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Why Blizzard can't just throw more money at WoW.
Holgranth
Member Posts: 380
A lot of posters on this forum seem to be under the laughable delusion that the only reason WoW doesn’t have more hero classes, player housing, new character models, better graphics, player politics, better balance, an endgame that doesn’t involve gear grinding, more destructible environments and city capturing is because the developers are stupid and lazy.
There are several reasons Blizzard can’t hire more people, throw more money at the game and implement everything anyone could ever want. The biggest one though is this little thing called the law of diminishing returns. For the completely uneducated it means that you get less and less return for every extra dollar you spend. It applies to almost every aspect of game development.
The bigger something gets the less efficient it gets. If hire too many concept artists you drown in artwork from a million different styles. Ditto with art directors and class designers. If you just keep hiring people you end up having all kinds of teams working on all kinds of things that don’t necessarily fit together and tripping over one another’s code.
At a human level people barely know half the people in their department. A medium sized team working on class design will do a lot better than a very large one. If you try to have multiple teams working on each class you soon have a complete disaster on your hands as it becomes impossible to balance the classes around one another. Lead developers need to be able to know what everyone is working on and make decisions.
Making an MMO or building any sort of business for that matter is a matter of finding a balance between too many people and too few people.
Dem hibbies! Dey be wrong!
Comments
Actually, more important than the law of diminishing returns is the concept of the cash cow. If you blast a lot of money into the game, you defeat the whole point of having the cash cow. Cash cows are used to fund other projects, not themselves.
/Win
Of course if the law of dimishing returns didn't apply you could just keep feeding the cash cow more and more and more and it would keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger...............
Dem hibbies! Dey be wrong!
/thread
in all seriousness though, I hope people will realize this sometime and actually quit WoW. Who am I kidding..
what reality do you live in?
It's not just diminishing returns. I dont know what's the situation now, but Blizz was really lazy during Wotlk. We had only 2 decent raids in the entire expansion...
Because they were devoting so much time and energy to Shattering and Cataclysm. Thats not being Lazy. Thats developing one thing at the expense of another.
Dem hibbies! Dey be wrong!
So the reason WoW has less...is because it has more. THAT MAKES PERFECT SENSE!
Wait, no, it does not. I guess I'm "completely uneducated" because I seriously don't think that games like Everquest 2, which has a lot of innovative and interactive features WoW doesn't have, detriment from "all this code" you speak of. WoW could do so much more, they are simply slow and, yes, THEY ARE LAZY!
However, why not be lazy? They have the most successful game out, and they just keep rehashing it, adding tiny little things here and there. It's genius, not a fault of diminishing returns, not a fault of laziness, it's clearly by design.
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Everyone on this site:
1: MMORPGs are DOOMED, and I have the answers to save them!
2: THIS game's gonna kill WoW!
3: I wish things would go back to the Golden Age of MMORPGs, which only existed in my mind...
That doesn't make much sense...
This thread really doesn't make much sense... =P
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Everyone on this site:
1: MMORPGs are DOOMED, and I have the answers to save them!
2: THIS game's gonna kill WoW!
3: I wish things would go back to the Golden Age of MMORPGs, which only existed in my mind...
I agree with you, blizzards make billions over the years they have had 12M subs but I have wondered since bc why dont they do a crytek 3 upgrade with completely revolutionary graphics and fix the gear grinds? Why blizz why.
1: Because they don't need to.
2: Because upgrading the engine is a lot of work, and would be potentially destabilizing to the game.
3: People are happy being able to run the game at full, having it look decent, not good or amazing, with good performance.
4: Gear grinds keep you playing, why would you FIX profits?
5: Revolutionary graphics dont happen on a 6-7 year old game.
There's tons of reasons why doing a COMPLETE overhaul is a terrible idea; they'd only lose money...for what? So you can go Oooh and Ahhh?
------------------------
Everyone on this site:
1: MMORPGs are DOOMED, and I have the answers to save them!
2: THIS game's gonna kill WoW!
3: I wish things would go back to the Golden Age of MMORPGs, which only existed in my mind...
It has little to do with bloated development teams and everything to do with the fact that they don't see the return on investment of designing such things as being worth. Simply put, they don't think it's worth allocating the funds or manpower to get it done, and would rather just pocket the money for themselves. They are a for-profit corporation after all.
Yeah just /sign more to this utter stupidity. Your guys are probably the ones who think that Blizzard earn "Millions per month" and buy themselves ferraris and candy with the money. Grow up guys.
No they just use it to breed a gazillion celestial steeds, which they sell with a profit again.
Most Wow players seems happy enough and pay their monthly fees so why spend a lot more money than you have to to get in the same sum?
