World of Warcraft Interview (Penny Arcade)

Penny Arcade has posted an interview with an unnamed source at Blizzard concerning the recent server downtime issues that have been plaguing their MMORPG World of Warcraft. These issues have led Blizzard to announce last week that no new player subscriptions to the game would be allowed until these problems were resolved.

Here’s a clip from the Penny Arcade article (which can be found by scrolling down to the second post on the website):

You say that you sold six hundred thousand units. Is the game not capable of supporting this many users?

The short answer is “The game is capable of supporting this many players,” but it would probably be helpful to provide some background information. Based on our market analysis, we made some initial calculations about the size of the massively multiplayer online games market in the United States. We then accounted for new customers to the genre based on our previous games. Looking over this data, we did believe that there was the potential for an extremely sizable interest in a Blizzard MMOG. According to our research, other successful MMOGs in the U.S. had achieved roughly 300,000 subscribers after 12 months of operation. What ended up happening with World of Warcraft is that we achieved double these numbers in approximately the first six weeks of launch. We absolutely can support the number of copies we put on shelves, but we believed it would take us longer to get to this number in terms of players purchasing the game and logging on(…)

It’s also interesting to note that Penny Arcade had originally named World of Warcraft as its best game of 2004, but last week the site temporarily revoked the prestigious game award due to those same server issues. Let’s hope Blizzard gets these issues resolved shortly so that everyone can enjoy the game at its full potential.