World of Warcraft Can Be Beaten

Speaking to GameIndustry.biz, Lars Buttler, CEO of yet-to-release-a-game Trion studios, notes how yes, World of Warcraft can be beaten. This in response to Activision CEO’s Bobby Kotick’s claims that doing so would take a…hundred…billion dollars!

GamesIndustry.biz: Activision’s Bobby Kotick recently suggested that it would take a billion dollars to compete with World of Warcraft, and you said that you were calling his “bluff”…

Buttler: I hope it’s a bluff. I think it would be worse if they actually believe it.

If Activision is bluffing – suggesting that no one will be able to compete with Warcraft – then why hasn’t anyone done it yet? WOW has been around since 2004 and, frankly, they appear to be firmly entrenched without any serious competition.

That’s a great question.

I think it’s because no one has really launched a great product in the online gaming space yet other than WOW.

Look at all the stuff that has been launched and apply one simple bar – could you sell this at retail if you stripped out all the online components? In other words, is it a good game? I don’t think that any other MMO could then stand…Or very few exceptions.

WOW is a good game. It has ramped up the last ten years of the MMO category and polished it really well and presented it as almost the closing chapter on those last ten years. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t another ten years or another twenty years to come.

Saying WOW is the end of all things would be like saying Mario or The Sims or Madden or any other great franchise are the end of all things in their particular categories. There will always be new and great developments. In the games world, that’s particularly true because technology evolves so much.

But wouldn’t you say that having been the leader for so long automatically gives them an advantage? It is their game to lose, so to speak?

In many cases, the biggest obstacle to future success is current success.

If you look at Everquest, that’s exactly what people thought. They thought you can’t beat Everquest. If that logic applied, then EQII should be owning the market. As a matter of fact, Ultima Online should be ruling the market because they have a big advantage.

But all those games – Ultimate Online, Everquest and WOW – are essentially built in the old paradigm of a static, single device game where you take your entire development risk – or a huge development risk – up front and then you cross your fingers.

I think what the future will hold, and what we are trying to enable, are dynamic game worlds that can always improve and that really use the full capability of server-based architecture that can learn from success and failure after you launch. In other words, we try to entirely step out of the box that has restricted innovation.

I think it is really important to point out that we are not trying to compete with WOW or clone it – in my mind that would be boring and it would be creatively constraining, and I also think it would be massively limiting the amount of risk and innovation we are willing to introduce.

We don’t see this as a zero-sum game where you can only have WOW and nothing else. We think that server-based games are a category that goes far beyond MMOs. It is a category that all videogames will move into – all games of today that are still basically client-based will become server-based because it gives you so many advantages.