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Roper: World Of Warcraft Subscriber Comparisons 'Ridiculous' For New MMOs
by Staff, Ben Fritz
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May 15, 2009
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In an in-depth new Gamasutra interview, Cryptic's Bill Roper discusses World Of Warcraft's unprecedented success, suggesting that its 11 million subscribers is a "totally ridiculous goal" for MMO creators.
Although Roper never worked directly on World of Warcraft, the Blizzard veteran and key figure on the Diablo franchise recalls how anxious the atmosphere was at the game's launch, when the team realized they'd have to gain nearly 1 million users to earn their investment back -- in an era when the most popular MMO, EverQuest, had only about 345,000.
"How are we ever going to do that?" he recalls wondering at the time. "Then, it was like, 'Wow, can we do that?' 300,000 was a ridiculous number."
Of course, the rest is history -- WoW is now one of the most successful games of all time, with over to 11 million users.
But Roper, who went on to co-found ultimately ill-fated Hellgate: London creator Flagship Studios, sees a downside: "People look at the success of World of Warcraft -- publishers or fans, everybody looks at the success of that -- and they go, 'Oh, well, a great MMO? That's 11 million.'"
"No, that's one," he says. "That's one game that's done that. No one else in the West has been even close. And I think it's challenging from the standpoint that gets looked at as an expectation or a goal to hit. It's a totally ridiculous goal to try to be hitting -- 'Oh, we're gonna go build an MMO that's going to compete with that.'."
"I don't think any game at Blizzard, we never sat around and said, 'Oh, we're going to sell six million copies of the game.'"
In the full feature, Roper discusses his work at Cryptic on MMO Champions Online, plus a career retrospective that includes everything from recruitment to the painful lessons he's learned -- and how failure can teach you more than success (no registration required, please feel free to link to this feature from other websites).
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I am stunned about MMO popularity in general. I got tired of World of Warcraft at level 10, maybe it was 15. Guild Wars Prophecies wore me out at well. It must be the social aspect after so many levels. The gameplay in WoW is pigeon push button stuff. No disrespect I genuinely felt that when I was playing, great art though.
How do you win against a company that has more players, more money, more people, more servers, and really good content? Don't play against them. Make a different type of game or a different type of MMO.
you have to pick your battles, and if you pick a battle with WOW you will lose.
11 million subs is absolutely normal, cause the market is 10 times larger than before
-stealing WoW's current subs (signed up paying customers)
-stealing other MMO's current subs
-"opening" new subs slices, that is, making a game that attracts NEW gamers, people that are at the moment NON-SUBS
In other words let's say all MMO's together have .ca 20 million people currently paying for some subscription. Well, the market is expanding, there's probably another 10 million potential players. I am not paying for anything because i want an MMO without babysit levelling progression.
The amount of time it takes to play/invest in 1 mmo is staggering, I can't imagine playing 2 or 3, ever; especially when accounting for real world financing. Perhaps, mmo tie ins with single player console games and vice versa might capture more audience?
It's not a ludicrous goal.
That being said, Roper does have a point that it is ludicrous to compete with WoW on their own terms, and that it is ludicrous to set yourself up to *require* several millions of subscribers to suceed. If you can't make a healthy business with 100k subscribers, your doing something wrong.
Comparing it to google or top 100 chart or any other system is fecious