World of Warcraft's Mike Morhaine Talks
Mike Morhaime may not be a huge name, but his game sure is. “World of Warcraft” is the biggest massively multiplayer game in the world, with 9 million registered users.
It’s incredibly popular with its devoted players logging in hours a night to play the game. Its unique business model with players paying $20 to buy the game, or $40 for the recent game expansion, and a $15 monthly subscription fee, has game companies clamoring to mimic its success.
Austin, especially, is known as a hotspot for companies trying to develop massively multiplayer games that can top the success of “World of Warcraft.” So, far, none have.
Morhaime, the president of Blizzard Entertainment, is delivering a keynote address at the Austin Game Developers Conference Sept. 5 through 7.
He’ll also stop by Blizzard’s new offices in Austin, where a 400-person customer service call center just opened.
We spoke to him about his first visit to Austin, any advice he has for game developers, and how he got into gaming.
Have you come to Austin before? And why are you coming to the Austin Game Conference? No, but I’ve been to Dallas. The short answer is I’m coming because they asked me nicely multiple times. They don’t take no for an answer.
Does this coincide purposefully with the opening of Blizzard’s customer service center in Austin? It doesn’t. We have already opened the office. So this will be my first time to visit the office. It really isn’t to that, but it is convenient for me because I can two things at once.
How does Blizzard plan on keeping its content fresh and innovative? We do have regular content updates that we will be doing as well as additional expansions. We just announced our next expansion “Wrath of the Lich King.” We also have a pretty important free content update. We are actually adding voice chat in world of Warcraft. So you can talk with your party members. The testing is going really well.
But the other thing I’d like to say is a lot of us at Blizzard love World of Warcraft and play World of Warcraft we’re eager to keep it exciting and fresh.
Why do you think World of Warcraft was so successful and other MMOs have failed? I think there are probably a few reasons for that. I think for one, we had a pretty loyal following of Warcraft players that were familiar with our universe and really liked it. So when we came out with WOW there were a lot of people out there that played our past games and played Warcraft and gave it a chance, even they hadn’t previously played this style of game before.
We really tried to make the game have a very shallow learning curve. A lot of the games before World of Warcraft targeted the hardcore player. Our philosophy was this style wasn’t a mass-market game, that your audience was really limited to the hardcore. It only catered to the hardcore players. We try to build our games under the easy to learn, but difficult to master philosophy. We try to make it so anybody, even if they aren’t that familiar with online role-playing games, that it is pretty easy to sit down and within a short period, figure out what the payoff is.
I think a combination of those things, and then of course once people try the game and understand it, that they do enjoy playing it. Our development team really did a fantastic job.
Do you have a certain character you like to play? I have a night owl hunter.
What other games is Blizzard working on besides World of Warcraft? We are working on a sequel to Starcraft, Starcraft II. We’re really excited about that. We just announced that in Korea at the Blizzard Worldwide Invitational in May. We are really excited to return to the Starcraft Universe and do a sequel; we’ve been wanting to do that for quite a long time now. Design Starcraft II in keeping the spirit of the original game, but taking advantage of a lot of innovation in real-time strategy genre.
What sort of advice would you give to beginning MMO developers? That’s a tough one. An MMO is probably the largest and most complicated type of game you can make right now. I wouldn’t enter into that lightly.
If you are going to do it, I think you have to do it with your eyes open and understand all of the different elements that go into making a fun, compelling MMO. An MMO is kind of, it’s kind of a marriage. A commitment. You have to, you have to be prepared to support the game after you lease it both with content and customer service.
Do you think customer service and content is something companies are failing to consider? I don’t know if they fail at it or not. They don’t fully comprehend what that means until you go and try to do it.
Tell me a little about what an average day is like for you.
My days are different depending on the day. I’m in a lot of meetings. I would say e-mail and meetings. I talk with a lot of people. I do a lot of traveling. Most of the time I am in California and we have offices in multiple countries now. An office in France, Korea, an office in China. An office in Taiwan. And we just set up an office in Austin.
How involved are you in the game design? I don’t get really involved in the low-level game design decisions, just high-level design decisions. Should we do in-game voice chat? Should we charge for that? Should we do it as a free feature?
You started Blizzard in 1991. What were you doing before that? Immediately before that I was at Western Digital. I was testing software for network cards. Right before that I was in school at UCLA in electrical engineering.
Were you a big gamer at the time? I have to say, I spent most of my time studying. We were playing a lot of Tetris, Air hockey at the arcade, and there were various computer games, I probably logged of my time on Tetris.
So where did the idea to form Blizzard come about? It was really my friend’s idea. I became friends with a guy, Allen Adham at UCLA. We became really good friends and he recruited myself another UCLA student Frank Pearce and convinced us to join him in a computer game start-up.
It was completely his idea.
What was it like in those early days? Well it was a lot smaller. When we opened the door and there were three of us. We had an 800 square foot office in Irvine. We started out doing conversions for larger, more established companies like Interplay. We’d take one of their games and convert it over from the PC and Macintosh. The year we founded the company, 1991, was the same year super Nintendo came out in the Untied States. We developed a racing game for the super Nintendo. That’s how we got started. We did a lot of other conversions and also started designing our own console games.
That’s really how we learned how to make games. Learning from other companies and how they learned game design.
When did you start working on World of Warcraft? We started development of World of Warcraft after we released the expansion of Starcraft 1999. We always thought of it as an MMO. One idea was to actually have a free MMO and have single-player component.
We realized that to be competitive meant providing a really high quality level of service and continuing to evolve the game world. Have all of those resources stay on the game after you launch I, and you have a revenue stream coming in to support that. We knew that if we went to a more free model we wouldn’t be able to afford those kinds of resources.
Were you prepared for the success of World of Warcraft? Once you go to 24/7 staff in multiple regions and you have to support a couple thousand employees you have to be prepared to grow that quickly and we weren’t. We scaled up the whole business. We staffed up, we hired some experienced managers, some experienced human resources people. I think we’ve got a fantastic team now. If we had to go back and do it over again, I would have that management infrastructure in place prior to releasing World of Warcraft.
I was surprised by how quickly it took off. I think we all knew we had something very special but I don’t think any of us expected the quick or just how rapid it was that people went out and bought the game.
What is your biggest challenge now? I’d say our biggest challenge is to continue to try to meet and exceed the expectations that our players have of us and that we have of our ourselves.
Permalink | Comments (4) | Post your comment Categories: online games
CommentsBy Rolando
September 4, 2007 7:46 PM | Link to this
Do you have a certain character you like to play? I have a night owl hunter.
I’m pretty sure he meant (or said) Night ELF Hunter. There are no night owls in the game (outside of the players staying up).
By anon
September 4, 2007 11:46 PM | Link to this
And not even a mention of one of the best episodes ever of South Park! What a missed opportunity - to ask Morhaime how he liked it…
By Chris W.
September 5, 2007 8:55 AM | Link to this
“Do you have a certain character you like to play? I have a night owl hunter.”
You can tell this was a recorded conversation, and that the interviewer has never even seen the game before. His answer was night ELF hunter…. there are no night owls in the game, unless you are talking about the players themselves.
By Geeky McGamer
September 5, 2007 3:15 PM | Link to this
I’m sure the interviewer heard Mike Morhaime say “night OWL hunter”, but it’s Night Elf Hunter. Really.
Yes, I know, I’m a geek.
