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

Platitudes

[OMNIpotusCOM]

Look, the game is pretty, fun for a while, and very addictive. They took the tried and true method of giving item hoarders, dungeon crawlers, D&D fans, and basic gamers a basic concept that each one could easily get addicted to. TFA had nothing you didn't already know. They basically took the best parts of Evercrack, UO, and D20 systems and made a pretty game out of it. End of article. Making red-colored crack and successfully getting a whole bunch of people addicted to it isn't really that impressive, and neither was TFA.

Congratulations on inventing MMOs

[nick_davison]

the company created a new type of product line by selling ongoing subscriptions for online access to the game, said Unnikrishnan at CSU Fullerton.
"Blizzard remains ahead of the competition because the company was able to parlay its strength in one game format to create an online service, which created a whole new product line and different type of revenue stream," he said. Wow. Imagine a world before WoW where there were absolutely no MMOs an no one had ever thought of a monthly fee for these games that didn't exist.

The irony of this whole piece is that just about every single on of Blizzards "innovations" are things Sony Online was doing with EverQuest for half a decade before it (Beta tests, test servers, employees playing the game, upgrades, cancelling titles that didn't work, broad demographics, stats analysis, the fun of a gaming company).

The more interesting thing is, EverQuest only ever achieved roughly a twentieth of WoW's subscription figures. So, more valuable than simply listing the things SOE already did as Blizzard innovations* would be to look at what Blizzard did differently that got them 20 times SOE's subscriber base - and fifty times that of most other competitors.

As a fluff piece, it's nice to congratulate Blizzard for innovations they didn't come up with. The thing is, they evidently did something different and the article manages to miss that far more fascinating angle.

*Note: Not claiming SOE came up with the innovations either. Ultima Online was doing much of it several years earlier still. And they took over from a lot of MUDs, MUSHes, etc. If anything, there've been a series of advances that have been made one at a time, everyone else copying whenever someone else has success with a new idea.

I'd suggest Blizzards real achievements were something more like:

Truly earn loyalty from your customers: People who bought Diablo and Starcraft played for years on a service they didn't have to pay any extra for. Any other company would have turned those servers off once they weren't making money from boxed copies of the game. Blizzard kept providing it and earned a fierce loyalty from their fans where everyone else leaves their fans feeling screwed the moment the dollar signs don't add up in the short term.

Set the barrier of entry LOW: While SOE was playing with the brilliant idea but agonizing experience of StarWars Galaxies and everyone else was chasing prettier graphics, Blizzard put out a game with cartoony graphics that everyone and their mom could play. Ten million general players doing something simpler beats out a few hundred thousand beardy ones and housewives with enough time to learn your complex game mechanics.

Don't milk the cash cow until its teats fall off: Blizzard's managed to get what, one expansion out so far? SOE has put out how many for EQ2 that was released at the same time? Sure, your balance sheet looks better if you can say, "I'm going to get 200% revenue from my begrudging players this year." It actually looks even better if you say, "I'll stick with 110% revenue from 2000% of the number of happier players."

No innovation at all...

[timmarhy]

.... but blizzard did something even MORE important - they did a damn good job of giving people what they wanted.

not many people give a fuck for super complex game rules (that's why nerds love DnD) they want something that's fun and group based. WoW gives that.

Lesson #12

[Plazmid]

Lesson #12: if they get addicted, they'll pay more.

Re:Lesson #12

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, you people crack me the fuck up. "WoW is addictive!" No. Cocaine is addictive; it causes physiological changes to your brain that cause you to want it more at the same time that it gives you less effect.
WoW and cocaine share many of the same qualities. Granted, WoW is much less expensive, but they both do some of the same things to you when used in excess. Excessive WoW playing can lead to loss of relationships, friends, jobs, and so on, and we've all heard stories detailing such things, sometimes right here on /.

That said, I've done both. Ironically, one of the things I used to keep myself busy after struggling with cocaine addiction was playing WoW, because it consumed a lot of my time and kept me entertained. I did however eventually quit WoW after I had to play it

more at the same time that it [gave me] less effect. Still, this wasn't the same type of physiological addiction one could attribute to cocaine. Raiding twice or more a week simply yielded less reward, and made the game more like work than play.

Ironically, the thing that Blizzard and drugs have taught me though is that I easily get addicted to things that are bad for me, and they're both experiences that I have learned from. The nice part about WoW though is that abusing it tends not to enable you to accidentally kill yourself.

I felt compelled to post because I had to let you know that I feel, from personal experience, that there is credence to what people say about WoW's addictiveness in relation to things that are physiologically addictive, like cocaine.

I've been clean for almost three years now, and I value my life a lot more than I did back then. It's been two years since I quit WoW, and I similarly value my friendships a lot more than I did back then.

Re:Lesson #12

[RockModeNick]

This type of thing is why, coming from a psychology background, I dislike the entire current conception of addition. Our brains like to offload work and analysis by simply keeping up behaviors that have been previously sustained. Pleasurable behaviors where we consciously associate enjoyment with specific behavior are easier to designate as addictions, but it's really all the same, offloading the work of deciding if we should do something or not by simply setting up automatic responses. Sometimes these responses are so closely worked into normal brain function that ceasing them causes a disruption in expected brain function, in a full spectrum from nearly undetectably minor(A passing question to the self on the way to work of "am I less sharp because I missed my coffee today?") to so much a part of our expected brain chemistry that function without them can take a LONG period of adaption(I WILL KILL SOMEONE if I don't get a cigarette soon). Obviously with examples where we're adding an outside chemical to our brain chemistry it gets a bit more complex vs systems where we're simply behaviorally altering our internal chemistry, but it's all still the same basic system. I strongly believe that this makes the term "addictive" nearly meaningless as it is typically used today.