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World of Warcraft Sales Figures Soar in Europe
GamesIndustry.biz has the word that the sales figures on release day for World of Warcraft here in the states have been exceeded by the game's European launch. Slagged servers crumpled and the account creation site on the Blizzard Europe homepage was taken down for a few hours on release day. From the article: "According to figures released by the developer, the subscription-based MMORPG sold more than 280,000 units on day one - more than it sold on its first day in the States - before sales rose to 380,000 by the end of its first weekend on sale."
Has Blizzard or any of the other MMORPG guys ever posted the actual cost of running such a service vs. how much money they are taking in on it? The gamers have to pay $50 ($80 for the "special edition") and then a $13 monthly fee, not to mention the expansion packs when they come out. With hundreds of thousands of people playing this game they are making hundreds of millions each year...and I seriously doubt it costs that much to run one of these games properly.
Maybe games like Guildwars can prove you don't have to rip your customers off to be successful?
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
I can't speak about WoW, but in Everquest, there are a lot of things that go into the game beyond what's there at the initial launch. (I don't count bug fixes, or game mechanic adjustments).
In Everquest, a lot of things go in. New quests, new gear, new tradeskill items, new spells, new zones open up, etc.
When a LOT of new stuff goes in at once, they do it as an expansion. Expansions were usually $20-$30. There's an upcoming "expansion" (although it's hard for me to call it that), that will be about $5. It's a very small, targeted sort of thing.
People that aren't into MMORPG usually see the monthly charge and recoil in horror. I played EQ1 just about exclusively for 5 years. I played nearly no other game during that time. Before that, I'd buy a $50 game every month or so. I spent a lot more on games before EQ, that's for sure.
This is the first game I bought since Diablo 1. And I have no regrets. The monthly cost is more then worth the entertainment I get out of it.
Good for Blizzard! I love playing World of Warcraft... it's the first game I can actually say I've enjoyed playing in years...
This means that they have sold over 1,000,000 boxes in North America and European releases so far. World of Warcraft has single handedly proved that the MMO market is by no means saturated.
Most companies think of Europe being "just some" market after the US and Asia.
...
However, considering many customers hence feel like "second rate", many don't fall for the products.
Now a good one comes here, not looking like a "cheap" European version of some game (like Mythic -> GOA DAoC), and people are surprised
Thinking seems to be harder than I though.
It's great to see WoW being such a great success also in Europe, however Blizzard should really do something about their servers.
Right now logging in is impossible to many European servers (just check the EU tech support forums...) and people have been experiencing disconnects and signup-problems from day one not to mention the huge queues on some servers.
The ridiciously short beta and the problems they had in the US should have warranted a more thorough analysis about what is required to serve the big audience. For a subscription (time) -based game this is quite unacceptable.
-Kari
That is not a small number! That is a really big number!
I will start this out by saying that if any blizzard fanbois respond to this with a flame...you're just trolling and are even more out of line than you consider me to be.
I will save the whole "my history in mmo's" speech and instead cut to the chase...
I bought WoW about 3 weeks after release expecting to find a game that does what it says: caters to the hardcore and casual gamers equally. I played WoW for about 2 months only to find out that this game caters to one kind of player: non-mmo vets looking to get their feet wet in the genre. Don't argue it...it's dead on spot true.
When I first started playing I noticed how this game had phenomenal graphics (anyone who says otherwise is on crack or blind), awesome characters, an immersive world, and many many many different ways to customize your characters skill/abils as well as equipment.
However, as time marched on I made the following realization about WoW: If I play more than a few hours a day I can ding lvl 60 with virtually NO hold ups. I never have to unlock any zones, never have to do anything in any order.....hell, I don't even have to do a quest to hit the cap. That's not an MMO, that's some kind of RPG/Action hybrid aimed at appealing to what is in fact the average wow gamer: a high school kid who loves the idea of playing an mmo, rotting on the forums etc...but has never succeeded at one before. WoW takes your fifteen bucks and then hands you the key to instant uberness. When I stand around in IronForge I see DOZENS upon DOZENS of people running around at the cap, pissing and moaning about the game being to easy and that they have nothing left to do except retreat old ground. This has got be the first MMO that hit this state in less than 3 months.
Added, that for a game that boasts PVP and BG content as it's selling points, and as the main things that make it "better" than other mmo's, there's really nothing in the way of purposeful pvp and BG's are probably another 6 months away. And 6 months is realistic....blizz has recently stated that they plan on releasing the first expansion roughly 12 months after release. Let's give them the benefit of the doubt and say they release it on time...which would be a first for the genre. That's another 9 months out. Ironically...this week blizz has stated that they feel it would be in the game's best interests to hold out BG until that expansion. So, as you see, my stating of 6 months for battlegrounds isn't even realistic, that's how hopeful it is. 9-12 months is much more realistic. Imagine if this is the way it really pans out...there will be half a million lvl 60's with nothing to do, and nothing to make the GREAT and HARDCORE players stand out in any way shape or form. That's not an MMO.
