11 Innovation Lessons From the Creators of World of Warcraft

Ant writes "Colin Stewart's OC Register Inside Innovation blog has up a post discussing Blizzard Entertainment's success in the games industry. According to the site, Blizzard has learned eleven lessons on innovation that can help almost any business. The industry leader used these innovation methods not only to create the world's most popular massively multiplayer online game, World of Warcraft, but also to keep the game fresh and challenging for more than 10 million players. Because many of those customers pay $15 a month to continue playing, Blizzard's ongoing creative achievement is worth more than $1 billion a year in revenues, not counting the multi-millions it tallies from its other games."

Comments

Re:11 lessons

[The MAZZTer]

1. Rely on critics
2. Use your own product
3. Make continual improvements
4. Go back to the drawing board
5. Design for different kinds of customers
6. The importance of frequent failures
7. Move quickly, in pieces
8. Statistics bolster experience
9. Demand excellence or you'll get mediocrity
10. Create a new type of product
11. Offer employees something extra

RTFA

Totally Crapified Article about Egomaniacs

[lancejjj]

This is a piece about some egomaniacs that want to express that they're simply smarter than so many others in business.

They actually think that their "11 Innovation Lessons" are new, different, and special.

Even a junior manager at a McDonald's has learned this stuff within their first 30 days on the job. Really. They are intrinsic to running any service organization.

Read through them, and ask yourself: would a McDonald's Junior Manager know this as an intrinsic part of his job servicing customers?

The short answer is YES, a junior manager at McDonalds would know 10 of 11 of them. The 11th just doesn't apply to McDonalds. Because Big Macs are perfect.

Re:Platitudes

[DarkProphet]

I think the reason that WoW STILL has 10 million subscribers is simply because it takes a LONG time to do things right. Levelling goes very fast(faster than ever since patch 2.3), but grinding for reputation, items, gold, and professions is a huge time-sink, in terms of hours. If you are the kind of person who ISN'T allowed to play for 12 hours a day, it can take many many months to move toward end-game content.

And that is to say nothing about PvP and Battlegrounds. The only other online games I've ever bothered to get into are Quake2 and Quake3. There is something irresistible about CTF and the other battlegrounds games. But to kick ass, you need a twink, which obviates the need for your main to spend all kinds of time grinding to fund your twink.

Then there is arena, where you attempt to twink your main, basically.

To have it all, it takes a huge time investment, which is reflected in the number of subscriptions Blizzard maintains over the long-term.

Now, I am not saying it is wrong for Blizz to extend the gameplay time by making it take forever to get anywhere on foot, or low drop rates, or the price of an epic mount versus the amount one can reasonably grind in say, 50 hours of play.

Well, the travel time actually is nothing short of ridiculous. Travel-time between "flight points" should be instantaneous. Just replace flight points with portals. PLEASE! Travel time between kalimdor and anywhere in outland is just crap. C'mon now.

OTOH, Blizz has been pretty good about regularly adding new content (even outside expansion releases), adjusting item and talent specs, and generally making the game more accessible to people with less time on their hands.

They've struck a good balance between making their product more open to new subscribers, as well as maintaining their long-term customer.

They've executed a well-crafted plan to widen their subscriber base while retaining a solid number of existing customers. That is the hallmark of any successful business. </verbose>