Ask HN: Why is world of warcraft so successful?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=226657

by elai • 18 years ago

25 40 18 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Why is world of warcraft so successful? What about it made it that it became the largest and most profitable MMO game of all time? Is it the first MMO that tried to appeal to non-hardcore gamers? Or a lot more than that? The reason why I ask is that I would like to try to replicate it's social & 'marketing' ideas to a facebook app.

PieSquared• 18 years ago

Well, one thing that definitely contributed was that Blizzard had already established the scene for with Warcraft III, so people sort of knew what type of world to expect. Also, Blizzard's other games (Starcraft and Warcraft mainly) were a huge success, so that gave WoW more credibility.

noodle• 18 years ago

it appealed to both hardcore and casual gamers, and at least for a while, was successful in that respect. it didn't require the latest and greatest gaming rig to run it and enjoy it. there is a huge social aspect to it, which i think luckily coincided with the development of solid VOIP technology to make it more than just text-based communications. it came from an established company with a guaranteed fanbase -- it didn't have to build itself up from the ground level.

i used to play.

alaskamiller• 18 years ago

- Quality. Blizzard-level of quality is hard to attain; they perfect every little detail.

- Approachability. From newbies to hardcore players, it entices them in and keeps them entertained.

- Sociability. More times than not, people just chat while standing around and make friends. Or join guilds and participate in the bigger quests.

- Addictive. For the Diablo hack and slash crowds.

jshen• 18 years ago

"Blizzard-level of quality is hard to attain; they perfect every little detail."

This isn't literally true, but the point you're getting at is. They take the time to do things well. This is seen by how often they delay releasing games, patches, etc. Very few businesses have the balls to say, it's not ready and we're pushing back our deadlines.

lackbeard• 18 years ago

Right. They don't perfect everything. But they always do an impressive job. Far better than most. Here's something Raph Koster recorded Rob Pardo (Blizzard VP) saying at a conference once. I thought it was good:

"The Blizzard polish. Polish is the word associated with us in reviews. There’s this big assumption that polish is something you do in the end. That we’re successful because we spend 6-12 months at the end polishing. We do get more time, but we do the polish right from the beginning. It’s a constant effort. You have to have a culture of polish. Everyone has to be bought into it and you have to constantly preach it. if you leave it to the end, it’ll be more difficult.

You’ll get a lot of “why does it matter that this feature is polished? It’s so small.” But people notice 1000s of polished features, not the single polished feature."

ilamont• 18 years ago

The social element, the rich and expandable storylines, and the relatively low hardware threshhold to play it. Internationalization helped a ton, as well. In China, it's a pop-culture phenomenon -- advertisements for other brands use WoW characters a lot.

And, of course, Blizzard/WoW has a sustainable business model.

I have to say, however, that the UI and some of the complexity related to tools and weapons is a bit of a turn-off, and is probably a barrier to more widespread subscriptions, IMHO.

xlnt• 18 years ago

WoW has very repetitive PvM gameplay (so do its competitors). No one seems to mind very much. I guess Blizzard's designers understand what most people want in a game much better than I do (I love Warcraft 3. I tried to play WoW, but got bored.)

iron_ball• 18 years ago

VOIP isn't it. Only the hardcore had third-party VOIP applications like TeamSpeak and Ventrilo, and in-game VOIP is a very recent thing.

Instead, I can break the game's success into three aspects: initial install, short-term retention, and long-term retention.

Getting people to even pick up a game (or register with a webapp) is one of the hardest parts. World of Warcraft came into the space with a huge lead in that respect. With the established base of extremely loyal fans, and giant brand recognition in its space, it was sure to get massive attention. The vast majority of new products cannot hope for a thousandth of the eager launch-day users WoW had. Blizzard reaped the fruits of years of brand-building and marketing.

Short-term retention is covered in other comments. The game runs well on old hardware, looks pretty due to great art direction, plays smoothly, doles out a lot of quick rewards, and so on. Over the first few weeks, the player is bombarded with tons of fun things to do and sharp increases in character power.

Long-term retention is the real magnet, though: the game never becomes a chore until the very end. All the way to the max level, the player is led from locale to locale, challenge to challenge, in a masterly display of game design. Compare the solo-friendly WoW leveling experience with the infamous "hell levels" of Everquest.