It is not about laziness or diminishing returns, they just don't have to because you guys pay every month anyways. I Wow suddenly had 1 million players they would pace up to get some back but they make so much money they can put a lot in earnings and the rest in future games instead.
I mean why work 80 hours for the same money as 40 if you don't have to?
Companies will do exactly as much as is needed to keep people subscribed, not more, not less.
There is no room for "laziness".
It's all business. The important thing is to make the playerbase feel like this is not the case.
QFT. They might even have some of those stuff ready, but waiting the right time for releasing(how do you like my tinfoil hat
? )
Uhm.. Blizzard is a corporation which is interested ONLY in profits. The fact that having profits means you have to make a good game made them make a good game. If they could get the same income with a crap game which takes 1/2 the resources, WoW would be exactly that.
with each expansion they will add enough content to keep their players happy, so if it turns out so some expansion has more content then necessary they will simply move some of it to the next one to reduce the costs.
*shrug*
Uhm, Blizzard doesn't earn ''millions per month'', they earn tens of milions per month in pure profits (their annual revenue 1.6 billion/year). And i really dont see what's so ''utterly stupid'' in thinking that studio employees ''buy themselves ferraris'' . Brad MCQuaid and John Romero woul'd surely disagree with you....
http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/people/person.asp?personId=29561456&ticker=ATVI:US
Seems like Michael Morhaime's salary is around 1 million. Quite respectable though I was unable to find information on what car he has. He can afford a ferrari though.
Your correct when you say that throwing money at something doesn't necessarily make it better. It is how that money is managed and used that produces results. However, I think your wrong when you say that too many people working on something dilutes the quality of what is delivered. I don't know Blizzard's operating model for development but usually there is a set budget put aside for normal development costs, or BAU changes you could call it.
Then if there is a large project (such as Cataclysm) the devs or creative team would need to pitch to senior management there idea, projected development costs, timescales, risks, manpower and of course projected profits. If they had new ideas that had never been done before it is likely they would have done a 'proof of concept' as well. If senior management approved they would make the set funds available for that project and then kick it off.
It is a misconception to think that the devs are handed a massive pot of cash and then told "There you go, have fun and make us money". It simply doesn't work that way. Everything in business needs to make money. The ideas you mention I can guranttee would have been discussed, studied, prioritised and taken apart bit by bit to see how they would work and what benefits they could bring. A decision was then made that they were not beneficial, would be rescheduled for another time or simlpy the project could not afford to put them in as well as other ideas they wanted to implement.
Blizzard is a rich company but don't for one second think that they have a limitless pot of funds to throw into WOW. They will only allocate the funds they feel are necessary to get the job done.
Many of you I agree with and you're right on target.. Blizzard will never add anything to the game , they don't need to.. WoW is a product produced and sold like anything else, even a car.. If Ford felt you would buy next years new Focus with or without a built in GPS sytem, it won't get added as standard equipment.. WoW is the same way.. WoW is in cash cow form, and unless their is a mass exodus that jeopardizes that cash cow before "Titan" is released 3 years from now, Nothing will get added.. Why spend $1 million in production cost if all it will reward you with is $100,000.. Blizzard won't admit it, but I think their subs took a hit after WoTLK, and Cat was to spark that interest again, which is did get them above 12 million.. HOWEVER.. I don't see that 12 million being a solid sub base, I would suspect within 9 months it will drop to under 10 million..
The hole in the dam isn't big, but I think Cat was designed to be that "finger in the hole" repair job.. and we all know how that works out in the long run.. Next expansion is suppose to be 18 months away.. I'm sure we'll hear about it at Blizcon, and will it be the same gear grind AGAIN? lol
WoW having a revolving door in terms of subs is not news. The 'only 30% playerbase hit 10+ levels' was a public statement by the CEO. Which means around 36 million people actually tried WoW.
If one looks at the financial market, they don't expect a drop in sub numbers in a year. They think cata is going to increase it.
Whether that is true or not is up in the air, but I trust financial guys (who has mega $$ on the line to give accurate estimates) over anyone's opinion.
Many are saying Cata is WoW 2.0 rather than a 'repair'. It practically is version 2.0 except it is called an 'expansion'.
e.g. Every zone that was in WoW 1.0 has been changed and revamped for the better.
Gdemami -
Informing people about your thoughts and impressions is not a review, it's a blog.
Have you ever wished that the graphics of Baldur's gate get upgraded while keeping the game exactly alike and the dialogue everything exactly the same just the graphics get an update ? I would buy it in a heartbeat. May be this is what Cata is about. I have not bought or even tried Cata so forgive me if I have somehow simplified it but in my opinion that is what Blizzard is doing giving a facelift to the lady Azeroth.