11 innovation lessons from creators of WoW

No one can deny that Blizzard is an amazing company that accomplishes things no one ever thinks possible.  With a record breaking player base size, and a worth of over $18.9 billion once the merge with Activision is complete, everyone knows they're a force to be reckoned with.

So what fun it is to read what they told Insight Innovation has made their company, and most of all, WoW, such a huge success.
“We come up with a lot of great ideas, we talk about them, we implement a lot of art and game play, and then we go ‘… that kind of sucks,’ said Pardo. “So do we do a re-boot, throw out everything — or do we make the call to cancel a game if there’s no realistic restart to do? It’s one of the things that makes us infamous for never hitting a release date, but it’s part of ‘gameplay first,’ ” a key principle at Blizzard.
It's a great article, other then the point made about Blizzard being a pioneer of a new catagory of gaming in MMOs!  Where was the author when The Realm, Meridian 59, and Ultima Online were being played?

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Fair to say?
# Apr 07 2008 at 8:03 AM Rating: Excellent
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1,154 posts
Just about anything out there with Blizzard on fluff, since they don't do the community that EVERYONE else in the industry does.

But I think it's fair to say that there are few innovators within the industry, and quite a few polishers. Blizzard's claim to fame is that level of polish, but I would agree. Until BC, we saw no true "innovation" from them.

But also, it's hard to define. Isn't that level of polish an innovation? :o

Round and round we go!
Fluff Piece
# Apr 07 2008 at 7:47 AM Rating: Good
It's a pure fluff piece, and none of these are new ideas or implimentations. To quote a good response I saw when this piece was posted on /.

Quote:
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.
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