I don’t want this to sound like bragging, but I work in a company that deals with millions of customers (gamers) on daily basis. I won’t post any links here to avoid advertising, and of course I won’t post any personal information about me, but if you read all this post, I am sure you will find that my words are based on real experience and understanding the current market. I hope you will read the whole post because I am sure you will learn a lot.
Now, for clarity, our company works in mobile platforms, but trust me, PC and Mobile platforms have huge similarities, and in the end of this post you will understand what I mean. And, of course, many points here will be my personal view and opinion, but these are all based on my current knowledge of the market.
Let’s start answering some questions.
When I work with young or new developers, they often ask me and senior developers about some “keys to success.” But, I always want them to focus on negative experience more rather than the positive experience. In fact, the combination of collecting both positive and negative feedback is the best in my opinion. New studios show me 1-2 games with millions of downloads, but I show them thousands of games with less than 100 downloads. Am I discouraging them? No, I am just pointing to the huge competition. And I will discuss competition a lot today which Blizzard didn’t have since its release on 2005 to the time people noticed FF online. This post will sometimes criticize Blizzard’s approach of collecting feedback and data because their actions and words are indirectly showing that they are very sensitive to negative feedback and negative data. But let’s get back to newbies. If you are a person that wants to create a game product, you need to know that luck is a huge part of success in this field. Of course, if you know the market, do research, collect valuable data and be able to use this data for your own good, you might increase your chances of having a good product, but still, there is a huge part of luck involved in it. I want you guys to look at Legion, BFA, and Shadowlands as three different games, instead of three different patches. These are three different products in my eyes. Now, many new devs are asking, “If Legion was so great, why did they change it and made it worse?” You may be surprised, but the answer is a bit scientific and has a logical explanation.
In microeconomics, there is a term called “Law of diminishing marginal utility.” I will try to explain with simple words, it basically means that any product that people pay money for will become bad in their eyes one day. The law is even possible to calculate if you know some basic math. We won’t do that here, of course, but if you want to understand it better, it basically means the more you use the same service or product, the more you dislike and then hate it. You try a new chocolate bar and you think it’s delicious, but if you eat it every day, you will have less and less satisfaction by the time. Eventually, you might even hate it and think that the creators of this chocolate bar are now making it worse. If you take a break and eat it later, the law of diminishing marginal utility will decrease slower. This law works on literally everything, food, drinks, movies, games, and etc. So, what do people who run the games do to solve this? They make changes. Good or bad, it doesn’t matter. They need players to feel the game differently. Otherwise, they will get bored and stop playing it. Now, I already mentioned that competition is very important in this case. There was a time that I was unhappy with too much CC in Pandaria PvP (maybe it wasn’t true because I am not an expert PvPer, it’s just the way I felt), and I quit the game. But I came back soon because any other mmo I tried was not a competitor for WoW. But in the current stance of the market, FF and Lost Ark and other cool projects exist, so decisions about game changes need to be done very carefully and slowly. Understanding and feeling the presence of your competitor is very important. Let me bring you another example, FIFA. This is one of the most hated (check all their ratings), but one of the most played games in the world. How come? Because it has no competitors. Pro evolution soccer quit and only focuses on mobile and online mods, which makes FIFA players to stick with this game only. This reminds us to the previous times of WoW without FF, isn’t it? I am sure many players in the past quit, tried to find other mmo, but came back to WoW again because of this issue. Now, the worst part of this is that the people who run the game may actually become a bit snobbish and think that actually their game is good, that’s why player stick to them. And their terrible changes in the game will not make them lose their base audience simply because players have nowhere to go. What FIFA does is that it changes the gameplay every year. Sometimes makes it slower, sometimes makes it faster, but the key thing is that there is a change and the law of diminishing marginal utility doesn’t let the numbers to drop, plus the fact that there are no competitors. But, there is a huge BUT. FIFA keeps the core mechanics in the game, which means there are 11 players, and the one that scores the most goals wins. FIFA will never touch these core mechanics, but Blizzard will do sometimes. My experience in MMO is not big and I don’t know if this is good or bad. I am just stating some facts. And I honestly believe that all these BFA changes didn’t make them lose their playerbase because there was simply no competition. In other words, FF online will make WoW a better game. Just look at 9.1.5, it already shows that they want players back.
