THE WETLANDS of Azeroth are no place for the inexperienced. Giant crocodiles and gangs of vicious orcs lie in wait for the unwary. But even the most perilous journey is possible with the right guide.
One such guide, Comolan, a healer and magician, recently led a group of neophytes through the swamp to rescue a party of elves. They eventually emerged unscathed from their adventure — free to return to the real world and their mundane day jobs at the likes of the Pentagon or Xerox.
This is The World of Warcraft — the online dungeons and dragons game that has 7m people hooked across the planet. More than a game, World of Warcraft is the Holy Grail for media companies — internet content for which people will pay.
A third of World of Warcraft’s players pay $15 (£8) a month to join the virtual world of Lord of the Rings-type characters such as orcs, elves, gnomes, dwarves and humans.
Perhaps even more astonishingly, some 3m people pay to play in China — notoriously known as the land of piracy — buying access by the minute. The would-be wizards toil for days following quests, joining guilds, killing, being killed and resurrected and becoming more and more powerful as their online personas grow in experience.
World of Warcraft is fast becoming the new golf. Business deals are done between “guild members”; funerals are held online for gamers who die in the real world. World of Warcraft players are even planning an online memorial for Steve Irwin, the Australian television star killed by a stingray two weeks ago. The gamers plan to spell out the crocodile hunter’s catch phrase “Crikey” on Zoram Strand, a coastal area in the game.
In China, Coca-Cola put World of Warcraft figures on 600m Coke cans. There are hats, T-shirts, a board game, seven novels and a movie in the works. The orcs may be fictional but the money is real.
Even fans like professor Edward Castronova, Comolan’s creator, have been taken back by the success of World of Warcraft. “I never thought that it would get this big. I don’t like to guess how large it can get now,” said Castronova, economist and professor of telecommunications at Indiana University. He had thought World of Warcraft had peaked at 1m players.
The game has even spawned its own sweatshops. In China, an estimated 500,000 people work in “gold farms”, playing video games to acquire virtual goods or skills that they sell for real money to rich gamers. On IGE, a popular trading website, a level-60 night elf with “great gear, skills and 100 gold to spend” was fetching $289.99 last week. Anyone wanting to power a new character up from level 1 to 20 in three days was being charged $24.99. A fraction of the money goes to the Chinese, Mexican and Russian players who play for hours to create the virtual assets.
For its ultimate owner, Vivendi, World of Warcraft has been a small blessing after the French firm was nearly ruined by a disastrous foray into media. Less than two years old, World of Warcraft, made by Vivendi’s Blizzard Entertainment, is on course to generate more than $1 billion in revenue this year.
There have been successful massively-multiplayer online games, or MMOs, in the past. EverQuest and Star Wars Galaxies have attracted hundreds of thousands of players. But Warcraft dwarfs them all. Part of its success is down to its “polish”, according to Castronova — World of Warcraft is simply better designed than its competitors. But behind that polish the game meets the needs of a global niche — the fantasy community.
“The real draw is the map of meaning the game provides,” said Castronova. “In the real world if you work in a coffee shop, that has no meaning. In the game if you are told to take this box from this village to this castle because something really important will happen, then that has more meaning than making a latte for some customer,” he said.
The success of World of Warcraft has got American telecoms giants like AT&T and Verizon working hard on their gaming divisions, said Michael Cai, director of broadband and gaming at Parks Associates, a research company based in Dallas, Texas.
More importantly, the game has shown that people are prepared to pay for content on the web.
“Two or three years ago the argument was that nobody was going to pay for content online,” said Cai. World of Warcraft, like Apple’s iTunes music store, has shown that a paying mass market does exist, he said.
Ease of use and a good price were vital to the success of both products, he added. Apple charges 99c a song in America; World of Warcraft charges $15 a month or, in China and other areas of the Far East, sells access cards that allow users to pay by the minute.
“But it’s not all about content,” said Cai. “Warcraft is a great game but Vivendi did a great job marketing it. Co- marketing with a brand like Coca Cola, putting Warcraft faces on city buses, partnering with the right people — behind Warcraft there is some good old-fashioned marketing. Online gaming is just another form of media.”
Consultants at Accenture recently interviewed 130 top executives at old and new media companies. Some 76% of them said future growth would come from “new channels of distribution” more than new geographic territories, said Gavin Mann, head of convergent media.
“For many years it was assumed that people wouldn’t pay for content online. Warcraft and many other sites show that large niche audiences are prepared to pay for content,” said Mann. “The challenge for all these businesses is the mass audience.” Apple iTunes is so far the only example of a mass-audience global digital business.
Warcraft and the entire gaming industry are trying to make their games more appealing to capture a mass market. The video-games industry likes to boast that it makes more money than the film industry. And there are clear signs that its core constituency is wider than the stereotype of the 15-year-old spotty male. But the movies entertain a huge audience of a variety and scale that the games industry can only dream of. The prize for replicating that audience online is enormous.
Castronova believes the services that are most likely to strike gold will be those that marry old and new technology. “Anyone could write a book and send it to people — we’ve had that technology for years, and nobody does that,” he said. Warcraft is not a blank book, a lot of the pages have been filled out. But, said Castronova, in Azeroth there is enough room to create your own reality. It’s a magic combination that people are prepared to pay for.”
