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World of Warcraft, baby. Yeah, [screaming] World of Warcraft. My dog loves World of Warcraft.
Explores the rise, fall, and legacy of World of Warcraft, analyzing why Blizzard can't recapture its original magic.
Key Takeaways
- The faction-based rivalry was central to WoW's unique player engagement and community.
- Creative visionaries like Chris Metzen were crucial to WoW's immersive world and storytelling.
- Corporate changes and business pressures contributed to Blizzard losing touch with WoW's core audience.
- Attempts to revive WoW have failed due to loss of original vision and player trust.
- WoW's decline reflects broader challenges in sustaining long-term MMO success.
Summary
- World of Warcraft was once the biggest MMO, generating over $10 billion and creating a passionate player community.
- The game's core magic came from the intense faction rivalry between Horde and Alliance, designed to foster player bonds.
- Key Blizzard figures Alan Adham and Chris Metzen shaped the game's world and conflict, making the world itself the lead character.
- The game's success attracted corporate interest, leading to Blizzard's merger with Activision under Bobby Kotick.
- Over time, Blizzard struggled to maintain WoW's original appeal, losing players and facing criticism for changes.
- Private servers and competing MMOs further eroded WoW's player base, highlighting Blizzard's internal challenges.
- Blizzard's silence and missteps alienated fans and streamers, contributing to a mass exodus.
- The video argues that the 'disnification' of WoW and loss of original vision led to its decline.
- Despite attempts, Blizzard no longer seems able to revive WoW's former glory or even embrace its own legacy.
- The video concludes that the magic of WoW was unique and unlikely to be replicated, marking the end of an era.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and WoW's Rise
- 01:52WoW's Peak Popularity and Player Culture
- 02:50Faction Rivalry and Game Design
- 04:15Creative Vision Behind WoW
- 06:01Blizzard's Corporate Changes and Challenges
- 09:40Industry Competition and Player Exodus
- 12:22Blizzard's Response and Community Impact
- 14:35Conclusion: The End of WoW's Magic
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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This used to be World of Warcraft, a game full of conflict and war. It's considered by many the greatest and biggest video game ever made, generating way past $10 billion in its lifetime.
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But somewhere along its way, it has lost its magic. I was entertained literally every second in current World of Warcraft. You can get to level 100 by buying it.
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It's like the game, like you can't even, like you can't even understand what is happening in the game.
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For years, the company behind the game, Blizzard, has desperately been trying to recreate the magic that once was, but without much success. Today, they're even afraid to disclose their own subscriber numbers. And the people behind the game wished it wasn't even
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called Warcraft anymore. Man, I wish we hadn't called it Warcraft. Sounds kind of intimidating, which is confusing when it's literally a game about war between two factions.
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Now, how do you go from being recognized as the biggest game in the world to being embarrassed by your own name? I think I found the answer, but it's not as obvious as you might think, and by the
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end of this video, you'll understand why not even Blizzard can bring it back. In 2004, World of Warcraft took the gaming industry by storm, and it quickly became one of the biggest massive multiplayer online games.
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I wouldn't talk to them if they don't play WoW. What would get you to stop playing?
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I don't want, I don't want to stop. Why would I want to stop? How long are you going to play for?
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All night. All, all week maybe. You don't have to work tomorrow. Work? There's no such thing as work with WoW.
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People literally spend years of their lives in the game. And some of the closest friendships came from meeting each other online.
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We met on World of Warcraft. I got him into WoW. I got like seven of my friends in a while. I, my ex-girlfriend, I got ex-girlfriend.
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Emphasis on the ex. When new expansions came out, people would travel across continents just to wait in line for the midnight release.
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We're at, uh, EB Games in West Hollywood for the release of the Burning Crusade.
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I come from Mexico just to get a Burning Crusade. Now, briefly put, World of Warcraft was a world inhabited by its players. And as you made your character, you naturally also picked the faction that you would belong to, which was a choice at first
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that didn't really seem like it mattered, but it did. Now, imagine that you enter the zone, the Barrens, as a Horde player. You're excited to have hit level 10. You place your first talent point in your talent tree, looking
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forward to filling out the remaining 50. You're now off to explore the world. But suddenly, an Alliance player marked a skull appears out of nowhere and just kills you. You press release spirit only to find yourself having to walk for 10
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minutes as a ghost till you find your body and are able to come back to life.
