Terra Nova put a quick post up about putting the Blizzard vs. WoW Glider case (and the Public Knowledge amicus brief) in the larger context of whether or not End User License Agreements are "good" or "bad," but even better than the post is the comments section. Lots of MMO heavies, including Richard Bartle, show up to break down just what Blizzard is trying to do with their claim against the botting software, and what they might end up doing to the industry at large.
No one is against Blizzard's goal of trying to stop cheaters. But the way Blizzard is going about it puts their stance in jeopardy -- they're saying that cheating in their MMO is a violation of copyright, and that is a completely different issue. Even Bartle himsef says this is an "ends justify the means" argument -- Blizzard is just using the copyright issue to get the judge to say that cheating is bad. As we posted the other day, Public Knowledge believes that any decision that says "yes, Glider breaks copyright law," could then be used as a precedent for calling any EULA violation a copyright violation.
Adam Hyland, in the Terra Nova thread, has the breakdown of outcomes: either a judge rules completely in favor of MDY/Glider (thus leaving every software maker open to EULA violations -- very unlikely), or a judge rules either narrowly in favor of Blizzard (saying that yes, cheating is wrong, but it's not a copyright issue), or wholly in favor of Blizzard (which Public Knowledge fears the most -- if breaking the EULA is a copyright violation, everyone who names their character XXNoobz0rXX is breaking copyright law). We'll have to see what comes out of this case, and hope that it's for the best for both Blizzard and their players.
Social networking around MMOs just hit the big time. Shawn Fanning, creator of Napster way back when, created a site called Rupture a while back that purported to be a social networking site based around World of Warcraft. Since then, the site seemingly hasn't done anything all that interesting -- they've added a few games and a few new features, but they haven't yet made it out of beta, and it wasn't apparent that anyone was real interested in Rupture.
Until now -- EA (yes, that EA) has ponied up a whopping $30 million to buy Rupture and all of its potential up. A move to put some social networking into play on their upcoming Warhammer Online title? Taking competition away from an upcoming official site covering all their games? Whatever EA is planning to do with Rupture, they're paying through the nose for it -- this makes the $1 million Wowhead buyout look like chump change.
Then again, if Rupture turns out to be the "Facebook for gamer"s that they hope to be, $30 million will look like a bargain. Either way, EA just put their money where their mouth is in the social networking MMO game.
World of Warcraft is doing terrific lately, but if you believe the hype, there's trouble on the horizon, and it's coming in the form of two big MMOs: Age of Conan and Warhammer Online. Greg Howson of Britain's Guardian newspaper has a column online in which he examines WoW's grip on MMO gamers and the two big games it'll face this year.
We'll leave the cross-MMO predictions to our great sister site Massively, but for their part, Blizzard says they're looking forward to a little competition in the MMO pool. Howson has J. Allen Brack, WoW's lead producer, saying that they're looking forward to playing the new games as well. And it's true -- real competition in this space might actually be a welcome thing to fans of all MMO games. Blizzard is working hard now, but they might actually be working harder if they had a competitor breathing down their necks.
Unfortunately for those who want to see that happen, it's going to be super hard for anyone to get near Blizzard's neck, much less near their game. As Lord of the Rings Online producer Ed Relf says to Howson, WoW is pretty much the iPod of the MMO space. It could just be that what Blizzard has done here -- bring an MMO to the forefront of gaming culture for an extended period of time -- is a deed that just can't be replicated, no matter how much money you put into making a game.
The9, which is the company that runs Blizzard's World of Warcraft in China, has announced today that the game has hit a full million concurrent players (which means that they've had one million people playing the game all at the same time) following the release of the Burning Crusade expansion there last year. Here in North America, concurrent users hasn't really ever been as high (although that is of course unofficial data, and we don't have information after the first month of this year). But MMOs are a different beast in China and other Asian countries -- not only do players pay-to-play (instead of a monthly fee, many players often pay hourly or daily, which means concurrent users equals paying users), and there are actually three games that have hit a million concurrent users over there (while here, WoW is far and above the largest MMO online).
Still, it's quite an achievement. It's interesting that it's coming so late in the product's life -- it seems that, just as over here, the expansion had a significant impact on player interest. Definitely a big milestone for Blizzard's game in China.
