Icarus Studios News

World of Warcraft 

When writing about developments in the virtual worlds/MMO industry, there are two subjects that are almost impossible to avoid: World of Warcraft (WoW) and Second Life. They dominate the news about simulated environments, and, thus, it’s very easy to use them as points of reference when discussing other virtual worlds. Since we’re going to be mentioning them, it’s worth an entry to explain why we consider them relevant. This week, we talk about WoW.

World of Warcraft is so successful that it has redefined the meaning of “success” as it applies to online games. Before WoW, very successful American MMOs were lucky to get a few hundred thousand subscribers, and the Korean Lineage MMOs were even more successful by pushing towards a million. Then WoW came along and quickly broke the million subscriber mark, and is even now rising past 10 million active users. This rate is unprecedented, and makes the subscription rates of other games that would previously be considered best sellers look like total failures. The size of WoW’s audience has divided the MMO market into two camps: those trying to make a game that can carve off a significant portion of WoW’s subscribers or otherwise equal its success, and those that consider WoW a statistical aberration and try to make a living in its shadow.

Why is WoW so popular? The common wisdom is that, rather than being an unprecedented innovation, it is instead a careful refinement of two powerful factors. The first factor is that WoW’s development company, Blizzard, already had an excellent reputation and fanbase from years of strategy and action games. WoW was an opportunity to revisit and expand on the popular Warcraft setting, so immediately had a large core audience. The second factor was that WoW was an evolution of a popular MMO style, commonly called a “Diku.” Rather than try dramatic, experimental game concepts, WoW strove to perfect the gameplay of popular virtual worlds from Everquest all the way back to the original DikuMUD from which the style’s name arose. Every aspect of the game was set up to be friendly and accessible to new players while rewarding veterans of older Diku-style games with polished versions of systems that they’d enjoyed in older games.

World of Warcraft at launch was a high-quality MMO with an existing fanbase. Warcraft fans tried the game, enjoyed it, and evangelized it to their peers. The game hit the tipping point so quickly that Blizzard temporarily ceased allowing new users within the months after release in order to increase its server capacity. Rival games did not quite manage the crucial alchemy of fans, quality, and accessibility that catapulted WoW to acquire more subscribers than were previously believed to be interested in virtual worlds. New MMOs may struggle to duplicate that alchemy, or simply make a comfortable living off of the bigger post-WoW MMO market, but World of Warcraft will likely be the dominant MMO for several years to come.

(Continued in Part 2)

-Stephen Cheney, Virtual Worlds Team