World of Warcraft Interview
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IG: We've yet to see a blockbuster MMO take off in the console space. Sony Online Entertainment is going to be bringing its MMOs to the PS3. What about Blizzard? You said you talked with Microsoft?
RP: Microsoft has shown us some stuff they have in development and they asked us our opinion about it that's all that was. But as far as MMOs on consoles, there's a lot of challenges. I'd say challenge #1 is the input device. So if you're going to port a game like WoW how does that work? Do you ship a keyboard and a mouse? Do you try to make a game that [adapts] to all the different controls and buttons? That's a porting issue. The bigger issue would be things like hard drives. I think WoW now is about 10 gigs and we're always pushing out more content. That's something cloud computing could eventually solve, but in the current generation of consoles that's a lot to deal with. You'd have to eat almost the entire hard drive, and there are Xbox consoles [sold to consumers] that don't have hard drives. So that's a big issue.
Another big issue is how to actually do patches because the certification process is pretty arduous to do that. I know that's something Microsoft is trying to work out so you can do more updates and the certification process is faster, but it's not going to be nearly as fast as we can do it. We just put it through our QA department and upload to our servers. ... Then, the other big issue is the business model. Right now, Microsoft and Sony charge platform fees for retail, but if you do an MMO there and it's subscription-based, they're going to want a cut of the subscription revenue too, and so that becomes a hurdle. So there's definitely a lot of hurdles right now for doing MMOs on a console, but it all can be overcome and I think in the next generation of consoles it'll be much easier.
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IG: Whenever I meet with other MMO developers/publishers and bring up WoW, they always insist that they don't try to compete with WoW because it's just at another level and it would be foolish to try to duplicate it. From your vast MMO knowledge, what advice would you give to other game makers trying to attract players to the MMO space?
RP: You have to first and foremost make a great game. So often I see with MMOs that they try to make a great social community, but they don't focus enough on the game... I think that's changed and they do focus more on the game now, but it really depends on what you want to do. If you want to make a game that's literally very much WoW-like, where there's a big immersive world and quest content and all that, then it's an uphill climb because you're not competing just with WoW as we shipped it, but you're also competing with all the content, patches and expansions. When we first came out, we looked at Everquest, and we kind of said the same things to ourselves: (We're competing with Everquest plus all the expansions.) So you have to be prepared for that and be able to make a pretty large product. With a lot of these games coming out, they have these spikes. They'll spike and do quite well and post big numbers for the first couple months, because what happens is all these WoW players do want a new MMO experience and they get excited, but they exhaust the content so fast that typically they come back to WoW. So if you want to make a game like that, you better deliver a lot of content. The second way to go is to deliver a different type of gameplay experience go with a different genre or IP or something like that where you're not being compared to WoW. Take something like a PlanetSide it's just not similar enough.
