Blizzard Entertainment - About New MMOs

You know what's probably one of my greatest regrets related to computer gaming? It's not the fact that - as most of my friends - I can't find enough time for gaming lately. It seems those theories saying that days are getting shorter as time goes by are true, but even if a day in 2010 would last 10 "1995 minutes," my problem remains - I missed playing the first game fantasy real-time strategy game from Blizzard Entertainment when it arrived on the market!

The game I am talking about is Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, and my regrets are related to the fact that I only got to see it after playing Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness like a madman. Obviously, the encounter was ruined, especially because there's a huge difference when it comes to graphics between the two games.

Now, let's leave my regrets aside and talk about Blizzard's Mike Morhaime opinion regarding new MMOs that try to conquer this huge online gaming market. Basically, it's the fact that everyone underestimates the huge logistics effort that comes with such a game, and even Blizzard Entertainment did it - "I think everyone who hasn't done it will probably underestimate the logistics behind it - we certainly did," said Morhaime.

"You focus on the things you are used to but you don't necessarily realize how difficult it is to scale up quickly and with an MMO you have to factor in providing 24/7 customer service, multiple languages... and that's not just hiring all those people to do customer service because internally within the organization you still have to support your employees and that's a whole lot of management infrastructure that doesn't exist before the launch." Oh, yeah, I fully agree with that. In the end, we're talking about an industry here, and not a game you make for your friends, gets uploaded to some freebies site, and an additional 100-1000 people start to play it.

Regarding their own World of Warcraft, Blizzard Entertainment claims that, after  Wrath of the Lich King, gamers will have to wait more than a year until the next update. According to the same Mike Morhaime, "The next one I think it is still unlikely that we're going to get it down to a calendar year. We're going to continue to try and decrease that but really the content of the expansion is more important and I think you guys are going to find with Wrath of the Lich King that it's going to be worth the wait."

Well, if the big ones have to spend so much time for updating an existing product...what about the little ones? I think we should respect at least the effort of some new companies trying to enter this MMO world, because it seems the path to success is longer and harder to finish than most of us would imagine...

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