Hardcore Casual on (un)reasonable expectations

There's a good post over on Hardcore Casual concerning the use of World of Warcraft as a yardstick of success in the MMO industry. While we generally agree that using a game like WoW -- which by no means was expected to get this big -- as your goal for success is a bit of a pipe dream. We have to disagree with the post's claim that the movie and music industry doesn't try to do this as well.

Movie studios try to recreate the Harry Potter movies' success all the time and the music industry has also been busy trying to recreate the popularity of various bands for a while now. We guess our point is that this sort of behavior isn't just in the massively game industry, it's in pretty much every industry. It's human nature, really.

The post goes on to say that World of Warcraft isn't as great as 10 million subscribers suggests -- saying that while it's a great game it isn't multiple times better than other 'hit' MMOs out now. This is another point that we happen to feel a bit differently about, but just a bit. While having 10 million subscribers may not mean that your game is a hundred times better than any of its competition, it does say something about the quality of a game. The two biggest factors to WoWs success -- in our opinion, at least -- are it's accessibility and overall level of polish in terms of presentation (IE animations, art design, game lore, etc).

So yes, when you use a game that got bigger than anybody ever expected, you are setting yourself up for disaster. However, that isn't to say a developer shouldn't be looking at that game and thinking, "What does it do that I can learn from?" We certainly know Blizzard did just that when it was developing World of Warcraft and is still doing that today.