Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning Interviews
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Eurogamer: By that we take it you're all ready to go on Thursday, then?GameSpot is next up with an interview.
Mark Jacobs: Oh absolutely. Oh my God. We just added more servers. The Europeans, obviously, are doing extremely well. I'm looking at our [US] server populations now and they're just filling up. It's great. They are filling up rapidly and only one server - out of all the ones we have up there right now - has a minor queue on it. And if you played these other games, especially WOW day one, then everything was queued and it took hours to get in. We've got a minor queue maybe maybe 30 minutes [long], on one out of all the servers here in the States.
Eurogamer: Are you expecting them to fill up, and do you have more in reserve if they do?
Mark Jacobs: Oh, we've got plenty. One of the really nice things about working with EA is that we've worked very closely with them to set up the exact number of boxes we want out there to fit the number of servers - and customer service - we have out there. We could sell out every box we have in the United States and have plenty of servers to take care of all that capacity, with a little bit of spare capacity as well. So we're in really, really good shape.
You saw the press release that went out: we're shipping 1.5 million units, so that's a lot of servers! We need a lot to support that kind of volume in both North America and Europe. And we're good to go.
GS: How much do you think timing plays in the success of MMOGs? You had DAOC, which came out about two years after EverQuest, and most critics saw it as a superior to EverQuest, but it wasn't until WOW came out that the whole MMO landscape changed. Now you've got Warhammer four years after WOW. Do you think there's going to be any correlation there?
MJ: I think that's a great question. Timing plays a role from two perspectives. First, when MMOGs come out, it's interesting--it really doesn't matter in terms of the time of year as much as other games. If you look at the history of MMOG releases, you've had some great successes in the fall, and you've had some great successes in the spring, and you had some OK successes in the summer. So that's the first interesting thing about timing.
The second is that when a game--and this is really true for 99 percent of the MMOGs--when an MMOG hits its third year, from then on usually in terms of peak concurrent users, it begins its decline. Now, some MMOGs can cover that by continually high sales. Or, in the case of [CCP's] EVE, which is probably the best success story for when you want to look at something that did not do well in the beginning and now three years or four years later, whatever it is in their case, they're doing better than they did at first, which is just amazing. But WOW, EverQuest, Camelot, by three years out they were really all--they really are in WOW's case--losing a lot of users. The difference is Blizzard has been able to keep the sales strong even now for WOW to make up for that loss.
So if you're looking at the perfect time to come out for a new MMOG, it would certainly be when the competition is three or four years out. And it really doesn't matter who the developer is because people are people, and they get bored with any game. You can't do almost any activity every single day, or even three, four times a week, for three or four years without getting a little bit tired of it, or very tired of it.
So, in our case, coming out with WOW hitting its second expansion pack is a lovely thing. It really is. And when you look at the competition from the other games, every other major game is a lot older than that. Certainly, Camelot is much older than that if you want to look at competing realm-versus-realm. Or, you would look at Final Fantasy in terms of player-versus-environment and strong numbers. Same with EverQuest 2.
So I look at it being a really good time to release Warhammer.
