WOW! WoW doubles 12-month player projections - in 6 weeks!

Odin · Post by **Odin** » Mon Jan 24, 2005 9:07 pm

Found this on Blues News...

There's a Blizzard Q&A on the main page at Penny Arcade (thanks Grasman) discussing World of Warcraft's woes: "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."

Lee · Post by **Lee** » Mon Jan 24, 2005 10:49 pm

Tiny Ogre is going to be a very, very rich man.

GungHo · Post by **GungHo** » Tue Jan 25, 2005 6:36 am

Lee wrote:Tiny Ogre is going to be a very, very rich man.

Going to be?

Pretty sure he already is, if he's been with Blizzard for any length of time. I mean how many copies did Diablow(sp?

) sell? A gazillion? Or was it a googleplex?

WoW is a good game though; you can tell they put time, energy, and most importantly, thought into making it. Good for them.

Butterknife · Post by **Butterknife** » Tue Jan 25, 2005 11:35 am

Lee wrote:Tiny Ogre is going to be a very, very rich man.

Only if he's an owner. Otherwise it's probably just a good job with good benefits. My company makes tons of money, but I live on a shoestring -- and it will always be that way. There isn't much of any "trickle-down" in the video game industry, I'd be surprised if Blizzard were any different.

Ralph-Wiggum · Post by **Ralph-Wiggum** » Tue Jan 25, 2005 11:42 am

But I bet he gets to play WoW for free. That's an extra 15 bucks a month!

fancydirt · Post by **fancydirt** » Tue Jan 25, 2005 11:56 am

Butterknife wrote:
Lee wrote:Tiny Ogre is going to be a very, very rich man.
Only if he's an owner.

Pretty sure he's the lead designer, for what it's worth.

Butterknife · Post by **Butterknife** » Tue Jan 25, 2005 12:29 pm

fancydirt wrote:
Butterknife wrote:
Lee wrote:Tiny Ogre is going to be a very, very rich man.
Only if he's an owner.
Pretty sure he's the lead designer, for what it's worth.

Really? I was under the impression that he was a programmer. Wonder where I picked that up from?

LawBeefaroni · Post by **LawBeefaroni** » Tue Jan 25, 2005 12:54 pm

WoW credits at Moby.

Ralph-Wiggum · Post by **Ralph-Wiggum** » Tue Jan 25, 2005 1:46 pm

LawBeefaroni wrote:WoW credits at Moby.

What's Tiny Ogre's name?

LawBeefaroni · Post by **LawBeefaroni** » Tue Jan 25, 2005 2:01 pm

Ralph-Wiggum wrote:
LawBeefaroni wrote:WoW credits at Moby.
What's Tiny Ogre's name?

Tiny Ogre aka TO aka Terrell Owens.

Right?

Odin · Post by **Odin** » Tue Jan 25, 2005 2:10 pm

LawBeefaroni wrote:
Ralph-Wiggum wrote:
LawBeefaroni wrote:WoW credits at Moby.
What's Tiny Ogre's name?
Tiny Ogre aka TO aka Terrell Owens.

Right?

Dunno, but I didn't find that name on that page (either doing a visual search or using Find...). I did find GG's own Lyno Hychong though. Dunno if he ever made it over to OO.

Sith

LawBeefaroni · Post by **LawBeefaroni** » Tue Jan 25, 2005 2:12 pm

Sith Lord wrote:
LawBeefaroni wrote:
Ralph-Wiggum wrote:
LawBeefaroni wrote:WoW credits at Moby.
What's Tiny Ogre's name?
Tiny Ogre aka TO aka Terrell Owens.

Right?
Dunno, but I didn't find that name on that page (either doing a visual search or using Find...). I did find GG's own Lyno Hychong though. Dunno if he ever made it over to OO.

Sith

tcweidner · Post by **tcweidner** » Tue Jan 25, 2005 2:12 pm

To is one of the programmers just FYI. I won't give out his name as its not my place to do that.

Odin · Post by **Odin** » Tue Jan 25, 2005 2:13 pm

Ok, so this Owens dude is actually some sort of football player? You got me.

Sith

Odin · Post by **Odin** » Tue Jan 25, 2005 2:14 pm

tcweidner wrote:To is one of the programmers just FYI.

That's way more in line with my assumptions based on the posts he made in the alpha/beta forums.

Sith

LawBeefaroni · Post by **LawBeefaroni** » Tue Jan 25, 2005 2:19 pm

Sith Lord wrote:Ok, so this Owens dude is actually some sort of football player? You got me.

Sith

Sorry. Just every time I saw TO in reference to Tiny Ogre, it wouldn't compute. Now in my mind Tiny Ogre, TO, and Terrell Owens are all one weird mess.

tiny ogre · Post by **tiny ogre** » Thu Jan 27, 2005 4:15 am

http://mobygames.com/developer/sheet/vi ... erId=1216/

Amusingly from that page, the fact that I worked on FreeCiv was news to me! Since Call to Power 2 was open sourced a while ago, I was wondering if it had to do with that somehow... nope, turns out:

Joe Rumsey (explosion animation from xgalaga)
Mike McGrath (explosion animation from xgalaga)

I actually don't remember if it was me or Mike either

. I've never met Mike, but I lifted a few of the graphic bits in that game from some Netrek graphics he did.

Reed · Post by **Reed** » Thu Jan 27, 2005 3:36 pm

Butterknife wrote:There isn't much of any "trickle-down" in the video game industry, I'd be surprised if Blizzard were any different.

Well, many (most?) game companies have royalty programs. I would assume that Blizzard employees get some pretty nice royalty checks every so often...