The National Post has an interview with an artist named Eddo Stern, who has created what he calls "sculptures" of figures from WoW. You can clearly see what looks like a dragon (Onyxia), Chuck Norris, and a Night Elf above, and there is apparently another sculpture in the series featuring Chuck Norris mashed up with something from Chronicles of Narnia. Finally, Stern apparently has created a video installation of a thread from the EverQuest forums called "Best... Flame War.... Ever." Sounds like pretty standard forum posturing to us -- a kid calls another guy a noob, said guy threatens to show up in RL for a fight and then talks about his buddies in Iraq.
Stern is supposedly playing with the virtual machismo of playing in MMOs, and how different the players supposedly are from the heroic character they're playing. Sounds like interesting stuff. While I don't really agree with his premise all that much (there are all kinds of people playing these games, and the vast majority of them don't really emulate Chuck Norris or try to pick fights on message boards), I like the techniques a lot -- those projections look pretty good. And his next project sounds even cooler: he's going to try and project a huge dimensional portal on the side of the highway in San Jose. Should be fun to see.
With my move to Austin complete, all that's left is to dominate South by Southwest (SXSW) this weekend. Pure West will be premiering their MMO documentary, Second Skin, on Friday, March 7th. Yours truly will be there to get the goods on all the WoW action.
Tune in this weekend for SXSW tips on video editing, sound formatting, and a slew of other fascinating topics. In the meantime, check out the high resolution version of the trailer.
A few days ago we tried to estimate how much Blizzard was making from those 10 million accounts, but now we know for sure: it's actually around $1.2 billion (which is up 58% from 2006). Now, you can probably see that that's only $500 million short of the estimate that we were trying to prove was wrong, but don't forget that the $1.2 billion isn't just subscription fees-- it includes all those sales of Burning Crusade last year at full release price. What Blizzard earns from subscription fees is just part of that total.
Still, a $1.5 billion year for Vivendi (especially when their other games divisions actually dropped by almost 30%) is good news for them. Of course, the question they (and more specifically, Activision Blizzard) have to be wondering about is if the success can continue. If Blizzard can release a new expansion this year and hold off the coming threats in the MMO industry, they'll be looking at even bigger numbers in 2008. But that's a lot to ask-- there's no question Vivendi (and Activision) will come up with huge amounts of profit this year, but growth of this magnitude will be a tough hill to climb.
MMO sites across the 'net have recently been abuzz with the question of what everyone's top ten MMOs are, inspired by a forum thread on f13.net. As of this morning, f13 has compiled the following rankings:
814 pts. - World of Warcraft 514 pts. - City of Heroes/Villains 471 pts. - Dark Age of Camelot 459 pts. - Ultima Online 450 pts. - EverQuest 435 pts. - Eve Online 349 pts. - EverQuest 2 348 pts. - Star Wars Galaxies 308 pts. - Lord of the Rings Online 219 pts. - Planetside
Though our game of choice, World of Warcraft, is ahead of the competition, this morning I'd like to ask you where WoW would rank in your own top ten list. Is it number one, matching f13's list, or not?
A while back, I found out from Gamebunny that a spoof on the MMO genre is an important part of The Simpsons Game, which just went on sale at the beginning of this month. We featured a Simpsons WoW spoof in a WoW Moviewatch some time ago, and as you can see from this trailer, a lot of the feeling and sound of the game is very reminiscent of WoW. Somehow this sort of making fun feels to me like the very height of praise for WoW and the impact it's had on the market. If the Simpsons make fun of it, it's got to be good.
This portion of the game is called "Neverquest," and I would definitely try it out if I could. Has anyone played this? Is it as fun as it seems in this video? Does it actually play at all like WoW plays, or is the similarity only in the look of it?
We've been working through the night to put the final touches on our new MMO-centric blog, Massively. Be the first to stop by and establish your FIRST POST cred in our comments.
So what should you expect to see on Massively? The same level of in-depth game coverage you see on WoW Insider, only for more MMOs than you can count -- even if you use all of your fingers and all of your toes. While WoW Insider will still be here, covering everything about World of Warcraft, we invite you to visit Massively for all the news on the other virtual worlds in the neigborhood. And who knows: you may just find a new MMO to love.
