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The first keynote speech at the currently unfolding Austin Game Developers Conference (Austin GDC) came from no other than Blizzard Game Producer Mike Morhaime for World of Warcraft. The said event, taking place at the Austin Convention Center in Texas, began yesterday and will run until tomorrow.
Anyway, the producer's speech was focused on how WoW will continue to rule the gaming world. According to him, there are exactly 10 steps that Blizzard has implemented for World of Warcraft and following them is one of the key factors why the game has been very successful all these years. The steps are as follows with a few explanations from the producer:
- Put Gameplay First
- Make Your Games Easy To Learn, Difficult To Master (cited Guitar Hero as a good example of this principle)
- Resist Pressure To Ship Early ("Nobody looks back on Diablo and thinks 'How much better it would have been if they had released it three weeks earlier'", Morhaime said.)
- Resist Pressure To Do Everything At Once
- Estimate Demand (Finding out how many people have the technology and Internet infrastructure available to play your game.)
- Human Resources Is Important (The success of WoW led to a massive scaling up of the Blizzard.)
- Running An MMORPG Is Not Just Games Development (24/7 IT, customer service, and community management are essential elements of a successful online game.)
- Communicate Or People Will Make Stuff Up (Make sure your company has teams dedicated to keeping the community and internal company figures informed of bugs, fixes, and other games issues).
- Avoid Financial Incentives (Minimize financial rewards from gaming sweatshops, credit card fraud, and account stealing.)
- Test (Blizzard's testing process involves three steps - everyone at Blizzard plays the game, a public beta is launched, a test site with dedicated test server is set up.)
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