Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

So this is marginally on topic, but I saw this on /. today. This is some kind of business porn bullshit from some local Orange County paper containing a bunch of platitudes about Blizzard's success with World of Warcraft. Frankly, this article could have been written about any arbitrary product, and is 50% bullshit. So I want to offer my 11 counterpoints on why WoW is such a hit.

1. Quality of people matters.

Blizzard hires quality people and generally pays them commensurate with their value. This might seem like it belongs in the source article, but in the games world, this is actually rare.

2. Innovation is bunk.

I love WoW, and I know the market, unlike the douche who writes for OCRegister. Yes, Blizzard makes exponential-ambient-ass-loads of money off WoW. However, and I have said this since the day the game shipped -- there is not a single iota of innovation anywhere in WoW. It is an identical, if not more limiting mechanical structure for a game relative to what other people had put out. In fact, the success of WoW might actually have a globally chilling effect on the MMOG market for the next decade. This, however, leads in to the next few points:

3. Fuck your product. Know, use, and love your competition.

Dogfooding is a common practice in all software businesses. Where you will really win is understanding why people love other products. Without naming any names here, a great example is NetBeans. I know Sun does all their internal development with NetBeans. They eat their own dogfood. What does this tell them? A good bit, really. However, it omits the knowledge of why people who use them like Eclipse or LOVE IntelliJ IDEA. You should have on your staff people who adore your competitors products, and use them all the time. This tells you not just where you can improve your product for the people who drank your kool-aid, but how you can WIN in the marketplace. WoW has almost no aspects to its gameplay that EverQuest didn't pioneer. All WoW is, in essence, is EQ with the crap that annoyed people fixed. Sony went wrong by actually trying to innovate (see #2) with EQ II, and that is (part of) why WoW ate their lunch.

4. Expand a market by doing better.

I see this all the time. Great example: MapQuest. MapQuest was a verb for a lot of people the same way "Google" is a verb. However, Google Maps came out and redefine the space. You can argue that Google Maps was innovative, but it wasn't "Cotton Gin" innovative. It was maybe "Fluorescent Light" innovative at best. They took an established market that they knew was big, and expanded it by pwning on the little things of the UI. WoW, in much the same way, came into a huge MMOG market, and expanded it by not shipping a shit product.

5. It is done when it is done.

This has been a hallmark of both Blizzard and id Software for years. I think neither company has made a ship date in two decades, but when they ship a product it is -- not just reasonably bug free -- but tweaked. For a game company this mean the mechanics are exceedingly well balanced. Buffs and Nerfs aside, it is clear to most people that WoW, and the whole *Craft brand, ships with an incredibly well balance gameplay for all the roles and classes when the game ships. Let me restate this point with another axiom: it matters less if it works 100%, than if it provides the utility the customer expects.

Note: Please don't confuse this with "Demand Excellence." If you are a manager and (a) you can't describe excellence when you see it or (b) don't use the competitors products (See above), then your "demand" is just so much posturing.

6. Personality matters, and that isn't from a committee.

WoW, like many Blizzard products, has a whole lot of character. Whether this is the Ghostbusters jokes in the Mage quests of WoW or the numerous SciFi classics references in StarCraft, the products reflect the love of the developers for genre products. This can't be designed by a marketing group. You need writers and developers who honest-to-god connect with the market. There was a chat at Java Posse Roundup with Joe about UI design and "how does this software make you feel." I brought up WoW and games in general, because this is one of the few areas in the industry where this isn't just a consideration, but the whole game plan (pun intended). The best way to establish brand loyalty is to make users feel connected with the people who develop the product. Oh, BTW...

7. Brand is incredibly important.

For all the talk in the business section about EA, Activision, or (Blizzard parent and Activision merger target) Vivendi, gamers know they are shit. Who cares about the shovelware churn factories? Sure, you might buy Madden whatever or NHLXX[XX], but in the end, you don't care about these companies. Yet another FIFA title doesn't matter nearly as much as StarCraft 2, Spore, or even Rainbow 6 Las Vegas 2. Pumping out products with marginal difference to collect your $60 and pass go again can make you a lot of money, but it won't earn you brand loyalty. However, when *Blizzard* the people who made both Diablo (huge in the US) and StarCraft (huge in the US but an absolute runnaway in Asia) say they are making an MMOG, assuming it matched 1..6 here, it will bury Lineage in Asia and the whole SOE portfolio in the US. Speaking of SOE...

8. Customer support matters.

Your product has bugs. Your product will get hacked. The question is, what happens when this happens? If your customer support experience has 1 bad outcome in 10, it will be all over the Internet. Moreover, if you have long term users, like many MMOGs do, if a customer needs help once a year, after 3 years a third of your user base hates your ever-loving guts. Seriously, ask anybody who played a Sony Online game.

9. Control expectations.

If you have a non-user deterministic software product (Google Search) you can talk about six-sigma uptime. Otherwise, if you have a product where the operational mechanics are critical (MMOG, Banking, ISPs) you will have downtime. Be upfront with the customers. Schedule outages fairly and tell your operations team to actually post to the Network Status page on your web site. While you deal with a lot of retards, if you have a status page and it shows you know and are making a good college try to deal with a problem, you will save yourself hundreds, if not thousands of contacts to customer support, and that will drive up your value in #8.

10. Operations is a competitive advantage.

TechOps is critical and has to be part of the development process. One of the reasons "patch day" (See #9) isn't as bad for WoW as [insert other preceeding MMOG here] is because they adopted BitTorrent for patch distribution. If you don't have your head firmly up your ass, you understand that BitTorrent increases burst network capacity (at least) linearly with demand for large files. For WoW this meant that in spite of limited download capacity, the distribution of 100+ MB patches never left the user screaming about sub-dialup download speeds. Of course, this also saved Blizzard tons of money. Whether you use Torrents like Blizzard or use high-burst capable systems like Amazon S3 and EC2, if you aren't planning for the surge, you are doing it wrong. Which leads to the last point...

11. Make it as easy as possible for me to give you money.

While surge in the first week brought the billing system for Star Wars Galaxies (read:Sony) to its knees, it didn't affect the game servers, so game servers were left idle why people TRiED to give SOE money. This goes to many other aspects of the purchase experience though. Fuck your demographic surveys. Seriously. Every screen between "Page 1 Hit" and "I have your money" reduces the chance of you getting paid. Moreoever, making it hard to get to a product on your web site is a bad idea. If you sell software and I can't buy it without ever talking to you, you are not likely going to get my money. This isn't just for games, this is about any kind of software or SaaS.

12: BONUS! Projects need to not just fail fast, they need vestment.

It was striking to me how "Ghost" the StarCraft franchise stealth game wasn't listed in the "Failed Blizzard Products" section of the article. Ghost was a hugely anticipated game and has teetered on being Blizzard's Duke Nukem Forever. However, the tale of why development stopped is compelling:

And as far as Ghost goes, we love that game concept and we consciously said that we're putting it on indefinite hold. The game didn't get made because we didn't love the character and we didn't love the concept. It didn't get made because it wasn't coming together in the way we wanted it to and we wanted to focus on our other projects. As I said earlier, if we had a development team available and they had a passion to do Ghost, we'd probably let them do it. That's what it would take.

Much like Google's controversial, and confusing to some, self-selection for teams, this shows that Blizzard doesn't want to put out a game where the team isn't on board with 1..5, even if the company is on board for the rest of these points.