Slashdot Mirror
No More Players for World of Warcraft - For Now
Chris writes "FileFront has broke the news from Blizzard that they are no longer placing their highly popular MMORPG on store shelves, due to the recent server problems reported by Slashdot on Tuesday. Denying rumors that they had asked several stores to pull the game from shelves, Blizzard rep Gil Shrif is quoted as saying: 'We're just being careful not to release additional copies to be sold until we feel the game servers can support additional players.' The online store on Blizzard's website shows the game to be out of stock. No word on whether or not this will affect the Korean release."
I wonder how this will affect the demand for WoW.
There's probably ample discussion of this in economics, but it seems pretty clear that some shortage scenarios result in people 'panicking' (perhaps too strong of a term) and really really trying to get whatever it is that's in shortage; I'm guessing there are people out there now who are thinking "OMG, WoW is closed! I've got to see if I can find a copy somewhere near me because I might not be able to get it later!"
And then, at some point, at significant enough shortages, people just sort of give up and don't care anymore. I'm guessing vendors would love to optimize their shortages to fit between these two points.
(Case in point: I wanted an iPod Shuffle, and called the Apple store a bunch of times, waiting for a shipment; they finally got one, but all of the Shuffles went to people who had pre-ordered; they were no longer accepting pre-orders, and told me to check in Friday. At that point, I got tired of the whole ordeal and decided not to get a Shuffle, at least any time in the near future. Not that Apple's hurting).
It's just amazing that they don't forsee the ammount of people. Especially right at launch and the months surrounding when you have most people logging on.
Dude, they have 88 servers. I mean, they were expecting success, sure. But they've sold more copies of the game in the last month than FFXI (as a random example I know the number for) has subscribers.
Besides, even if they believed WoW would be very successful, they can't just assume "Woohoo, my MMORPG entry into the already saturated market will be a wild success! I'm gonna take out a loan and buy $50 million worth of datacenter equipment to host 20,000 servers!" and many MMORPG businesses have been nearly if not entirely bankrupted in the recent past for taking that line of thinking. Blizzard was perhaps a little pessimistic in their expectations for World of Warcraft, I don't think I can blame them.
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