The WAR Came Back, The Very Next Day...

(sings)
The WAR came back, we thought it was a goner
But the WAR came back, it just couldn't stay away.
Away, away, yea, yea, yea!

Schadenfreude is something we try hard to avoid here at WAAAGH!, because, in my opinion, it's one of the pettier aspects of fanboyism. The kind of finger-pointing "HA-ha!" of fans of one game laughing at the misfortunes of another doesn't really help to foster community across MMORPGs -- which are, after all, not our college alma maters, but just a genre of games that we like very much. You can like WoW, WAR, AoC, EQ2, CoH or whatever -- I won't belittle you for it here.

So don't take this article as any kind of schadenfreude when I say how enthusiasm for WoW's Wrath of the Lich King has appeared to decline off a steep cliff in some realms of the MMO community that I keep tabs on. It's not because it was a bad expansion -- far from it, as it got multiple accolades -- but because for some reason people keep assuming that expansion packs will change the game as they knew it instead of delivering more of the same, albeit at a more polished quality. What I do find interesting is how this all seems to be panning out more or less as I predicted: that WAR and other MMOs would take a pretty good hit with Wrath launched, but once people exhausted the content there (as they seem to be doing extremely fast), gamers would migrate to (or back to) other titles and shore up their population. LOTRO, for instance, has been getting a lot of positive mentions for its expansion and general level of ongoing development.

In the realm of Warhammer, it's gratifying to witness people giving WAR another shot and finding that it's not the same game as it was in September, but a much more stable, polished product with lots more content added in -- and a dev team that hasn't "gone silent" but continued to talk to the community and let us in on what they're doing and planning. I think many people tend to look at these games in more of a black and white way -- it's either a major success or an epic fail -- and thus are dismissive over promising titles that are still growing and delivering the fun.

I don't think it's that easy to dismiss Warhammer as being either stagnant or failing, as much as some folks would like to. You may not like the game, it may not be to your taste, but it does take a ridiculous amount of chutzpah to ignore the positive changes and fixes over the past couple months, the incredible amount of dev-community dialogue, the strong population numbers and the passion people have for this game. One of the things I look forward to most in 2009 is seeing people "rediscover" WAR after casting it aside after the initial month or quitting over issues that aren't even present these days. We've really gotten past a lot of the rockiness of the initial months plus Wrath of the Lich King plus the holiday season, and now the game has time to gain its legs and start chugging faster and faster down the track.

However, EA needs to pick up some major slack in the advertising department and get more word out about this title to show their pride and support. It's hard to say if they felt let down that WAR had to be delayed, cut content for release or failed to break five million subs in the first few months, but their coffers are being filled in plenty even so, and this isn't something they should just sweep under the rug.

I'll end this with a rather encouraging statement by Mark Jacobs:

EA's earnings call is in a few weeks and after that, there will be a lot more clarity about our numbers. As always, I can't talk about it before the call but after that it will be fair game. There is no question that WotLK (like BC before it) and everything else swirling around us had an effect on PC game sales but we expected it would happen so we were not surprised. As I've said in interviews both before and the game launched, we knew going up against WoW was a marathon and not a sprint and we're still in it for the long-term. I can't give you sales numbers today but I can say this, that if I compared the number of new people trying WAR today than one month ago (or even 2 months ago), there are more people today than on Dec 17th or even Nov 17th (and this holds true for lots of other days as well, for those of you who think I'd engage in semantics ).

This, of course, will have no effect on the doomsayers/naysayers/etc. but the fact remains that we've come through one of the most competitive and challenging retail environments in the history of gaming (world economy in tatters, WoTLK, other great RPGs, etc.) and are still selling nicely even though we are a new subscription game. The fact is that almost everyone is hurting these days and calling us a failure because we didn't achieve WoW numbers (which I always said we wouldn't do) overnight is just silly. WoW didn't reach their peak subscriber numbers overnight and neither have we. If I thought that we had peaked already, I'd put WAR in maintenance mode and call it a day. Not only are we not doing that but we are investing heavily in WAR. The extent of some of that investment I'll be discussing soon.

Mark