I understand that you'll point to sales numbers and tell me how wonderful wow is doing...the bottom line is this: It's selling at the rate it is b/c of it's mass appeal. It does something other mmo's have never done, and for the purpose of not ruining the genre like every other gaming genre has had happen to it. It appeals to gamers who really don't belong on an MMO. They want instant gratification, instant uberness, and instant action. Problem with that approach is it always will equal instant burnout within weeks, and at best months.
Purpose of this thread is not to bash wow....to be honest, a part of me is asking for advice on why wow is worth it long term. I own and subscribe to both wow and EQ2 and as of now, I give 100 percent of my time to EQ2 because of the following reasons: I know, that no matter how good I get, or no matter how much progress I make any night...I'm just scratching the surface...no matter WHAT I do. There are so many enemies and so many "goals" that people won't even come across for another two years, that I truly feel that I'm one character, in a whole world of heroes. Also...in EQ2, EVERY (and I mean EVERY) single thing that you do is recorded on the web as YOUR achievement and then ranks you against all those on your server, as well as all those in th
"Why did they cancel my favorite Sci-Fi show? I downloaded ALL the episodes!"
I am glad I didn't buy this only to find I couldn't log in.
I do see these are historical games... in the future such server issues will go, so enjoy the stories of server outtages and record sales, before this becomes just another command and conquer or doom gaming fad, and becomes old news.
I personally like the genre, but do not play games. I think it is important to keep up with the field though, so I regularly read up on them.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
...that they'd have learned from their American launch.
Well, don't forgot the cost of your computer. And the cost of the electricity you use while playing the game. And, do you drink more Mountain Dew while playing? Add that in too.
Seriously, your comment has to be one of the stupidest I've seen in a long while. Not everything is about Windows and Microsoft.
And BTW: you can play the game on Mac OS X also, so you don't have to have WinXP.
Forget the whales - save the babies.
I bought WoW last Friday, when it launched here in the UK. Experiences so far, despite what I've seen posted here in this thread and on the Blizzard forums, have been generally positive.
When I get home from work at 5:30PM on Friday and install the game, the registration servers are down. I'd kind of expected this - pretty much an inevitable hazard of buying the game on the first day of its release. Fortunately, I play FFXI, and KOTOR 2 had also come out that day (and yes, I wound up buying that as well), so I had plenty more to keep me entertained until they fixed the reg servers and I didn't have to sit there hitting "refresh" like a muppet and no doubt making the problem just a little bit worse.
The registration servers come back up at about 10:30PM, about an hour before my usual bed-time. The registration process himself was a bit crap; a lot of pages to click through, which are, pretty much inevitably, very, very slow. To make matters worse, there's a time-limit on the whole process which, if exceeded, means you have to start again from the beginning. With the pages taking so long to load, it takes me about 4 or 5 goes to actually register. To add insult to injury, Blizzard have one of those annoying "text in image" things that you have to fill in to register. This is on the same page that you have to enter your VALID CD KEY on. Were Blizzard worried that people were going to buy dozens of copies of the game and make automated scripts to register them all? Oh, the horror, the horror.
On reflection, I guess I'd have been better waiting for Saturday morning to do the whole registration process.
Once I've created the account, logging in to the game and setting up a character is pretty much flawless. I guess most other people are still stuck at the registration page by this point (11PM Friday). Once I get into the game, the newbie zone I spawn in is highly congested - it's a bit of a race to pull mobs to fight. Of course, this is something else I was fully expecting and I can't really complain. The problem continued over the weekend but it's alleviated slightly now that I've moved away from the newbie zones. I've not experienced ANY problems logging into my server and pings have been generally ok, even in the big towns. I guess this is because I didn't have any particular preference over which server I wanted to play on and was able to take the under-loaded server that the auto-select function recommened. I'd advise any other new players to do the same.
And how good is the game? Well... it's ok. It's not going to draw me away from FFXI in the long run, though. Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of things that WoW does that I really wish FFXI did. The ability to gain experience and levels through doing quests is perhaps the biggest plus point. However, the game's infrastructure seems, in many ways, vastly inferior to FFXI's. The search and trading functions, such as they are, can barely even be described as adequate. I'm also really not a fan of the way you can just keep on soloing, even at the higher levels. It'll be a fun occasional distraction from FFXI, but won't hold my attention for too long.
One pays more for Warcraft in Old Europe! FB!
Well. A lot more people live in Europe than in the USA, so that it sells more in absolute numbers doesn't seem very surprising.