Xullthara
04-15-2008, 12:37 PM
I thought this was interesting, it was posted on a Game Dev site I read. I liked the Donut analogy the most. I would like to see the video of the interview if anyone can find it. :o
-Mayzyne
Morhaime On Taking Over The World
http://kotaku.com/assets/resources/2007/09/MORHAIME1.jpg
The Austin Game Developers Conference is highly focused on the MMO industry, so what better way to kick it off than with a keynote speech from Michael Morhaime, the president and a co-founder of Blizzard, makers of the most popular massively multiplayer online roleplaying game on the planet? The keynote is entitled "How to Rule the World (of Warcraft): Ten Lessons", and I fully expect to be able to create my own MMO competitive if not better than WoW by the time the speech lets up.
Morhaime launches into the keynote with a look back at the 20th century - my favorite so far. It's the first century with video games. The world is smaller. Technological process continuously increases exponentially. How much has changed in the past 100 years? Morhaime is going to tell us.
1907: Like WoW before you had a mount with no flight paths. That pretty much sums it up. Well that's all well and good, but what is Morhaime here to talk about?
http://kotaku.com/assets/resources/2007/09/morhaime0.jpg
Oh.
Blizzard started in 1991 with $20,000 and two PC's. Back then games were simpler. No CD drives, no big cinematics. Blizzard got started creating PC ports, then moved on to creating SNES and Genesis games. When the 16-bit console market started to decline they shifted focus to PC gaming, creating Warcraft. Blizzard was bought by an educational software company called Davidson Associates in 1994, after which a series of mergers and takeovers ensued, culminating in their being a division of Vivendi today.
Throughout all the changes, the core philosophies have stayed the same:
1. Gameplay first. The most important aspect. If this doesn't get taken care of, nothing else matters. By the way, gaming is a donut.
http://kotaku.com/assets/resources/2007/09/morhaimedonut.jpg
To Blizzard, the hardcore gamers, the ones who really put gameplay to the test, are the hole in the donut. I don't think Mike was saying that the hardcore community is empty space but rather describing its central but minority role. The casual gamers are the actual donut: they make up the bulk and they are "the market". For example, system requirements for Blizzard games are matched to the donut and not the hole. Another way to capture the donut market is accessibility. Mike gave props to Guitar Hero for being easily playable for the casual gamer while presenting exciting challenges for the most hardcore.
2. Build and Protect the Brand
Morhaime says that the Blizzard name is their most important property. People see the Blizzard name and will buy a game based on their name alone. Building your brand means high quality and polish and never compromising on them. Blizzard's goal is to create a game and have it sell itself simply because "it's a Blizzard game". I was taken aback by how familiar that line was to me as a long-time gamer - I now know it was a concerted effort on Blizzard's part and no mere accident. Mike illustrated this point with a bank account. You should always make deposits into your brand's account and never make withdrawals. Lots of deposits with minimal withdrawals will make the brand worth more.
3. Resist the Pressure to Ship Early
*cough* Vanguard *cough* His message here is don't give into the myriad forces urging you to put your game out early. I suppose this is all fine and good if you are Blizzard, but otherwise that could be a problem. He uses the example The Burning Crusade expansion missing Christmas yet still selling amazing numbers. Well sure - they could have shipped TBC with a requirement that you undergo a full cavity search delivered via angry midget before you could take the game home and they'd have sold millions. Possibly more!
4. Resist the Pressure to do everything at Once
Build up your business slowly. Don't try to make the next World of Warcraft immediately, because if you do they will find you and they will kill you.
Morhaime is now talking about Blizzard's evolution as a global company. It features a chart that explains how their increasingly global focus has affected sales, which I will present here instead of trying to explain.
The more places you sell the game, the more games you sell.
He stresses the importance of being sensitive to local cultures. For instance, don't dress a Chinese panda up in traditional Japanese samurai armor, as Blizzard did with Warcraft III. You don't want the Chinese mad at you. There are a lot more of them than there are of you.
