Blizzard - Growing Pains

Recently I guess some guy at GDC or some big game convention let it be known that Bungie the guys behind the Halo franchise was working on a MMO. Having recently been acquired by Activision; the whole world just assumed it was World of Warcraft in space.

Thinking about this for a while just sort of made some dreams come true. My brother is a BIG Halo fan, and while he may not be the right customer for an MMO. He's got a life, it really just spurns my hope of them coming up with a MMO. Although I still hold out hopes for World of Starcraft. I enjoy playing World of Warcraft, but sometimes I just want to do something different.

Turns out later the guy was just yaking our chain, and the MMO and their future plans aren't real. I think its just bungie testing the waters and they didn't like what they heard. What did they expect working for Activision. Anything that is an MMO is just going to be called WoW in whatever. Wether this was really a joke or not remains to be seen.

I think if you were a company like Activision your scared to test the waters again. You don't want to take subs away from your poster child. Yet you don't know how to move forward.

Any game you put foward in a MMO space has potential to take away subs. How you keep those people playing both games without paying twice the fees is the tricky part. You may get some in, but anything that detracts from WOW isn't neccisarly bad. Even a lot of people I know who play WOW are just waiting for Diablo 3 to come out and they are GONE.

Keeping people onboard for a 2nd MMO is the tricky part. I think its rather easy and here is how. It's been done before by Sony and others. You need to branch out into a multi-game mmo company.

You have to consider a one time fee to access multi mmo's. Give people the flexibility to play mutliple of your games and you can raise the fee to probably a good $20 and people even might consider it a deal to play your games.

Then you need to give them the toolts. Battle.net is a great start, however you need to make it connected all the time. Not just in your games, their is so many ways to keep people interested in your products even if they can't be at a physical computer to play them. Include these services in your permium package.

What Bungie desides to do next is really anyones guess. Ultimatley I haven't read anything on the web. However I think it very likely they will play it safe. They can't work on Halo, because Microsoft probably has the rights locked down. A thought that probably should have crossed our minds. Microsoft would have to publish said MMO or give its blessings. It was a mistake to not buy Blizzard they are not going to make a mmo that's not on the Xbox. The fact Final Fantasy has been so succesful really should beef up their interest. In fact cross play with pc/xbox is my primary wish.

Seems I play in different worlds than my brother.