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But then 3 seconds after you come to life, the Alliance player kills [music] you once again. You see, he gets his joy out of making your life miserable, which is why he's been waiting for you for all 10 minutes. And this is exactly where
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the magic of World of Warcraft happens, because nothing builds a stronger bond between players than sharing [music] a common enemy. You start to ask for help from other Horde players in the Somite chat, and together you defeat that
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Alliance scum. Now, from this day onwards, you're a Horde player for life. Officially at war with the Alliance.
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I'm looking for world PvP 'cause, uh, I hate Horde, so I kill Horde when I see Horde.
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Do you guys play together? No, [music] we play different servers. He's Horde. I'm Alliance.
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Oh, that's like Severed Bedrooms, but wait until she levels up so I can kill her.
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It became a cultlike movement. Like the amount of people who walk up to me and show me their Horde tattoo.
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Yeah, this is my tattoo. The Alliance, Horde for the win. Alliance, man. Even commercials were centered around the two factions at war.
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[groaning] But the extreme rivalry of the two factions wasn't just something that randomly happened. In fact, it was born from one of the most controversial decisions in the game's development. The world is divided into two warring factions. There's the Horde and the
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Alliance. And that was a very important, very controversial decision that was made by Alan Adhamardo. And I came from EverQuest where we felt like this was a horrible decision Alan was making.
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You see, in EverQuest, every race would be able to group up and play together.
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Splitting the world in two was seen as a very bad strategic move. But Alan Adham, one of the founders of Blizzard, had seen something that the others hadn't.
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He came from more of the dark [music] age of Camelot that was more PvP based.
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And he said the magic of that game was they had three factions. He liked the fact that you were instantly on a team.
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You weren't a loner in the world. Whether you liked it or not, you had people on your side. Alan's a smart guy. The fact that he was fighting so hard for Horde Alliance, we got to do it. The war between the factions wasn't
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just a side effect. It was the design. But splitting the world into two teams was only half of it. Because a rivalry in a war, well, it needs a reason behind it to make you want to fight. And that
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reason came from just only one man. Chris Metzen, who was the creative director on World of Warcraft. And really, like Alan Adham, who was one of the founders of Blizzard, calls Chris the heart and soul of Blizzard. It's
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almost like when you're making a Blizzard game, you're making Chris's imagination. And Chris famously said the lead character of World of Warcraft is the world. You see, World of Warcraft was based off of the game Warcraft, which was a strategy game about two
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armies at war. And Metzen had been the one writing the war since the very beginning.
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You know, in Warcraft 1, we had, you know, the kingdom of Stormwind, um, in the land of Azeroth. And the conflict of that game was pretty much contained within that place. You know, the orcs come through the Swamps of
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Sorrow and, you know, 301 forest and attack Stormwind. The scope of that conflict was pretty small. As we started talking about Warcraft 2 and the idea of expanding the two armies as a human group became the Alliance, you with
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[music] elves and dwarves and gnomes, you know, reciprocally the orc group expanded to include forest trolls and ogres and death knights and all sorts of good creepy guys. So, a lot of the design decisions [music] um with the
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two armies and kind of expanding them predicated building the world and building it out further.
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Now, Alan Adham and Chris Metzen both agreed on a very important thing and that was the game needed both factions and a reason to fight each other.
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Essentially giving birth to the magic of World of Warcraft. But to Chris, this wasn't just a video game that they were making. [music] It's more than just a video game. It's more than just this project we work on,
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you know, for long periods of time. [music] It's a vehicle through which we engage with the world, you know, through our community, through the players and the people that love the fiction or the raiders, the PvP
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[music] players, right? All sorts of different types of WoW player out there, but we're all kind of united by this space. And the passion that the players would feel from Chris Metzen building these stories so passionately to [music]
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bring us together is essentially what made World of Warcraft such a big game for years. But Blizzard's biggest success of a video game would soon get in very big trouble. When you attract millions upon millions of players interested in paying a subscription fee,
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while you also attract someone else, and someone else was knocking on Blizzard's door, meet Bobby Kotick, a hardcore American businessman who had been at the steering wheel for Activision since the '90s. His entire career w
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bankruptcy. You know what? I never ran a business that didn't make money. [music] Like that gets back to the DNA of I don't know how to do that.
