These Statement:
The massively multiplayer online role play game,World of Warcraft,now is in the lead of world online game market.There are some reasons you already knew,but there are some factors you didn’t notice.Let’s search for these invisible factors.
Outline:
Ⅰ.Qusetion was raised in a reaport,along with some curiosities.
A .There are more than two million players in the west and about five million in china, who are willing to pay for playing this game.
Ⅱ. Invisible factors of the success.
A. Go-it-alone mode of gameplay.
B. Easier control and “fun factors”.
C. Different options offers to players.
D. Long-year experience in online service.
E. Blizzard’s reputation and its’ good concept of creating a game.
Ⅲ. Conclusion
A new report from analyst group DFC Intelligence's David Cole looks at the unique path that gave rise to Blizzard's groundbreakingly-populated massively muitiplayer online role-play game (MMORPG) World of Warcraft, including the myths behind its international impact, and the forecast for competitors hoping to break off a chunk of Blizzard's success.
The report follows below:
'With the interactive entertainment world’s attention about to turn to the new console systems, we thought this month we’d instead take a look at one of the most successful PC game products ever, World of Warcraft (WoW). WoW is of course, a `subscription-based massively multiplayer online role-play game (MMORPG). What makes the product unique is not necessarily the number of users, but the number of users that are willing to pay up to $15 a month to play the game. The game has raised the bar for MMORPG products, particularly in terms of revenue generation. However, there are some fundamental misconceptions about the game that are particularly problematic. In the end, it is a great game that has perhaps recalibrated investor expectations for MMORPG products beyond what makes sense. There is a lot of supposedly new talk about the “World of Warcraft model”. To longtime industry observers, this talk is more retro (or even tired) than it is revolutionary. Still, WoW developer Blizzard Entertainment obviously did something right and it only seems natural to ask what it was. It is only after understanding how Blizzard made WoW a success that companies can ask such questions as: is that success duplicable and if so is our particular company in a position to duplicate that success?
What we know for sure is that World of Warcraft has had one million North American subscribers and one million European subscribers for a total of over two million Western subscribers, not including five million chinese subscribers. This, in and of itself, is an astounding feat. No game had been able to top 750,000 subscribers in those territories, let alone one million or two million. It is important, however, to remember that in terms of revenue generation, World of Warcraft is just one star among the many high-flying video games with millions of unit sales.
Unlike some games which force players to cooperate, WoW facilitates the go-it-alone mode of gameplay. A good deal of the action in World of Warcraft does not occur within the massively multiplayer setting where there are hundreds to thousands of people. Many quests allow the player to enter into an “instance” which is a sort of parallel universe in which the player and whatever group they are part of leave the main gameworld and enter a “court” of their own. Instancing, as it is known, is a controversial practice among the hard-core MMORPG crowd because it breaks the illusion of the game as one seamless “virtual world”.
On the other hand, it allows players greater control of their individual experience and reduces server overhead and lag. The practice also allowed Blizzard to provide direction for player versus player (PvP) gameplay. The normal MMORPG focuses primarily on player versus environment (PvE) experience where a user goes on a “quest” and focuses on fighting computer generated monsters and building their character level. With PvP players fight each other. For WoW, Blizzard introduced “Battlegrounds” about 6 months after the original game release. These are essentially minigames that are almost like the “Deathmatches” from first person shooter (FPS) type games. In the first Battlegrounds release, there were an epic game with up to 40 players and a “Capture-the-Flag” 20 player match. The battles also provided a much needed boost to the factional strife that World of Warcraft fosters between the game universe’s races, the Alliance and the Horde.
Both the PvE and PvP instanced content has proven incredibly popular even as it has led to derisive commentary from MMORPG purists. It appears to us that instanced content lets Blizzard formalize some of the way users play MMOG. For years, different play styles led to social problems among players who were following different implicit rules. Also, many users are not attracted to a purely open-ended game. Some players want clear winners and losers as in an FPS or sports game. Now, people who like PvP battles can engage in those in their own arena while PvE players can hang out in the auction house. This has enabled World of Warcraft to draw players who would normally be classified as moderate gamers, the types who play Counter-Strike, Call of Duty, or Battlefield.
Instancing and support for solo players, however, are not limited to World of Warcraft. Many other games provide the same types of play to various degrees. A great deal of WoW’s success can probably be attributed to the elusive “fun” factor. So is it simply about building another product that consumers find to be fun? Developing an online game with the quality of WoW is probably within the reach of several companies, assuming they have around $25 to $50 million to invest in creating a well-designed fun game. However, having a high-quality, fun product was only one part of WoW’s unprecedented success. There are several other key factors that will be much harder to duplicate. Blizzard’s global execution was based on years of experience and backed with very strong brand recognition. The foundation for WoW’s success was started years before actual product development commenced.
World of Warcraft is the first truly global online game. At least as impressive as the game’s success in China is its more than 1 million customers in Europe. No other MMORPG has even claimed 100,000 European subscribers.
Blizzard was able to launch a product on a global basis because they had years of experience with releasing and operating online games around the world.Blizzard’s decade long experience with its free Battle.net online game service was clearly a major factor in WoW’s success. Most online game developers have had mere thousands or at best tens of thousands of users. Blizzard was used to dealing with hundreds of thousands of users on a daily basis. This type of large-scale operations experience cannot be underestimated. WoW did not come out of nowhere and was the result of years of experience. This type of experience is probably impossible to duplicate.
Finally of course there is Blizzard’s reputation and the brand strength of Warcraft. Blizzard’s franchises like Warcraft, StarCraft and Diablo were among the most popular PC games of all time. Blizzard is definitely a company well-known for quality of product not quantity. They are a company with a reputation for taking the time to get things right. For example, it took over six years between the release of Warcraft II and Warcraft III. Furthermore, Blizzard, at the time of WoW’s release, was probably the most respected online gaming company in the world. Through years of supporting online games at Battle.net with a high level of service, the company was known as responsive to player desires and just plain good at running online games. Unlike many game company brands, Blizzard had proven its international appeal with massive popularity of StarCraft in Asia, particularly outside Japan. Blizzard even had some indirect benefit from piracy. Warcraft games were some of the most popular pirated games in China and other parts of Asia and this lead to strong brand recognition.
After knowing this,you’ll find how did WoW become the most populor game in the world.
博文