Thinking long term is the key to resisting the pressure to ship by X date - even if X = Christmas. Diablo missed Christmas - we all know how amazingly well that worked out (for any gamers living under a rock, that statement was not sarcastic). More recently, the expansion for WoW Burning Crusade also missed Christmas. It became the fastest selling game of all time with 2.4 million copies sold the first day (more on that later).
Global Challenges
Here Morhaime details the biggest challenges bringing WoW to the world presented.
5. Estimating Demand
Yeah, they were a bit off on this one. Who knew? Blizzard had started in North America, so they kept their focus here and did not give much thought to other markets. When they looked more closely at Europe, however, they discovered the cost of their complacency: Europeans were importing Blizzard games from the US which destroyed any incentive for European retailers to carry Blizzard titles. This gray market activity had caused Blizzard to underestimate and overlook Europe. Now Blizzard treats the globe as a single market with single release dates (starting with Diablo II but with the notable exception of WoW). Since then, with each new title, the volume of sales to Europe and Asia has increased and even exceeded North America.
Mike moved on to the pink elekk topic: how WoW came to be. One of their greatest challenges was estimating the demand for such a game. They decided that since Warcraft III was their fastest selling game ever, it should be used as the best-case (or worst-case as it turned out) scenario for growth. And so they prepared their servers' hardware for that amount of traffic. They also prepared only enough customer support for that level of sales. As it turned out, WoW not only outsold Warcraft III from the start (almost double), it increased in sales at a higher rate. Fortunately, Blizzard had prepared for this to some extent: they executed a "staged launch" beginning with North America and not their usual global, simultaneous launch. But even that was not enough. At one point, they even had to stop distributing more copies of the game to save their servers. The company had no choice but to scale up "overnight".
6. HR is Really Important
When WoW took off, Blizzard had to scale up the entire business overnight. "We were not prepared." Suddenly the support team they had in place was woefully inadequate. Be prepared for explosive growth, just in case.
7. Running a MMOPRG is not just game development
It's not just creating a game. It's becoming a global service company, with IT, customer service, and community management. Blizzard also had to triple their workforce - mostly in customer service. They were no longer just a game developer - they had become a "service company". Facing that reality was painful. Blizzard learned that if you don't communicate with your users, "they will make stuff up". Many bugs went un-addressed simply because Blizzard was too understaffed to listen to users. The users interpreted this as Blizzard simply not caring.
8 Communicate (or people will make stuff up)
Having a community team is important. With a steady stream of information fed to the customers from people who know what is going on. This keeps the customers happy, and keeps rumors from being spreading.
9.Avoid Financial Incentives
Try to keep your game from presenting money-making opportunities for third parties, like gold farmers, account stealing and reselling, and credit card fraud. Thanks to this philosophy, World of Warcraft is completely free from the scourge of gold farmers. *weeps* Blizzard also learned that it's a bad idea to give people financial incentives for in-game activities. Where there are incentives, there are gold farmers. There are also account stealers and spammers. In the end, it hurts players and damages the game.
10. Testing
Blizzard tests the hell out of their games. You should too. Internal testing, public betas, test servers, etc. Another lesson was that test servers are a very good idea. Though Blizzard's policy is that all of its employees test their games, they learned that public test servers allow you to work out the kinks under heavy loads, fresh pairs of eyes and the pitiless assaults of exploiters before content goes live. Mike pointed out that the cost of running such a server would have been more than paid for if they had run it from the beginning.
Putting all of these philosophies into effect led to the Burning Crusade launch. Blizzard upgraded their infrastructure, added extra capacity, and as a result it was one of the smoothest major expansion launches ever, despite midnight launches around the world.
Morhaime closes the keynote with a video of the European BC launch, showing crowds of fans in costume and out, with the WoW theme playing in the background. It is painful to watch. If you are tempted to dress up for a game launch, avoid video cameras at all cost.
A talk has to end with a success story, and for Blizzard it was the launch of the Burning Crusade. As one customer service employee put it, Burning Crusade launched as smooth as a small patch. This was possible because Blizzard was ready: massive upgrades to server infrastructure, extensive private and public testing, and plenty of communication. Selling 2.4 million copies in a single day without a single server crash? When you rule the world, such things are possible!
Seriously.
