If you can’t build an MMORPG, just buy one!

I read something recently that was somewhat baffling:

“We don’t think that even if we made the USD 500 million or billion-dollar investment to get a product out [to compete with WOW] that we would even be successful doing it.”

That was Activision CEO, Bobby Kotick, speaking at the Goldman Sachs Technology Investment Symposium 2008 Conference on Tuesday, February 26, 2008. Obviously, he was trying to justify his merger with Vivendi (Blizzard) rather than trying to compete with them instead.

Maybe I’m naive. Maybe my lack of experience in game design makes me an ignorant lout in these matters. Maybe I’m just thinking above my pay grade… But I think that statement is kind of BS.

True, you could spend hundreds of billions of dollars on a game and it could fail miserably, which is why you can’t simply throw money at all your problems in life and hope they’ll go away. Big budget summer blockbuster movies fail all the time. Not because they cost over a quarter of a billion dollars to make. No… the problem isn’t with the investment of greenback capital.

It’s a lack of investment in other areas: Creative Vision. Implementation. Alignment with Public Demand. Quality.

You can have an astronomical advertising budget. You can pay your designers top dollar and put them in the most expensive and ergonomic cubicles. Your CEO can fly around in his private jet. None of this will make your MMORPG successful if your game is, say… complete shite.

I don’t have fancy graphs and charts to show MMORPG investment over the years from Ultima Online to Everquest I to Dark Age of Camelot to yaddi yadda to World of Warcraft and beyond, but I think it’s safe to say that, while I’m sure the costs are rising, Blizzard didn’t work on a $500M+ budget to get WoW to where it’s at today.

To get there, they merged historically-proven concepts with revolutionary concepts. They balanced for the casual and hardcore gamer (more so than any of their competition, anyway). Sure, they had an established, successful IP to work with but it was far from the pop culture spotlight it’s in today.

All things said, they came out with the right game at the right time that appealed to the widest possible audience. Are they king of the mountain today? Yes. Will they be king of the mountain forever? I highly doubt it.

The original quote, taken out of context, makes Mr. Kotick sound frightened and vision-less. Money does not equal success. It’s a great tool to help get you to where you want to be but without all the other elements, you’re destined for failure. In fact, you can drastically reduce your monetary investment if your vision, implementation, and mechanics are stronger, and of course, align with public demand.

So I guess Activision went with the safe bet. Rather than trying to show off their strengths in MMORPG design and implementation (or lack thereof), they backed the current behemoth that is WoW and potentially World of Whatever Blizzard’s Next Project Is. Considering the mentality of their leadership, it was probably the best decision to make.

Here’s hoping the next big MMORPG proves Mr Kotick wrong and that a company with far less investment capital can be successful by relying on other strengths.

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