooth Newbie Experience -- this is critical, making it easy for casuals and spouses to get started (or "hooked")
3. Fun, Fun, Fun! -- if it's not Fun, get rid of it. Blizzard ruthlessly excised most of the un-fun stuff from the standard MMORPG design.
4. Don't Ship Until its Done -- several MMORPG disaster launches have shown that you really must wait until its ready
5. Low System Requirements -- 95% of the PCs in peoples livingrooms can run WoW, compared to like 25% for most games. This is no accident.
6. Reward Quests More Than Grind -- WoW was the first MMORPG where questing was the most efficient way to level for most players. This kept them moving around and doing different things, which is way less boring than 30 hours of grinding foozles. This idea is also behind the daily quests, for example.
7. Something For Everybody -- crafting, raiding, casual content, battlegrounds, PvP servers, lots and lots of quests, epic mounts... there is stuff in WoW that appeals to each of the Bartle playertypes.
8. Customizable UI Makes Players Happy -- even Everquest could be customized somewhat, but WoW made it possible to make powerful and useful custom UIs, and made it easy for other players to then use them. There are now a lot of players who will not want to play some new MMORPG unless it has a customizable UI.
9. Infrastructure Is Important & Hard -- they knew this from battle.net too. Again, they underestimated some things--like bandwidth--in the first year, but it eventually got sorted out.
10. Manage Community Expectations/Customer Service is Important & Hard -- they already knew this from battle.net, of course. The WoW forums are a cesspool, but that is unavoidable for a game of that size. In all other respects they've done a pretty good job.
11. Keep Cheaters, Botters and Farmers Out -- they watched Diablo I get absolutely destroyed by cheaters, and Diablo II had its share of setbacks here. Currently they can't stop Glider, but at least they're trying.

Re:Lesson #12

[harry666t]

> Oh, you people crack me the fuck up. "WoW is addictive!"
> No. Cocaine is addictive; it causes [blah blah blah]

BS.

You can get addicted to almost ANYTHING, including a computer, a person, a sound, an emotion... Or, to be specific, to ANY emotion that is associated with doing something, seeing something, thinking of something... See, emotions are also chemicals. Some chemicals get people addicted faster, others - slower.

It's sad how one can get addicted to anger, or to a feeling that he/she's a victim, but I've seen such people. Believe me or not, but you CAN get addicted to a game.

Re:The REAL 11 lessons of WoW

[Anonymous Coward]

"Low System Requirements" - This is perhaps one of the more important and often overlooked reasons for most of Blizzard's popularity in general. The average consumer buys and plays things based on two factors: how the bloody box looks, and if it runs on his or her system. WoW looks like an interesting game and works on many people's computers. Blizzard is making the fallacy of assuming that their success has to do with something they did. It's a common mistake: people producing a product assume that they have somehow managed to predict the market when they may have simply made something that happened to be what people wanted. Sometimes, Occam's Razor prevails: the simplest solution is the correct one. Sometimes, all the things that various people opine about being wonderful are less important than the factors that actually determine success. Sometimes people just like the box and the fact that it runs on their system. I hardly think the average player scrutinizes Blizzard's games from an analytical perspective. And when put to no test at all, everything shines. The secret may be perhaps in aiming low and talking big - design a game for the masses and then conclude that your success wasn't inevitable, it was instead due to some design processes you've got that the other guy hasn't.

Is ten million subscribers a meaningful number for some reason, by the way? Why don't we expect the hallmark of a good game to be 20 million? Why do we expect that popularity has something to do with...

I'm sorry, I forgot this was about their success, not putting out a quality product. I'm still getting accustomed to how far divorced those concepts are becoming with every passing day.

Re:WoW is NOT perfect. What Blizzard did NOT learn

[Gunuku]

Permadeath would be a horrible thing to have in WoW since death can't be avoided if you want to instance or PVP. Latency spikes or the world server going down would also randomly kill you even if you were careful as possible. The Bind-on-Pickup is to ensure that there is always a reason for people to enter dungeons and raid and try to add a sense of 'worth' to powerful epics - though it is easier to gear a character now than ever before which isn't a bad thing.