14 DAY TRIAL // The undergoing Austin Game Convention saw a series of announcements and other unofficial rants from and about World of Warcraft enterprise. For starters, Blizzard confirmed on Wednesday that WoW surpassed the 7 million active subscribers limit worldwide. While it's hardly a surprise anymore, the gargantuan figures are rather staggering to say the least. Earlier this year, in March, officials presented the public with the six million mark. Despite often open criticism, within less than seven months, the game succeeded what other concurrent MMORPG titles never manage to do in a life time. In the mean time, Austin Game Convention saw a number of leading game developers talk about the state of the scene and subsequently link their affirmations to WoW.
NCsoft designer Scott Jennings shared his opinion with the audience: "WOW just had a patch a few weeks ago. As usual, their patch distribution completely failed. That may be because their patch distribution system is best described as 'Let's make something so frustrating people will just host the damn patches for us.' It's unacceptable. It amazes me that WOW's peer-to-peer distribution has become accepted practice. Why are you people putting up with it? Part of our core business as an MMO provider is providing the damn MMO." The issue is by no means recent and consists in a conundrum of marketing choices rather than anything else. Jennings also talked about the necessity of keeping servers up and running on contractual parameters as a form of respect towards the customers. WoW realms are known to have consistent delays every time a patch is applied during the weekly maintenance hours.
It then was BioWare's Austin studio director Richard Vogel to take the stand, as he reiterated the bitter feeling Electronic Entertainment Expo left him with: "When I went on the E3 floor, I looked at all the new games and said, 'I know how to play that. I know how to play that, I know how to play that. It's just like WOW'... Looking out at E3 this year, there is nothing innovative coming out in the next three years, and that's pretty sad."
Addressing the same issue on a slightly different note was Sony Online Entertainment studio technical director Lorin Jameson: "I feel like in many ways, people are copying WoW, but they're learning the wrong lessons," Jameson said. "The problem is, from a feature-set perspective, WoW is not an innovative game. It didn't do anything particularly new. The major innovation they did was they executed in a high-quality fashion and released with a depth of quality content that was not broken." Jameson noted that no other publisher ever thought of investing the estimated $50 million to produce the highly controversial MMORPG. Strong points also relate to the great amount of time the game spent in the beta stage, along with the substantial changes that ensued. As a general conclusion, none can deny Blizzard's merits as they forever entered MMORPG history with such a daring development endeavor.