This weekend, I decided to try out The Burning Crusade, for various reasons. Most importantly, I wanted to experience their expansion pack free trial process, see if we can learn something from it. It’s less than stellar so far, here’s what I had to go through (read: not pleasant).
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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