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After successfully turning the sinking ship of Activision around, he was hungry for more. So he put his target on a studio that could build him an empire, Blizzard Entertainment. The deal he made merged Activision with Blizzard's parent company. And from that they created a
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giant called Activision Blizzard with Bobby Kodc at the steering wheel together with his board. and they only had one thing in mind and that was making money. Now, the timing was almost too perfect because Blizzard were actually met development on what would
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become the single biggest expansion [music] the World of Warcraft would ever see, growing from all the way up to 12 million subscribers. Do you realize how much money that is? They were nearly making $180 million per month. Now,
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making money isn't necessarily a bad thing because Blizzard were already doing so way before Activision entered the image. But when your number one priority is to be profitable, it shifts the [music] focus from making the World of Warcraft to make money off of the
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World of Warcraft. And this matters because suddenly the game and the people developing it had metrics and [music] targets to reach, which means that the decision-m wasn't up to Chris Metson all alone anymore, but rather in the boardroom talking about numbers and
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targets. Suddenly, the content that was made and released with the patches was more focused on keeping you playing with daily and weekly chores. But even worse, microtransactions were also introduced.
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Now, the first purchasable mount, the Celestial Steed, was priced at $25. And according to a former Blizzard developer, it ended up making more money than Starcraft 2 would ever make. Think about that for a second. Bobby Kodic and
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Exhibition were really good at making money indeed. But they weren't the only ones who had noticed how much money that World of Warcraft was printing. The entire gaming industry wanted a piece of the pie. One by one, new MMO started
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appearing. Star Wars: The Old Republic, at the time one of the most expensive video games ever made. [music] Warhammer Online, Rift, Wildstar, and even Final Fantasy. Every time one of them was released, the press and some of the
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player base would hype it up to be a potential woowiller. But essentially, nothing could recreate the magic of World of Warcraft. Star Wars lost so many subscribers it went free to play within a year. While Star got shut down
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and Final Fantasy, it never really took off. Well, until later, but I'll get back to that. No. Wow Killers actually killed the game and it was dominating its competition, essentially crowning it the king of the MMO genre. But as Chris
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Metson wrote in his own story arc, "No king rules forever, my son." As Blizzard had just peak its subscribers with the conclusion of its story line of Wrath the Lich King, something was about to go terribly wrong. You see, changing the focus from
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creating a world to milking it will never go unnoticed by your own player base. And the players, well, they just wanted the magic back. Have you ever thought about adding servers for previous expansions as they were then?
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In 2013, one very brave soul managed to answer BlizzCon's Q&A and ask the Blizzard team directly if they would ever reintroduce a classic version of the game. But Activision Blizzard, well, they just dismissed his proposal.
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No. And and by the way, you don't want to that to do that either. You think you do, but you don't.
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Essentially breaking the link of trust between the developers and the players. Slowly but surely, the player base's frustration only grew bigger and bigger.
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You probably heard me do a long rant about why I hate World of Warcraft.
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Currently, you can legitimately get to level 100 in a day. A day. feel like I feel like everyone wants to love World of Warcraft so badly and it's just so hard. It's just this stupid deformed piece of But it wasn't just the players who were
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struggling with Blizzard's change of focus. On the inside, the very own people who had created the world were starting to struggle as well. By the release of the expansion, Mr. Pandaria, Chris Medson, the heart and the soul of
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the game, had started showing early signs of disagreeing with direction of the game and Exhibition Blizzard.
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Sure, it's a job. Sure. We got a company to run. We got a product to put out, but that's not the point.