WoW tends to be a night time activity for most people, many of whom find that it's surprisingly easy to move from one objective to another and lose track of time until the wee hours of the morning. Some people I know sometimes stay up most of the night playing WoW, only to get an hour or two of sleep before whatever they have to do the next day. They're young and they say they make up that sleep at other times, but still, no one would argue that this sort of situation is ideal.
A recent study reported by CNN says they're not alone. People who play MMORPGs tend to sleep less and spend more time playing than players of other computer games. It may seem obvious, since MMOs are by nature somewhat of a time-sink, but there is undeniably something more to it; any activity can potentially be a time-sink, after all -- so what is it about MMOs that makes people actually sink time?
The answer is up for debate, of course, but one important factor is that WoW's community of players gives the accomplishments within the game a context of reality. The game's goals, dangling in front of us like carrots, would be nearly meaningless if we could only appreciate them in a single-player context, but with a whole realm of other players working alongside us to get them too, they can feel very important. If the choice is between a few hours having dreams you won't remember, or getting a little closer to riding an impressive dragon mount, then certainly sleep can seem boring and useless by comparison.
...or second choice? While those of us here at WoW Insider heavily obsess over World of Warcraft, we're vaguely aware that it's not the only game out there. But here and now we're not going to talk about World of Warcraft -- we're going to talk about the other games you play. Do you moonlight with another MMO? Tell us what your favorite is in our poll -- or if it's not an option on our poll, leave us a comment!
We have often speculated about who will step up to dethrone World of Warcraft in the MMO gaming market, and it appears that we finally may have a contender: Carbine Studios. What makes this particular Aliso Viejo-based development studio so unique isn't what they are working on -- another MMORPG with what appear to be sword-wielding aliens-- but who they are.
The dev team is made up of some of the best and brightest in the industry, including Kevin Beardslee, a lead designer on WoW. In fact, there are now 17 former Blizzard employees working under the Carbine label, and this bodes well for the creation of a game strong enough to rival the WoW powerhouse. NCSoft is very proud to have these guys working for them, and if the concept work is any indication, this might finally be the game that could become the next king of the MMO mountain.
Do you live and breathe massively multiplayer online games? Can you chart the history of your game characters all the way back to Ultima Online? Is the list of betas you've participated in enough to wallpaper a small room? Then you may just have what it makes to join us and make some money doing something you love -- writing about games. The Joystiq network is looking for some talented writers with an interest in those funny "massively multiplayer online" games to add to the team. Have we got your interest yet? Then keep reading for complete application instructions!
Fresh from the pages of the Sydney Morning Herald comes the news that World of Warcraft, and indeed all massive multiplayer online games, is unethical.
Jonathan Blow, developer of the game Braid, recently spoke at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image's FreePlay conference. Some of the things he said about MMO's are interesting, and some of the conclusions he reached seem erroneous to me.
Developers should provide activities that interest players "rather than stringing them along with little pieces of candy so that they'll suffer through terrible game play, but keep playing because they gain levels or new items", he says.
Well, so far so good. I don't really think anyone could disagree with that statement.
Mr Blow believes developers need to think about what their games are teaching players when they reward them for performing certain actions.
"That kind of reward system is very easily turned into a Pavlovian or Skinnerian scheme," he says. "It's considered best practice: schedule rewards for your player so that they don't get bored and give up on your game. That's actually exploitation."
Somewhat hyperbolic, but essentially accurate in terms of what the system is doing to get you to keep playing. Is it exploitation? Well, clearly Jonathan thinks so. We'll come back to why I don't agree in a moment.
Terra Nova put a quick post up about putting the Blizzard vs. WoW Glider case (and the Public Knowledge amicus brief) in the larger context of whether or not End User License Agreements are "good" or "bad," but even better than the post is the comments section. Lots of MMO heavies, including Richard Bartle, show up to break down just what Blizzard is trying to do with their claim against the botting software, and what they might end up doing to the industry at large.
Social networking around MMOs just hit the big time. Shawn Fanning, creator of Napster way back when, created a site called 
World of Warcraft is doing terrific lately, but if you believe the hype, there's trouble on the horizon, and it's coming in the form of two big MMOs: 
A few days ago 
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