Thursday, February 17, 2005

World of Warcraft having record sales in Europe!

Well Blizzard is doing it again, and again. There's a slew of articles talking about how World of Warcraft (WoW) is a hit in Europe following its success in Korea the previous month, and North America late last year.

Sales rose to 280,000 on its first day, it had sold over 380,000 on its openning week-end. This shows how a well executed MMOG can be a very successful enterprise, and that should be a lesson to the "Earth & Beyond", "Wish" and other failed attempts.

Head over to GamesIndustry.biz, joystiq.com, Gameplanet, TotalVideoGames, Eurogamer.com, to read up on it.

Lets just hope that Blizzard has learned from its overwhelming success in NA last year, and that it now has the infrastructure the massive amounts of european players having fun in this World of Warcraft!

Monday, February 14, 2005

MMOG secondary market: the bad and the ugly!

As reported earlier today on Slashdot, okrata.com's Garthilk managed to get an email interview with IGE president, Steve Salyer. Head over for a quick (and dirty) read on some real hard questions and answers (unless it gets too hard ) on a practice that has all camps fired up.

At the end of the interview he asks one innocent question (or loaded, depending on your point of view) that illustrates quite vividly what virtual goods and character sales does to a game. Whichever camp you're in, this debate is far from over, and it's likely to get uglier before it gets resolved. If it ever does.

Personnaly, I'm not in favor of, either the sales of goods, characters, or currencies, simply because:
  • it destroys the delicate balance of the virtual market economy that was created be the developpers and the players;
  • it puts an unfair advantage on those who have (or are willing to spend) real life money and use it to get ahead in the game;
  • it brings real life elements into a virtual world that is trying to dissasociates itself from it.

How would you feel if you had spent hours, weeks, and months in your VW (virtual world) and had build up your character to something very impressive, only to see all your effort (and fun) wasted when you see some newbie kill/destroy off your character/ship/avatar with his uber character he just purchased on eBay? Or try to answer Garthilk's Monopoly question. And do it honestly.

Saturday, February 12, 2005

I just love MMORPGS!

I love MMORPGs! That is, I've played several as a Beta tester and I've always found that there is something fascinating about their dynamic. Especially their social aspect - which is kind of obvious since that's the whole idea behind: create a game setting in which hundreds, no, make that thousands of people from all walks of life can interact, roleplay and have a blast.

I've Beta tested Earth & Beyond (which was recently cancelled by EA), Star Wars Galaxies, Lineage II and EVE - Second Genesis.

I've also played the trials of a few others: Shadowbane, Anarchy Online, Asheron's Call. But in the end I came back to EVE.

What a game!! What a world!! What an incredible experience...

The visuals, the game mechanics, the sheer size of it. With 5000 systems in the game (and the option of more being added in the future), many of them with a large supporting entourage of orbiting planets, moons, Space stations, Factories, Asteroid Belts, NPC ships, sentry guns and all sorts of other space paraphernalia. You get to see all these beautifully rendered in stunning DX9 Graphics.

You can't be fair using the written word to truly describe this game - it has to be played to be truly experienced. Simply put, it is.... ah, there's no word for it I tell you.

You'll just have to trust me on this one!