So, please don’t think that Blizzard can think of one core mechanic and it will be good and everyone will be happy with this. I already explained why this won’t happen because the law of diminishing marginal utility exist. In fact, if they stick to only one mechanic, it will kill the game even more. You have to do changes in order to keep the game fresh. Unfortunately, 13-14 years without competition made Blizzard feel that they can do whatever change they want without consequences.
Now let’s discuss some “key to success” stuff a bit more. In current market of gaming, there are two types of projects. Long-term loyal fanbase projects, and short-time super profitable projects. The first type comes very rarely. Even with many enthusiasts in the dev team, it’s hard to achieve because after 1-2 years, the game demands changes in order to keep it fresh, and with the huge competition, often these changes make these games worse and they lose income or even go bankrupt. Another issue is that a dev team might develop the game for 3-5 years, and until they finish, the market will be so different that nobody will want to play their game. So, in more cases the games on PC are short-term, just like Call of Duty. Every 1-2 years they make some little changes, keep the core mechanics, and produce a new game. Nobody in Activision seriously wants a Call of Duty game to live more than a year because it’s easier to make people purchase “a new game” rather than update the old one. I repeated this many times and I will do it again, this is all because of crazy competition. If you are still reading this, try to think of a game that has been released in the past 5 years and had good updates and kept loyal fanbase. There are very few of them that you can think, isn’t it? So, the current tendencies of the market put Blizzard in a very hard situation because it’s getting harder and harder to come up with changes in the game that will keep your fanbase loyal to you. We are all humans and we cannot be creative forever. But if we don’t do the changes in the game, it will die anyways.
Another “key to success” is the friendliness to new players. Now, this is the moment where I might be too harsh on Blizzard, but the current stance of WoW is super unfriendly to new players. If you are a long-term sort of a project, you heavily rely on new players. Now, you may want to argue that do this, and then do that, go to this vendor, do this quest chain first, go to Korthia first, and then go to PvP, and all this information that is in your head… will new players understand it? Most likely they will think that it’s complicated or nerdy, and won’t even try. Will they get the same information so “easily” without having your experience in the game? I want you guys to understand this clearly. Everything that is in your head, sounds clear and easy to you. But you can’t expect a total stranger to understand it. I play since 2011 (with big pauses), and I often spend so much time reading guides. New players won’t do that, at least few of them will agree. It’s a common misconception that WoW is only for old fanbase of the game. New players want to give it a try too. The reality is that the game is trying to attract new players with questionable methods, like letting them buy gold for real money, or making PvP overly aggressive.I know many teenagers who want to start a career of a developer and they tried WoW too. The key word here is “tried” because they absolutely got lost in the game. If they decided to PvP… I don’t want to discuss this and explain why it’s bad. The numbers of PvP events in overall game proves that it’s not a good time to PvP. Maybe you are adaptive and you are enjoying it, but you are you, and statistics are statistics. When Skill Capped releases a video with title 'Why Shadowland PvP is broken," means it is arguably not a good time for PvP ing.
Think about it, even for the previous players it is hard to come back to game. Now imagine a person who tries WoW the first time. Blizzard is trying to make some game aspects casual, so new players will be easier to attract, but it doesn’t work like that. Simple does not equal to fun.
So, what is fun? There are some key concepts of fun in PvP or multiplayer games.
- Awarding. You need to make sure that players have the feeling of satisfaction by achieving certain goals.
