World of Warcraft Q&A
The second part of today's Penny Arcade news update features a Q&A with an unnamed person at Blizzard, who is grilled about the World of Warcraft server problems which have plagued the game since launch.
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vezatron
replyThe PR rep does well on bending out the questions like "what would you have done differently". That was some pleasant marketing.
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oh please, it was a BS question deserving a BS answer. Hindsight is 20/20, how were they supposed to know it would sell twice the projected maximum figures for a year in 6 weeks? They couldn't.
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In all honesty, I had no doubt in my mind they would sell out almost immediately...
They really should have been prepared for that kind of response. If you put 600k copies on the market, and you're Blizzard, you're gonna sell 600k copies very quickly. The more I think about it the more I think it's common sense....-
Yeah, I really don't see how they underestimated the number of copies they'd sell or the number of people that would dog-pile their servers on day one. Market analysis, estimates, genre trends.. whatever. It was still bone-headed to not expect every single copy they printed to sell, and for every single one of those copies to get online right away. Unfortunately, the game is still feeling the shockwaves from that boneheaded move. I know they'll fix the problems eventually -- hopefully sooner rather than later -- but still.. ugh, cmon man.
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So you think it was boneheaded of them to look at the trends, say "The most popular games of this genre sell 300k copies in a year, we'll be prepared for twice that easily" and then have that number subscribe in 6 weeks? Like I said, hindsight is 20/20, where were you guys predicting this stuff beforehand? They're doing all that can be expected. When was the last time you've heard of a company withholding a top selling product to reduce the load on their current customers? There's nothing stopping blizzard from selling another 300k units and just saying FU to everyone whose on a high load server, but they're not.
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I certainly think it was. And stop defending points noone is attacking. All we are saying is Blizzard should have known better. Their products are always insanely huge, far beyond any competitors in any genre they produce products in. I think it WAS pretty obvious that they would sell double in a few weeks what others in the genre take a year to reach half the same number of sales... just like every other genre they release products in.
The data was there, they just didn't recognize their own popularity enough to act on it and instead choose to be conservative. Their hurting for it now (no not really, they are making a metric shit-ton of money), but oh well they're working on it and they will resolve it. That's what makes them the stellar company they are, despite this one particular failing. -
Yes.
"where were you guys predicting this stuff beforehand?" Uhh, well I don't work for Blizzard, so would it have mattered if I, or anyone, had "predicted" any of this beforehand on some internet forum? Nope.
And I'm not saying anything bad about what they're doing now. They're doing all that can be expected to fix the problems, I agree. No one here has said otherwise.-
I understand that, but you both of you make it sound like they did this out of ignorance. They should have ignored all precedant and research, and simply built their infrastructure around the assumption that every copy of the game produced would be sold? It's not like it's cheap, making the wrong decision could cost them millions. They went with the numbers, and they were wrong, but I'd hardly call it boneheaded. They were prepared as anyone would've been.
Basing assumptions off of how popular your previous games are is dangerous. Blizzard never asked anyone to pay $15 a month for their other games. Blizzard didn't want to dump hundreds of thousands of dollars into unnecessary infrastructure when every metric they had indicated it wouldn't even be remotely useful for another year at the earliest. I don't fault them for that.
On a side note, why people keep flocking to these high population servers is beyond me. Most complaints can be addressed by just avoiding them altogether. The problems are generally limited to the 20/88 overpopulated servers, it's not like there aren't enough servers to go around.
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Most mmorpgs only allow limited amount of stocks to sell. They were greedy and as a result players suffered.
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Try taking a marketing course. Blizzard estimated their potential impact, and the result was exceeding 100% of standard mmporg operations in a few months compared to established operations 12 months is unbelievable. The increase on gross margins on box sales is stupendous.
The only thing that seems slightly esque is that they would make so many boxes and take an inventory hit when they sold slowly...-
Dunno why you're being hard on the previous poster when he essentially hit on the same point you made.
Why would Blizzard have 600k copies in distribution channels if they knew that they couldn't handle that many users but figured that wasn't a problem because they couldn't possibly sell 600k copies? It doesn't make sense to me. Why didn't they release 300k copies for the first few months? This interview would have us believe that they did all this research and were caught off guard when their analysis turned out to be overly pessimistic. Well, if you trust your research so much, why did you get twice as many copies as you thought you could sell onto store shelves?
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