wisepowder: WoW Classic: A lesson for the gaming industry at large

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On August 26th, Activision Blizzard released World of Warcraft Classic, a re-release of the popular stand-alone MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role playing game) that has dominated the gaming industry for more than a decade. The 15 year old quote on quote “throwback” promises a gaming experience that mirrors the original look and feel of WoW when it first hit store shelves back in 2004.To get more news about buy wow gear, you can visit lootwowgold official website.
Upon release, WoW Classic did not disappoint with millions of new and returning users subscribing to Blizzards $15 per month game pass . The game has been so successful that early reports estimate the game should account for 50% of Activision Blizzard segment growth this year.
While most may view WoW Classic’s resurgence as the typical case of consumer nostalgia, I believe there is a larger lesson to be learned here. For the most part, the success of WoW Classic lies very much in Blizzard’s pragmatic approach to game development. In stark contrast to fellow industry behemoth Electronic Arts, Blizzard’s development and community team has proven how much the gaming industry undervalues the importance of developing a game alongside a community and not just for it.
Much has changed since 2004. Not only has popular gaming gone through various iterations but the internet as a whole has completely adjusted to the Mooreian surge and transfer of information exchange. When the original version of WoW was first released, one could only learn about the game by playing. There was no YouTube, no Twitch, no Twitter. If you wanted to know more about the game, you had to play it yourself. All you needed was the CD box set, a computer and an active internet connection.
Enter 2019: gamers have unprecedented levels of knowledge about almost any game, WoW being no exception. Streamers now dominate the gaming industry with platforms like Twitch bringing in millions of viewers. Content creators across YouTube can review, analyse and judge any game before it is even released. On top of this, an increase in exposure has created a more vocal audience. The average internet user today has 8.5 social media accounts and a larger propensity to share their thoughts & opinions across social channels.For most game development companies, this digitally voracious environment is a double-edged sword with good news spreading like butter but bad news spreading like wildfire. Indeed, you only have to look at the notorious and premature release of No Man's Sky as a prime example (although to be fair, they have recently made good on their promise to fix the game). For Blizzard however, re-releasing WoW Classic was a golden opportunity to show a declining player base that the company still listens to their community.
As stated earlier, for many years, player communities have begged Blizzard to release legacy servers for the original vanilla World of Warcraft. The downfall of game content from Wrath of the Lich King saw the thriving player base slowly decrease by half in just a few expansions.
One source for this loss were privately held games that ran the games source code but hosted their own servers. These servers are also known as private servers and still exist to this day. It’s important to note that Blizzard executives have been long aware of the prevalence of these vanilla legacy private servers, and so the idea of a reboot official version of vanilla World of Warcraft was never too much a stretch of the imagination.