I mentioned in my last article about WoW’s success that one of the factors is how well they hype. Just now, they released a new trailer for just one of the new features of their upcoming expansion pack. The quality of the trailer is amazing and serves to hype the expansion pack to the players extremely well. For most other companies, they will probably just release a cinematic that looks cool, but Blizzard went above and beyond that to capture its fans.

Just a quick update on ScrumWorks. We have been using ScrumWorks at work and so far it has been working out very nicely. I have to say I really appreciate the simplicity of its interface. I would classify no bells and whistles as a feature The only complaint I really have is the export to Excel feature can use some work. But overall, it’s a great package at an unbeatable cost. One of my engineers (Steve McGarry, among the best that I have worked with) actually said he hates MS Project but this is much more managable.

In the first installment of the Decoding World of Warcraft’s Success Formula, I identified two major in-game strengths of WoW. For the second installment of the series, I will be talking about three inter-related out-of-game areas that contributed to its incredible success: brand, marketing and community.

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Since its release in November 2004, World of Warcraft (WoW) has enjoyed incredible success, boasting over five million customers* world wide (source: Blizzard’s press release). So what exactly is it doing right that it took the world of MMOG by storm, snatched a huge chunk of the market, and at the same time, expanded the market to the largest it has ever seen? It should be no surprise that, there isn’t one definitive answer to this, but rather, there are many things that Blizzard has done right. I will be writing a series of editorials on this matter. For this entry, I will be focusing on its prime strength: accessibility and usability.

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