And there you have it. Straight from Morhaime's mouth. Now go create a WoW killer. We'll wait here.
-Mayzyne
Morhaime On Taking Over The World
http://kotaku.com/assets/resources/2007/09/MORHAIME1.jpg
The Austin Game Developers Conference is highly focused on the MMO industry, so what better way to kick it off than with a keynote speech from Michael Morhaime, the president and a co-founder of Blizzard, makers of the most popular massively multiplayer online roleplaying game on the planet? The keynote is entitled "How to Rule the World (of Warcraft): Ten Lessons", and I fully expect to be able to create my own MMO competitive if not better than WoW by the time the speech lets up.
Morhaime launches into the keynote with a look back at the 20th century - my favorite so far. It's the first century with video games. The world is smaller. Technological process continuously increases exponentially. How much has changed in the past 100 years? Morhaime is going to tell us.
1907: Like WoW before you had a mount with no flight paths. That pretty much sums it up. Well that's all well and good, but what is Morhaime here to talk about?
http://kotaku.com/assets/resources/2007/09/morhaime0.jpg
Oh.
Blizzard started in 1991 with $20,000 and two PC's. Back then games were simpler. No CD drives, no big cinematics. Blizzard got started creating PC ports, then moved on to creating SNES and Genesis games. When the 16-bit console market started to decline they shifted focus to PC gaming, creating Warcraft. Blizzard was bought by an educational software company called Davidson Associates in 1994, after which a series of mergers and takeovers ensued, culminating in their being a division of Vivendi today.
Throughout all the changes, the core philosophies have stayed the same:
1. Gameplay first. The most important aspect. If this doesn't get taken care of, nothing else matters. By the way, gaming is a donut.
http://kotaku.com/assets/resources/2007/09/morhaimedonut.jpg
To Blizzard, the hardcore gamers, the ones who really put gameplay to the test, are the hole in the donut. I don't think Mike was saying that the hardcore community is empty space but rather describing its central but minority role. The casual gamers are the actual donut: they make up the bulk and they are "the market". For example, system requirements for Blizzard games are matched to the donut and not the hole. Another way to capture the donut market is accessibility. Mike gave props to Guitar Hero for being easily playable for the casual gamer while presenting exciting challenges for the most hardcore.
2. Build and Protect the Brand
Morhaime says that the Blizzard name is their most important property. People see the Blizzard name and will buy a game based on their name alone. Building your brand means high quality and polish and never compromising on them. Blizzard's goal is to create a game and have it sell itself simply because "it's a Blizzard game". I was taken aback by how familiar that line was to me as a long-time gamer - I now know it was a concerted effort on Blizzard's part and no mere accident. Mike illustrated this point with a bank account. You should always make deposits into your brand's account and never make withdrawals. Lots of deposits with minimal withdrawals will make the brand worth more.
3. Resist the Pressure to Ship Early
*cough* Vanguard *cough* His message here is don't give into the myriad forces urging you to put your game out early. I suppose this is all fine and good if you are Blizzard, but otherwise that could be a problem. He uses the example The Burning Crusade expansion missing Christmas yet still selling amazing numbers. Well sure - they could have shipped TBC with a requirement that you undergo a full cavity search delivered via angry midget before you could take the game home and they'd have sold millions. Possibly more!
4. Resist the Pressure to do everything at Once
Build up your business slowly. Don't try to make the next World of Warcraft immediately, because if you do they will find you and they will kill you.
Morhaime is now talking about Blizzard's evolution as a global company. It features a chart that explains how their increasingly global focus has affected sales, which I will present here instead of trying to explain.
The more places you sell the game, the more games you sell.
He stresses the importance of being sensitive to local cultures. For instance, don't dress a Chinese panda up in traditional Japanese samurai armor, as Blizzard did with Warcraft III. You don't want the Chinese mad at you. There are a lot more of them than there are of you.
Thinking long term is the key to resisting the pressure to ship by X date - even if X = Christmas. Diablo missed Christmas - we all know how amazingly well that worked out (for any gamers living under a rock, that statement was not sarcastic). More recently, the expansion for WoW Burning Crusade also missed Christmas. It became the fastest selling game of all time with 2.4 million copies sold the first day (more on that later).