And what's more, people seem to keep playing at the maximum level, even if they are NOT tackling the high-end raid content. (For the uninitiated, a "raid" is an extremely difficult, often murderously difficult game area whose enemies can only be defeated with a level of teamwork, personal skill, and above all time investment beyond the capabilities of most players.)

Raid gamers are not where Blizzard is making its bread and butter. Instead, the people WoW is retaining are the people who are doing repetitive, seldom-updated content in exchange for slow, incremental, but guaranteed rewards. For example, there is a Capture the Flag team-battle level that has not changed in years -- and people still play it, over and over, in exchange for a handful of points each time. Thousands and thousands of these points can be traded in for a top-notch weapon.

The final major retention pull for WoW is the social aspect: after a while, you aren't playing so you can have fun. You're playing so OTHER people can have fun. You don't want to let down your team, so you log in for scheduled events whether you like it or not. This afflicts raid and "casual" players alike, to different degrees.

So, you want to make a Facebook app that taps into the same qualities as WoW? Make it extremely fun to use at first; give users a sense of reward and increasing power/ability; then make the rewards come slower and slower, in less and less value, for the same amount of work. Just like the diminishing returns from a drug addiction... oh, and somehow monetize it.

Goladus4• 18 years ago

I agree with most of this. EQ's "hell levels" are something of a red herring, however, given your point about the game becoming dull. Hell levels were more of an annoying glitch. Everquest didn't become dull because of hell levels, it became dull because most classes didn't have enough to do in typical combat situations.

Big penalties for failure, a low tolerance for minor mistakes, and a limited set of tools for players to win with meant that typical combat scenarios tended to have very little variance. Players usually did the same thing every time. In WoW there's a lot more room to experiment and recover from mistakes without losing the battle. The result is that for most people, battle tends to be more dynamic.

trevelyan• 18 years ago

There's also a huge install base in Internet cafes in China and Korea. College kids spend a huge amount of time socializing online there, which is where the major marketing push is made.

roberto• 18 years ago

So, you have no idea why it's successful, and yet you want to replicate it on a facebook app? A facebook app is not a mmorpg, so you'd have to understand in depth the success of WoW to map it onto a completely different environment, drawing analogies from one world to the other.

It would be the same to ask, Why is the Porsche so successful? I want to replicate its ideas on a facebook app...

lagringa• 18 years ago

Two great links for you: http://www.psychochild.org/?p=409 leveraging psychology for MMORPGs and http://www.baychi.org/calendar/20080408/ game mechanics in social sofware

elai• 18 years ago

The app is a game, it's social, it's networked. It's more like, why is toyota so successful, i want to replicate it's ideas for a motorcycle company...

notauser• 18 years ago

I played it for quite a while, which is really unusual for me (I generally get bored of a game after about 20 minutes.) There were a few factors for getting it:

- My friends were going to play it. So I added my pre-order to the list.

- It was really easy to get into, with some fun intro quests.

- The point and click skill level was really low.

The reasons I carried on playing were (somewhat) different:

- I made lots of friends and acquired power and influence (establishing a raiding guild.)

- Regular rewards. Damn you Pavlov and your accursed bell.

- Customisable interface. It was my game in their environment.

And the reasons I left:

- I felt I had gained as much out of the leadership experience as I was going to get.

- My other projects were being neglected and I wanted to catch up.

- Frequency of reward dropped (as I mostly had them all).

All in all it was a pretty worthwhile. Certainly managing a raiding guild, running an engineering team, and herding cats have many things in common. (Scarcity of loot/loot/fish for example.) And after a year break from personal projects I bounced back into it with a vengeance and extra energy - I got a book published, passed the first of my finance exams, and got back into programming all at the same time.

bprater• 18 years ago

Awesome thread. Compare this to your own business models folks, there is gold in understanding how Wow because such a powerhouse. You may not be able to apply all the principals, but just a few can make a world of difference in your start up.

