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AGDC: How to rule the World (of Warcraft)

Elizabeth Harper
Updated ·9 min read


I'm attending the Austin Game Developers Conference this week, and today's big event is a keynote by Mike Morhaime, president and co-founder of Blizzard Entertainment. Titled How to Rule the World (of Warcraft): Ten Lessons, I doubt it covers guild management, PvP tactics, or farming for gold -- but I'm certainly interested in Morhaime's thoughts on the operation and administration of the Warcraft universe. Keep reading for a play-by-play of the keynote!

9:25 AM CST: The ballroom is filling up, and everyone is waiting for the show to get started.

9:36 AM CST: The ballroom is working its way towards full, all of us waiting on the man of the hour to show.



9:40 AM CST: A speaker apologizes for the lateness, but they wanted as many people to have the chance to attend as possible. World of Warcraft as a world-wide brand. Introducing Mike Morhaime to talk about 10 lessons learned from producing a global IP brand.


9:42 AM CST: The stuff we're doing today wouldn't have been previously possible. Our century is the first to have an electronic games industry and this generation is the first one to grow up playing games. Looking back at the 20th century, we've had:

  • A revolution in transportation, communication, information

  • Rate of technological progress has continued to increase exponentially

  • This is unprecedented in the history of the world (the real world)


9:45 AM CST: Start by looking back and seeing what has changed in just the past 100 years. Just 100 years ago (1907):

  • Only 8000 cars in the US

  • No air force

  • Only 8% of US homes had a phone

To put this in perspective, it was like World of Warcraft before getting a mount and without any flight paths.

9:46 AM CST: Moore's law. Technology is getting faster and better -- we're limited by the technology on our users' desktops.

9:48 AM CST: A brief history of Blizzard.

  • In 1991, 3 UCLA grads founded Blizzard Entertainment with $20,000 in capitol and two 386s.

  • A simpler time... no CD drives

  • Started out by doing conversion projects (ports)

  • First project was a racing game for Nintendo

  • Started building up teams capable of creating their own original projects, which they'd pitch. Selected as best software developer of 1993 by Video Games Magazine.

  • The 16-bit console market was starting to decline at this point, and they decided to create their first PC game, Warcraft.

  • Also, the internet was beginning to get big, and they started considering how to use this in their games.

  • In 1994, the company was sold to an education software company called Davidson & Associates. Public company, but majority owned by the Davidson family. They recognized that Blizzard knew what they were doing and would leave Blizzard full creative control while giving them access to their distribution systems, marketing, PR, etc.

  • Even though, through various mergers, they're now part of Vivendi, the initial deal with the Davidsons leaves them some autonomy.

9:54 AM CST: Blizzard's core philosophies.

  • Our first priority is to make great games. Gameplay first -- if we don't get this part right, none of the rest of it matters.

  • It all starts with a donut....

  • Building the brand

  • Resist the pressure to ship early. There's pressure from many sources to ship games in a timely fashion, but shipping early is risky.

10:04 AM CST:

  • Resist the pressure to do everything at once

10:05 AM CST: Blizzard's evolution as a global company.

  • They create all games in English, and then translate them to other languages.

  • Adapting to Europe

  • Adapting to Asia

  • Blizzard's sales have gradually become more global. Starcraft was the first game with a large Asian market, even though it wasn't designed with Asian markets in mind and, though most of its Asian gamers are in Korea, it's still not translated into Korean. After seeing Starcraft's success, however, Blizzard pushed to launch games world-wide at the same time. (Though WoW's launch was done in stages.)


10:10 AM CST: The myth of "regional taste"

  • Different styles of play exist everywhere, just in different concentration. Some people like PvP, some people like PvE, etc....

  • Blizzard doesn't think they need 15 different versions to appeal to each region's "taste" -- instead it's different styles of gameplay. Don't second-guess themselves designing for other people, "We're our target market." Don't play guessing games with what

  • But you do have to be sensitive to other cultures... An example of where Blizzard messed this up.

10:15 AM CST: WoW Operations Overview

  • Direct operations in key territories: North America, Europe, South Korea

  • Full customer support and server infrastructure in each of these

  • In Asia, instead of creating facilities themselves, Blizzard has partnered with others

10:18 AM CST: Estimating global demand

  • There's a lot of infrastructure that needs to be setup and planned in advance for a launch.

  • For WoW, they underestimated demand. They do midnight launches at the local Fry's Electronics, go down and sign boxes, etc. They went over to the WoW midnight launch and the line wrapped around the building three times -- they started thinking maybe they needed more hardware.

  • They had looked at the record from their previous games to estimate how far World of Warcraft would go. They presumed it couldn't sell faster than Warcraft III -- it had a monthly subscription fee, which would slow down adoption, some people would wait to see how it went, ect... But they were wrong.

  • They immediately had to play catch-up! The entire business needed to be scaled up overnight. More development staff, more IT staff... A live team dealing with issues and fixes currently on the game a different team to develop future features. Community management, customer service, management teams for all of these groups, human resources... "When we launched World of Warcraft, we didn't have a recruiting department."

  • "We were not prepared."

10:22 AM CST: Running a MMORPG is not just game development. It's a number of things that impact the players' experience that may be just as important as the game itself. Blizzard wasn't just a game developer or game publisher -- they were now a service company.

  • Blizzard had been running Battle.net, and felt they had some experience with online gaming, but this was a whole new game. (They thought they knew this!)

10:24 AM CST: Communicate (or people will make stuff up)

  • WoW's community team needed a process to keep the community form and keep staff (domestic and international) informed.

  • When a problem crops up, Blizzard may not yet know what the problem is or have any idea of how long it will take to fix while they're researching.

  • While you're not talking to your community, they're freaking out!

10:25 AM CST: Avoid financial incentives

  • If there's a financial incentive to do something, people will do it.

10:29 AM CST: Testing -- never trust version 1.0!

  • Everyone at Blizzard does an internal alpha test

  • When they think things are good, they move on to a public beta

  • Since they're constantly releasing new content for World of Warcraft, they've found it very valuable to have a test site (the PTRs). The game was initially launched without this, and they feel it hurt them.


10:31 AM CST: Burning Crusade Launch -- Blizzard tried to learn lessons from the game's initial launch.

  • Upgraded their entire infrastructure to eliminate potential bottlenecks

  • Added extra capacity in case their demand estimates were off again

  • This time we were prepared! The launch went very smoothly. The community service team said it was like a patch launch.

  • Did a world-wide launch with the game going out in the US and Europe at the same time. Almost like a new years' celebration with a new launch site opening every hour.

10:33 AM CST: Showing video from the European Burning Crusade launch.

10:37 AM CST: Thanks for coming!