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He confided in an open interview that one of his greatest fears were to let down the Warcraft fans. He feared that people hated the game that they had made and he dishonored the brand and the company behind it. He felt like a victim
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of the split focus within Blizzard to make money. As he described in his own words, falling into a trap and cycle of performance. In 2016, Chris Medson resigned from his role at Blizzard due to extreme burnout. But he didn't just
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leave Blizzard and the game behind. He also left the player base behind. You see, they kept releasing expansion upon expansion built to keep its players playing and sell copies. But the subscriber count would just still keep dropping. Eventually, Blizzard just
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stopped telling us what their subscriber numbers were. But as players had lost all hope for the game, something had been going down in secret. As these supposedly MMO killers had been appearing left and right to push Warcraft off of its pedestal, it turns
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out that the actual threat wasn't any of them. 30 hardcore WoW fans who had been playing since the release of the classic game in 2004 had taken it upon their own hands to give the players what they actually wanted. Illegally, they had
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built a duplicate version of the old game and ran a publicly available server for free called Nostalas. And the server, well, it was literally packed with people who had quit Blizzard's version of the game to play the game
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that had the magic that they fell in love with. In over a year, Nostalgia reached close to a million created accounts and over 150,000 active monthly players. Even the biggest World of Warcraft streamers such as Sodap Puppin was playing on the Nostalia servers when
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he wasn't streaming, ultimately showing to Blizzard that the real threat to World of Warcraft was its own former self. But because this was an illegally built server and Blizzard owned the IP, they just without much hesitation sent a
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season desist to shut down the server, which meant that once again the players were very discouraged and felt more frustrated than ever. They literally ran it for the for just the love of the game as Jon Trron puts it and you literally
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went out of your way and you got them shut down. It was your game that was so good.
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But then something incredible happened. Every single serious gamer played World of Warcraft at least once in their life.
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Blizzard would make a ton of money. So many people would come back if these servers were made and released. To convince Blizzard to finally listen, the players had realized they needed to do the market research for Blizzard, showing the potential money that they
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could make off of re-releasing the classic game. And a petition was made, and it got signed by 280,000 people. It even got featured on BBC.
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Now, former WoW lead Mark Kern, he personally carried close to 10,000 of its pages [music] into the official Blizzard HQ. And the Nostalgist team actually reached out to Blizzard to offer their help, saying that they would come on board to build the game with
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them. So Blizzard invited them in, and they met. But it was never disclosed what was said at the meeting, which to the players made it even worse when Blizzard afterwards just decided to say nothing for a year and a half. Nothing
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until November 3rd, 2017. I want to take a minute and I want to talk about ice cream.
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What? No. No way. No way. Ice cream is one of my favorite desserts. No way.
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But I stand understand that for some of you. No way. Your favorite flavor is vanilla.
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Oh my god. Vanilla. the morph. Holy Oh Jesus. Well, in case you guys didn't see they announced class service.
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We're doing that at the end. We agreed we were going to do that at the end.
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I just want to make sure you knew. I could not believe that it would be announced.
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So, I just watched the announcements. Um, Dude, I lost it. Oh, I started tearing up.
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Jay Allen Bre, the very same guy who had gone out on stage to [music] say that they would never release Classic and that we as a player base think we want it, but we don't. He went out on stage
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again at Blizzcon to reveal that World of Warcraft [music] Classic was finally being re-released. And the community went crazy for it. As it was released, streamers flocked to play WoW, and even veteran players returned to feel that same feeling they had back in 2004
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playing the game. It broke the launch day Twitch records with 1.1 million viewers on release day. and Blizzard finally saw their subscriber count just go up as it was, according to their own financial statements, the biggest quarterly subscription increase they had
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ever seen. There's just one massive problem with re-releasing an old game. You see, it was living on borrowed time.
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No matter how you looked at it, it is still a re-release of an old game. And come the final patch of that game, Blizzard didn't have its soul at the steering wheel, Chris Medson, which meant that when players were still
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actively playing the classic game, the decision for where to go with World of Warcraft Classic had to be made by someone else. Now, enter Holly Longdale, the brin lead for Classic. You see, Holly had came directly from EverQuest,
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the same game that the original developers of WoW had taken inspiration from, which sparked a hope in the community. But the thing is just that her role at EverQuest wasn't connected to building an immersive world. It was something else. You see, under her
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decadel long tenure at EverQuest, she was in charge of re-releasing old versions of the game almost annually, each time with some added twist or a quality of life improvement, all to recycle old content and sell copies.
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Which is why when she joined Blizzard, Activision Blizzard went on to let Holly do what Holly does best. And that's when they announced that they would re-release the Burning Crusade Classic, just with extra vanity items to pay for
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and a copy to buy. Even seasonal servers like they had done with EverQuest came to life in World of Warcraft, constantly giving the player base hope that this would be a fresh version built on the old game that had so much magic that
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made it great. Eventually, of course, the disconnection to their player base caught up to Blizzard and to Holly.