We often talk about community on our sites. You ain't seen real community until seen Wow after you've played any serious amount of time. I have many real-life friends that I've met in real-life through playing the game.

mattmaroon2• 18 years ago

I think it's mostly escapism. Everyone here has a lot of reasons why people are choosing this form of escapism over another like television or some other MMORPG, and a lot of them are good ones, but in the end it just comes down to the game being engaging enough that it makes you forget about all of the troubles in your life for a few hours while you play it.

I would argue that most people who engage in it (or any other form of escapism) for a large number of hours are depressed.

shiranaihito• 18 years ago

Unfortunately for me, I agree..

Of course the reasons why it works so well as "an escape" are what people have listed in this thread already.

mattmaroon2• 18 years ago

Yes. I think it's very valuable to ask why people cho0se this form of escapism over another, like sports, television, body building, or any of the others available. There are more and more every year.

But if you want to replicate it, I think the biggest thing to understand is that it is escapism. That was the not very well-received point of my comment.

shaurz• 18 years ago

I believe it is laced with crack.

imperator• 18 years ago

The reasons are manifold.

1. They took every lesson from every MMORPG before them, and put it into WoW. This means things like PvP flags, and not having death exact a heavy toll. This was not obvious to WoW's predecessors. Generally, Blizzard does not enter a market first, they wait, let others innovate, and then combine features into a heavily polished product crafted around an easily understood theme.

2. They reward human psychological tendencies to generate habits. This is done through staging a series of rewarding goals. The repetitive parts are not so repetitive that you lose sight of the goal. If the user can hold the goal in their mind and find achieving it satisfying, then a player will return multiple times to what is essentially the same task.

3. They capitalize off of the desire for novelty. Blizzard did a great job of establishing variance in terrain, music, audio, objectives, and creatures. Little touches like non-enemy animals roaming the land broke up the environment into a place that felt diverse enough to be real. Providing places with enough characteristics to endow unique identity made the place even more memorable. A heavily carpeted room, a place that emanated foreboding, or a bizarrely twisted tree. Places like that were memorable and this prevented them from entering into the tedium.

4. They struck the perfect balance between the feeling of work and play by fostering the social component well. Try playing WoW by yourself and with others. These will be very different experiences. One will eventually be a boring game, and the other will incorporate the pleasant grooming of conversation so well, you'll discover you're talking more than playing the game.

gregstoll• 18 years ago

Points that come to mind:

- The leveling curve is just about right. At the beginning you gain levels very quickly, and with them new and exciting abilities. You always feel like you're making progress, be it with better spells, better gear, getting to adventure in new zones, etc.

- It's very casual-friendly. When you're logged out you earn "rest XP" which, upon logging back in, lets you level faster, so you don't have to play in large chunks of time to make progress. It's also pretty easy to level all the way up to 70 (max level) playing by yourself.

- There's a surprising amount of humor (pop culture references, etc.) which is a nice bonus.

- There are lots of things to do even at max level - this wasn't as true in the past but you can do daily quests, play in one of the four PvP battlegrounds, join an arena team, do raids, etc.

keefe• 18 years ago

I think that it comes down to the same reason Civ was such a popular franchise. Whenever you finish one thing, there's another thing to do. Oh, just a few more points until I level... oh, I can finish this dungeon and get a new sword. There's also the social aspects of that - you do a dungeon with some friends, get involved in their dungeons later so it has a social motivation for returning as well. I think you also get emotionally attached to your character, and don't want to see him deleted by canceling your account.

kn0thing• 18 years ago

Can't explain, playing WoW.

giles_bowkett• 18 years ago

Addiction.

Harkins• 18 years ago

A lot of good thinking about design of virtual worlds can be found in the archives of the mud-dev and mud-dev2 lists. They've run for ~10 years and include many of the game designers of the current hit games.

axod2• 18 years ago

WoW is a commercial success, but I have to say "Is it a moral success?". Is it good for people to get so immersed? To spend their life playing a game like this?

I've seen a lot of people get absolutely addicted to the point where they will do nothing else.

I think the best thing in terms of profit, and worst thing in terms of decency etc, is that the game never ends. You never win.

Personally, I don't think games like WoW are healthy.

henning3• 18 years ago

It takes incredible amounts of time, but when you get to Tier Six gear or the highest-level PVP rewards, the game is pretty much over and you can't go any further.

axod2• 18 years ago

I thought they kept building new worlds and challenges etc? I haven't played it though...

henning3• 18 years ago

I play WoW about 20+ hours a week (Selecta on Spirestone) and I have played through most of the pre-expansion pack content, so let me comment on this from personal experience.

