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Vivendi Jilts WoW CE Pre-order Customers
Draconix writes "Having pre-ordered the World of Warcraft Collector's Edition over a month in advance, I eagerly checked my email on November 22nd, expecting confirmation of shipment. Instead, I received a notice from Inside Mac Games, explaining that their order for the WoW Collector's Edition would not be filled. It seems, at the last minute, Vivendi Universal decided to ship a limited number of copies, and only to major players, such as Amazon.com. Doubtless, IMG is one of many stores who have had to inform their unsuspecting customers of this development. Of course, it is now too late to obtain it from one of the distributors that did receive it, so thousands of expectant gamers will come up empty-handed--denied what many had ordered months in advance. With Vivendi Universal already at odds with one of their developers, is more trouble on the way?"
There must be an ongoing wager as to who can get the most bad PR for Vivendi. "Hmm... I see your HL2/Steam and raise you a WoW ripoff."
Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master. -Anonymous
This could well be IMG starting to sell pre-order versions without having any gurantee of delivery and now trying to paint Vivendi as the bad guy for their cock up.
I guess I'll find out if the local EB I purchased it from got enough/any copies.
Amazon lists it as:
"Availability: This item is not stocked or has been discontinued."
I wanted to give Vivendi more of my money but they decided to leave it on the table.
I'll downgrade to standard edition instead of waiting a month for them to get their act together.
-==-
What does Blizzard's developing of a MMO (the best I've played so far, BTW) have to do with Vivendi's screwing of their own customers? Blizzard didn't make the decision to limit the number of CEs, Vivendi did.
;)
It would be nice to find some way of creating a backlash against Vivendi without hurting Blizzard. Or without depriving myself of WoW.
Dude, you must be the only person in the world that doesn't think World of Warcraft is not ready. Of all the 3rd gen mmorpgs out there, majority concensus is that WoW is the MOST ready game, and could have been released months ago as is. Severely lacking in content? Now we know you are just trolling. There's so much content in the game that people were afraid it would be taking AWAY from the multiplayer aspect. And I've seen no issues with imbalance, or pvp.
Thing is, while Blizzard have a fairly good (but not perfect) record of delivering decent singleplayer and small-scale multiplayer games, releasing a MMORPG is an undertaking on a totally different order of magnitude.
For every single game they launched that uses battlenet, they've always run into launch problems. The first couple of days of the Diablo 2 launch was a total disaster, as was war3. But give them a couple of days, and things smooth out. Diablo 2 and War3 are still incredibly popular today, and nobody remembers what craziness was going on at the beginning of the launch.
MMORPGs are vast games, in terms of content, complexity and number of players. The potential for something serious to go wrong and not be picked up (or, more damningly, picked up but not corrected) is significant. Nothing I've seen has convinced me that Blizzard have had the capacity to do this.
I'm curious, what is it that you are looking for to convince you that Blizzard can handle this venture? Seriously? Do you honestly beleive that Blizzard hasn't done their research, especially since they are entering an extremely mature market? Do you honestly beleive that Blizzard hasn't looked at the successes and failures of other mmo's out there? Do you think that Blizzard is just chucking millions of dollars without any regard for quality and satisfaction of customers? So tell me again, what is it you are looking for in regards to a successful mmorpg launch? After you answered me that, also please tell us why it should be anybody else's business but Blizzard's to give us their strategy for launch?
Showed up about 11:00pm last night, figured that the line might be half way around the building, Turns out the line went around the building twice, took up most of the parking lot, and then for good measure it went down the street a couple hundred yards.
Talking to the Fry's Employee, he said that they had 2 or 3 truck loads of games on the way, but doubted thier would be enough for everyone.
The poor guy seemed rather alarmed and stressed seeing several thousand gamers surrounding the store.
According to him, the line started forming around 1pm.
Although everyone seemed to be in a good mood, I didn't stick around.
I'm curious, how would I, as a consumer, revolt against a publisher without simultaneously revolting against the developers? Vivendi is making some very anti-consumer moves here, which ought not be tolerated.