President blizzard summarized ten game experiences

Source: www.17173.com

Michael morhaime, founder and president of blizzard, delivered a speech at GDC Austin to talk about ten pieces of experience he has learned from World of Warcraft and other blizzard games.

1. game first.

If you know blizzard, you know that they are doing their best to balance the game, or do better than anyone else. Blizzard's philosophy is understandable but hard to grasp. They want you to get started easily and stay interested for a long time, and use the same product to attract casual and core players at the same time.

2. Build and protect the brand.

Blizzard's goal is to allow consumers to enter the store. When they see the blizzard trademark, they will know that it is a good thing. But I personally think blizzard is not doing well in this aspect. Why? They bullied poor bnetd personnel and accused a group of developers who could not resist. Blizzard is really bad.

3. Resist the temptation of early listing.

This cannot be done by many people. The game should be launched after completion, rather than coming at a certain time on the calendar. If you follow the calendar, then your result will be, and worse, it will be Microsoft's nightmare-like operating system with multiple bugs.

Michael pointed out that companies should look into the long term rather than the short term. Short-term considerations usually do not have good results. Diablo missed the Christmas holiday and was launched in December 31. Do you think Diablo is a game that misses Christmas or that sells millions of games? The burning expedition also missed the Christmas holiday, but sold 2.4 million copies on the first day.

4. Do not do everything at the same time.

Know what you can do and do it well. World of Warcraft is not their first online game. Warcraft 3 has a lot of online content, and so is Diablo 2. From these experiences, wow was born.

5. Blizzard is a global enterprise.

It was once an American company. Things are made in English before being made in other regions. The game is first available in North America, then in Europe, and then elsewhere. This approach has some drawbacks.

Starcraft is a national game in South Korea, but not a local language. The only local language is the Japanese version, but this version is in conflict with other languages. South Koreans are playing with the English version. The gray markets in North America and Europe mean that when the game is available in the United States, people will be able to get it before the release date in Europe, and when the game is officially available in Europe, people have already bought the product, and the sales are naturally not good, and retailers are also unhappy.

The solution is to treat all players equally. For global release. This takes more time, but it is definitely worth more. Diablo 2 is commercially available worldwide, and the results are quite good.

6. Myth of regional taste.

Blizzard does not believe that there are regional tastes. global interests are the same, but the number of people is different. If you create a game that suits everyone's taste, you don't have to create a version for each market.

One thing you should pay attention to is cultural issues, such as the pandatv in Warcraft 3. Pandatv in the game is wearing Japanese clothing and holding Japanese weapons. Chinese players complained. Therefore, it later wore Chinese clothing and weapons, and the problem was solved.

7. Operating Online Games is not part of game development.

You are running thousands of servers on three major land 24 hours a day. You also need to manage a group of active but virtual communities.

For example, your development team is adding content to the game. But if the team needs to correct server issues, they cannot continue to develop those content. Which is more important? Blizzard has set up a group specifically to cope with problems in the game, so that the development team can focus on their work.

8. Communication. Internal communication and external communication.

If you have a community, you can talk to them frequently and clearly. If there is a big bug or the server crashes, the staff will start working immediately. They will not go to the Forum to explain the problem, and the time will be wasted.

In this case, irrelevant internal personnel do not know what happened, and people outside of the company do not know what happened. Then people get crazy, publish posts on the Forum, and then the Forum goes down.

To solve this problem, blizzard established a formal email system. The development team can communicate with internal staff, and messages can be spread in an orderly manner.

9. Avoid money.

As long as you reveal a business opportunity in WoW, people will abuse it. If you hide it, the problem becomes smaller. If the bad guys cannot make money, they will no longer have problems such as Taojin, account theft, and credit card forgery.

10. Continuous testing of the game.

Do not trust Ver.1.0. The more you test, the better, but few can. At blizzard, everyone is testing every moment. First, there will be a beta test, then a Public Beta, and then a release, hoping that the game will be balanced, smooth, and bug-free by the day of release.

Blizzard is close to this goal in the release of the burning expedition. The server structure is upgraded to reduce network latency and increase the capacity. They added a lot of content and finally postponed the release date to the day of completion.

Finally, they went on sale in the early morning of the local time. I sold 2.4 million copies a day, which is a good result. An administrator said that he was very pleased when he looked at the lights on the server one by one.

Blizzard has struggled for 16 years and now has millions of online games. They have made great achievements. Any technology may have problems, but blizzard can always mitigate them. I hope that online games in the future can learn from their mistakes and successes