- Cheating. You need to make sure that players are able to legally cheat in the game with gameplay mechanics. For example, providing them some overpowerful defensive skills, or CC’s, or allowing them to skip some boring mob trash, or whatever else.
- Variety. You need to make sure that players have variety of options in the game events. The usage of these actions can be low, but the players need to know that these choices exist. It gives them the feeling of an open world and the feeling of actually making choices in the game.
- Fairness. You need to make sure that cheating aspects in the game need to be gameplay based, such as CC or stealth of rogue, and you need to make sure that here is no real money involvement in cheating if the game is paid. In Free-to-play games players have different feelings towards microtransactions. In some Asian markets, players will be even unsatisfied if the game doesn’t provide them microtransactions and pay-to-win systems because in their mentality, it’s fair that payer is the winner. Because of my job specifications, I lived in China for 5 year, and I can read and understand Mandarin. And trust me, the issues that EU and US players are feeling towards pay-to-win existence is absolutely nonsense for them. So, how to deal with such issue? Chinese market is huge too. The answer is, you need to separate the fairness systems regionally.
I want to discuss the collecting negative data a bit more, and finish with this post. In my opinion, success comes with self-criticism. We understand that you guys spent a lot of time developing conduit, and covenant, and thorghast, and other stuff in the game that are so controversial. But, it happens. When you are spending so much time on something, you need to purposely lower your expectations. Just because you spent a year making these systems, it doesn’t mean people will like it. And I understand your frustration when players want massive changes because it’s a lot of work, and basically it throws in the trash all your previous work, but that’s how the market works now. You need to be able to do quick changes.I nFF if players dislike something new, developers will quickly respond because they have competition, you. Anyone who works for Blizz should not focus on the little positive feedback, quite the opposite. You need to focus on the negative feedback and never take any toxicity or insult personally and never make decisions based on your emotions. When you are emotional, irrational thoughts in your head sound so logical! But then, player base almost halves, and you announce 9.1.5, but in your post you don’t acknowledge, or pretend to not to acknowledge what happened in reality. In my experience, we posted games on mobile platforms, and we got 1 stars and very harsh insulting and harassments to us. Think about it, we had users who literally spent 10 seconds in the game, uninstalled it, gave us 1 star, insulted all the team and their families, and left. So what? Do we take them seriously? No. But there are so many 1 star reviews that provide us valuable feedback, and when we see that overall rating of the game is lower than 3 stars, we collect the feedback and at least try to test and see if that’s the reason. Yes, sometimes you can have success and you won’t acknowledge why you have it. You may have opinions why you are successful, but reality will be different. For example, a person who got friends with corrupt governments of some countries may be able to make millions of dollars on selling oil or gas. But if you ask why they are successful, they might say, “Because I am humble and hardworking,” and believe it or not, they mean it. Blizzard, you are almost no different from him. You lost your sense of reality. And when the numbers started to drop dramatically, it was a cold shower.
Remember Battlefield 5? Remember how arrogant were Dice to their fanbase? And when their numbers decreased and they got huge anti-records, they announced new Battliefled that all players have been waiting for. And they show how the pilot jumps off the plane, uses RPG ani-tank weapon, and comes back to the aircraft again. That was an apology from them to their players. It was a message like, “guys, we are the same cute Dice, please come back.” I really hope you will have the same sense and do what players actually want.
There are so many other things I wanted to discuss, but the post is getting gigantic. My summary why I believe that WoW will be fine is that there is a huge competition, and they acknowledged it, and they are working on it. I am pretty sure, what comes after 9.1.5 will be even better because they are a megacompany that needs money, and money comes from big numbers of player base.
One last mention, please allow players who don’t have active subscription to discuss in the forum. This is a bit unfair. You are only allowing people who play the game to talk. And it’s possible that people who play the game now are somewhat satisfied and it might create the illusion that players are happy with the current stance of the game. I already said, if you focus only on the positive feedback, you will go nowhere.
Thanks for reading this gigantic post.