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Because while they kept re-releasing old content while never really making meaningful updates to the game, the players had caught eye on something else. A Wow killer from the past that had come back to haunt the future of what WoW was. Final Fantasy 14, a game
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that had initially failed, had remade their own game, and it was full of soul as the creator behind it was a hardcore MMO player himself. Final Fantasy offered the Wild Players a game that was built for gamers by gamers like World of
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Warcraft once had been. And this caused a mass exodus from World of Warcraft by both players and huge streamers. But here's a sad truth. Because whenever Blizzard lost its players to a game like Final Fantasy or a private server like
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Nostalas, they were literally being told the same thing. We don't want new. We want what was lost. Now, either Blizzard just couldn't hear it or actively chose to ignore it because they were still trapped between the split focus of
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hitting quotas and keeping the players happy. But now there was a sale to Microsoft [music] on the table, which meant that of course the numbers had to look good no matter what. So instead of rebuilding the world, they essentially
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just double down on the strategy of chopping down World of Warcraft Classic into several different versions of the old game. Seasons of mastery, seasons of discovery, hardcore, and era. Each one spiked, then faded a little faster than the last. And selling game copies built
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on a feeling of nostalgia won't last forever. They had taken a mirror of what once used to be World of Warcraft and just shattered into different pieces, hoping that the players wouldn't realize it is literally the same glass. And the
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man who set all of this in motion, well, he didn't really have to watch it break because Microsoft bought the company and Bobby Kodic just sailed off with a fortune while the entire industry applauded him for turning World of
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Warcraft into a machine that just printed money. But with the supposedly villain finally gone, so surely the magic could come back now, right? And this is where something genuinely unexpected happened. Something that would surprise even the old school
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veteran players and those who had left to play another game because Blizzard had one more card up their sleeve. There may very well be a job posting up soon on the Orgamar warboard. And if there is, we'll call you.
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[cheering] Hey, love you guys. I miss you. They had realized they could no longer recreate the magic that made the game so special. So, they broke their in case of emergency glass and called back the heart and soul himself.
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Please welcome my friend and the executive creative director of the Warcraft. Oh Chris Meth.
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They're bringing him back. [music] WHAT UP, BLIZZCON? [cheering] HORDE, WHERE you at? ALLIANCE. [screaming] [cheering] I never thought I would see this again.
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The king had returned to save his kingdom. And for the first time in many years, there were finally real hope. But it didn't take long for this whole illusion to shatter. Because both the company and the game he returned to was
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not all the same anymore. We want everybody to be able to play WoW. I just want to bring it to as many people as possible. And that means, you know, evolving what Warcraft means, what it is, and where it's going. We want it to
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be approachable. Today, both the Horde and the Alliance can easily play together, whether that's raids, dungeons, PvP. I mean, they can even join the same guild. And with that, it's become way less about war and much more about art and aesthetics. Some
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players call it the disnification of World of Warcraft. So, how do you go from being the greatest game of all time to now not even want to stand by your name?
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Even with Chris Mets, we talk about he sometimes he's like, "Man, I wish we hadn't called it Warcraft." Sounds kind of intimidating.
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Did you catch it? Because this isn't according to Holly her own words. This is actually something Chris has said that he wish they didn't call it Warcraft. Chris Medson has entirely changed his perspective on the story that he's writing. meaning that it's no
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longer supporting the core concept of what made WoW so good, which is war and conflict between the two factions. And the reason why they don't even want to call it Warcraft anymore is because that the name itself is actually a promise,
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Warcraft. And the people who are designing the world now, well, they don't want to keep that promise anymore because the promise was made by an entirely different group of people. If you take out the war, well, all that's
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really left is just scenery. But of course, in today's day and age, for Blizzard to split the player base in half, make sure that they can't even talk to each other and let strangers in the Barrens ruin each other's evening on
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purpose, that idea dies within 5 minutes in any design meeting today. We even heard Jeff say that back then it was a controversial decision, but Allan believed in it so much that they just had to go forward with it. But at
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Blizzard, there's not really anyone left to fight for the war. Clearly, not even Medson. And that is why that there will never be another World of Warcraft.
Topics:World of WarcraftBlizzard EntertainmentMMORPGHorde vs AllianceChris MetzenAlan AdhamBobby KotickActivision Blizzardgaming historyWoW decline