Things that make WoW successful are part of many good games:

1) Feelings of accomplishment - you come back to a character every time that you yourself built up. The persistent nature of the game (rather than a first person shooter where every game is a blank slate) is compelling.

2) Working with others to achieve a common goal - it's fun to team up with people and take on hard bosses that none of you could defeat individually, or even in smaller groups. The later stages of the game feature god-like foes that require dozens of people working in very, very tight cooperation to defeat, or else everyone will certainly be killed (Sunwell Plateau, etc.). In other words, 50 people randomly banging on the harder bosses will not suffice because the bosses are so powerful they can simply divide and conquer. It really is challenging.

Many games have those qualities. What makes WoW better than them?

Well, basically WoW corrected a lot of EverQuest's flaws. That's basically it. They had the second-comer advantage in that. It had Blizzard's name behind it, too (Starcraft, Diablo - both highly successful franchises in their own right).

Plus, there's a real in-game economy, with a value-added chain and everything (gather or buy raw materials -> turn them into a valuable item -> sell the valuable item at a higher price than the cost of the materials). The game's currency is valuable even up to high levels in the game (although there are many guilds sitting on hundreds of thousands of gold with nothing to really spend it on -- it doesn't scale that high). But, it is definitely valuable to have thousands and thousands of gold.

You can't easily "replicate" something you have absolutely no comprehension of.

Don't fucking try to treat it like a business application, because it isn't.

alex_c• 18 years ago

Short answer: you can't.

Long answer: some of the answers in this thread would in theory apply to any MMORPG, but the obvious reality is that most MMORPGs aren't huge successes like WoW.

Some of my best guesses: - great art direction. All the locations, characters, monsters and weapons are colorful and unique. Look at any screenshot and chances are you can tell at a glance WHERE in the game world it is - that's not true for many games out there. - Blizzard has perfected an effort/reward system more finely tuned and addictive than that of any other company out there. It started in Diablo and they perfected it in Diablo II - WoW is just a continuation. Advancing is easier than in other games, but you know that the next reward is just around the corner so you play "just 5 more minutes". In addition, the rewards somehow avoid being repetitive - it doesn't feel like you're just replacing a 5 with a 6 somewhere, like in other games. As another poster mentioned, it's incredibly Pavlovian. - Something for everyone. WoW actually manages to be engaging for both casual and hardcore players, for two friends or a couple playing together and for a large clan who know each other from previous games.

I don't think Blizzard put in any really innovative ideas in WoW, but their execution was far, far beyond what anyone else has done. Of course, after all their previous hits, they also had the resources to pull it off.

LPTS• 18 years ago

It offered people who are too scared of living to get out and do something in the world an addictive way to enjoy the illusion they have accomplished something without requiring them to engage in life?

If you are really sitting around thinking "I want to know how to put ideas from WOW into facebook" you have bigger questions you should be concerned with then "why is WOW so successful." Like "Where is there an actual problem I can solve?" "How can I use my logic and critical thinking skills on my process of deciding what problems to be concerned with and what is important in life?" "Why the hell do I even exist in the twenty first century, with this limitless possibility, and what do I really need to get done before I die?" and "Is mixing facebook apps with WOW really better for the world, from a big picture perspective, then suicide?"

I think if you focus on those other questions, this WOW question will clear itself up like magic.

tokipin• 18 years ago

i think it's simply that Blizzard actually thinks about what they're doing. i played various MMORPG's, and many of them had such obvious game design no nos -- like losing experience upon death

it's as if the companies were just shoving together a collection of "challenging things," and thinking they were making a game

so i guess those companies were trying to manufacture games, while blizzard crafts them

subwindow2• 18 years ago

Having spent half of the past 10 years addicted to MMO's, I can tell you:

Addiction via immersion and frequent incremental rewards.

One: you immerse the user in the game environment so that all of their attention is focused on the game world.

