Beating WoW Would Take a Billion
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"...[Blizzard] has a big infrastructure to keep [WoW fresh, engaging and interesting], whether it's the 2,000 game masters they have that are monitoring gameplay or the hundreds of people that are enhancing content or the things that they are doing with expansion packs. They have a model that is very well-developed, they have a very keen understanding of their audiences, and they're just scratching the surface of opportunity in a lot of areas.Y'know, one would figure it'd take innovation and product quality to take on WoW. Perhaps a sign of the times that one starts thinking of competing with other games purely in dollar counts.
"...These guys are among the best in the world of game development. ...We don't think that even if we made the $500 million or billion-dollar investment to get a product out [ourselves to compete with] World of Warcraft that we would even be successful doing it.
"When you look at Lucas and EA and Microsoft and Sony--and you pick the venture capitalist--and look at all the money that's already gone to these businesses that have failed, there didn't seem a likelihood that even a well-managed company like Activision would have the prospect for profit anytime soon in this category. And so that became very apparent to us."