Global Challenges
Here Morhaime details the biggest challenges bringing WoW to the world presented.
5. Estimating Demand
Yeah, they were a bit off on this one. Who knew? Blizzard had started in North America, so they kept their focus here and did not give much thought to other markets. When they looked more closely at Europe, however, they discovered the cost of their complacency: Europeans were importing Blizzard games from the US which destroyed any incentive for European retailers to carry Blizzard titles. This gray market activity had caused Blizzard to underestimate and overlook Europe. Now Blizzard treats the globe as a single market with single release dates (starting with Diablo II but with the notable exception of WoW). Since then, with each new title, the volume of sales to Europe and Asia has increased and even exceeded North America.
Mike moved on to the pink elekk topic: how WoW came to be. One of their greatest challenges was estimating the demand for such a game. They decided that since Warcraft III was their fastest selling game ever, it should be used as the best-case (or worst-case as it turned out) scenario for growth. And so they prepared their servers' hardware for that amount of traffic. They also prepared only enough customer support for that level of sales. As it turned out, WoW not only outsold Warcraft III from the start (almost double), it increased in sales at a higher rate. Fortunately, Blizzard had prepared for this to some extent: they executed a "staged launch" beginning with North America and not their usual global, simultaneous launch. But even that was not enough. At one point, they even had to stop distributing more copies of the game to save their servers. The company had no choice but to scale up "overnight".
6. HR is Really Important
When WoW took off, Blizzard had to scale up the entire business overnight. "We were not prepared." Suddenly the support team they had in place was woefully inadequate. Be prepared for explosive growth, just in case.
7. Running a MMOPRG is not just game development
It's not just creating a game. It's becoming a global service company, with IT, customer service, and community management. Blizzard also had to triple their workforce - mostly in customer service. They were no longer just a game developer - they had become a "service company". Facing that reality was painful. Blizzard learned that if you don't communicate with your users, "they will make stuff up". Many bugs went un-addressed simply because Blizzard was too understaffed to listen to users. The users interpreted this as Blizzard simply not caring.
8 Communicate (or people will make stuff up)
Having a community team is important. With a steady stream of information fed to the customers from people who know what is going on. This keeps the customers happy, and keeps rumors from being spreading.
9.Avoid Financial Incentives
Try to keep your game from presenting money-making opportunities for third parties, like gold farmers, account stealing and reselling, and credit card fraud. Thanks to this philosophy, World of Warcraft is completely free from the scourge of gold farmers. *weeps* Blizzard also learned that it's a bad idea to give people financial incentives for in-game activities. Where there are incentives, there are gold farmers. There are also account stealers and spammers. In the end, it hurts players and damages the game.
10. Testing
Blizzard tests the hell out of their games. You should too. Internal testing, public betas, test servers, etc. Another lesson was that test servers are a very good idea. Though Blizzard's policy is that all of its employees test their games, they learned that public test servers allow you to work out the kinks under heavy loads, fresh pairs of eyes and the pitiless assaults of exploiters before content goes live. Mike pointed out that the cost of running such a server would have been more than paid for if they had run it from the beginning.
Putting all of these philosophies into effect led to the Burning Crusade launch. Blizzard upgraded their infrastructure, added extra capacity, and as a result it was one of the smoothest major expansion launches ever, despite midnight launches around the world.
Morhaime closes the keynote with a video of the European BC launch, showing crowds of fans in costume and out, with the WoW theme playing in the background. It is painful to watch. If you are tempted to dress up for a game launch, avoid video cameras at all cost.
A talk has to end with a success story, and for Blizzard it was the launch of the Burning Crusade. As one customer service employee put it, Burning Crusade launched as smooth as a small patch. This was possible because Blizzard was ready: massive upgrades to server infrastructure, extensive private and public testing, and plenty of communication. Selling 2.4 million copies in a single day without a single server crash? When you rule the world, such things are possible!
Seriously.
And there you have it. Straight from Morhaime's mouth. Now go create a WoW killer. We'll wait here.