Two: using that focus, you provide a system wherein there is the constant availability of incremental rewards. In games like WoW, every single minute spent goes toward achieving a specific incremental reward. You kill a monster: you get a reward (loot + experience), you go to the nearest town: you get new quests. The key is to have a near-term action (< 5 minutes) available to the user at ALL TIMES where they can achieve some kind of small reward. Larger incremental rewards (levels, skills, raids) are available to keep attention once the smaller rewards become rote.

Look at anything that's ever been called addictive- not just video games. I bet that they share these two traits, and their addictiveness is directly proportional to how well they accomplish these goals.

Can these be applied to a facebook app? Maybe. Would you look sleazy trying to do it with a facebook app? Definitely.

Goladus4• 18 years ago

Everquest was just as addictive as WoW. In many was EQ and Final Fantasy XI were both more addictive and more immersive than WoW, yet WoW's success dwarfs them both. It can't be the only explanation.

subwindow2• 18 years ago

WoW was much better at linking together the big rewards than EQ or FFXI were (I've played all three, along with Asheron's Call 1&2, Dark Age of Camelot, Ragnarok Online, Eve Online and Lord of the Rings Online [Good God!]).

With EQ, big rewards were frequently too far in between (especially hell levels and gaps between major "new spell" levels), which led to people quitting when their addiction waned (ie, minor rewards were considered rote, major rewards non-existent or too far away). Also, the end game (at least until Velious) wasn't nearly as developed as WoW's is, and relied on raids held by huge guilds or even the entire server. This led to higher-level players frequently not having access to any near-term rewards, and eventually losing the addiction.

FFXI's problem was with lower levels. The reward for gaining a level didn't seem as important as in either EQ or WoW. Equipment never seemed like a major reward either, as most players essentially rented equipment from the auction houses.

Goladus4• 18 years ago

Why is WoW successful?

(1) They started with the successful and highly addictive Everquest format.

(2) They used a small number of classes, carefully and creatively allocating abilities to each one in order to make that class fun to play: either solo or in a group. They also tweaked the mana/melee balance to be more flexible and interesting and combat was generally faster paced than in other MMORPGs.

(3) They set the bar for failure lower, and the penalty for failure was less punishing. This encouraged less-hardcore players to experiment more and try different things, rather than always sticking to the safest tactic.

(4) They designed for PvP from the start.

(2) + (3) + (4) = Replayability. People log in to play WoW because it's fun to play not just because they want to hit the next level.

(5) They used frequent, incremental rewards so that players logged out always having felt as if they accomplished something.

(6) They started with a huge Warcraft fanbase, and marketed to their audience with hip, exiting videos and information.

(7) They kept system requirements LOW. They focused on getting realism through animations and colorful symbolism rather than high poly counts. They avoided the "uncanny valley" of character models while delivering a game that players could play on the hardware they already owned.

(8) They marketed the game worldwide.

(9) The game loads quickly, once it's patched. You can decide you want to play WoW and be online in a minute or so. (Others may be better now, but when WoW came out EQ took 5-10 minutes from desktop to spawning in-game)

(10) Instanced content made it easy to avoid the more annoying social aspects of an MMORPG. Fighting for spawns was fun in EQ, but that's not needed in WoW because the combat engine is better.

bayareaguy• 18 years ago

My son and daughter were both into this game for about a year before they lost interest and decided they would rather save their money or spend it on other things.

I think the thing they liked the most at the start was the fact that there were a relatively large amount of things they could do and discover and then share and showoff.

But after they played for a while I noticed they stopped wanting to show me neat new stuff in the game and instead tell me about the people they were playing with. I was really surprised when I learned that my then 13 year old son was regularly spending hours online with armed service personnel stationed in Europe, disabled diabetics from Iowa in their 40's, thirty-something gay couples from Palo Alto, off-duty nurses from Los Angeles, etc. In short just about every kind of person he would never otherwise consider part of his social group.

So personally I think the real reason it is successful is that it seems to be able to create the same kind of opportunity for shared experience across cultures in much the same way early radio and television did.

jsmcgd• 18 years ago

There are many reasons why it is successful. However for me the most salient reason is that it strongly appeals to casual girl gamers. This demographic can elevate a game to the stratosphere a la sims.

Ask HN: Why is world of warcraft so successful?

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