The First 30 Years of 'Warcraft': The Making of a Game Universe

[Music] hello hello hear me okay good morning everyone thank you so much for for getting up and braving this early morning uh I was worried it was going to be an empty room because of all the parties last night and get together so I appreciate so much seeing all of you here got the most essential items here got coffee got a clicker and I got a little presentation so we'll try and go that um so in case you didn't read the label over there we're going to talk about the first 30 years of Warcraft uh and what I hope to I hope what you get out of this is we want to share some of the experiences that we've had over the 30 years uh a little bit of the decisions that we made along the way some of the lessons we learned and I'm hopeful I I I hope that there will be information that'll be helpful for all of you so why don't we kick it off with a movie

buts go by World of Warcraft install it on your computer and join the online sensation before we all murder you all right all right welcome to the world of warcraft I'm William Shatner and I'm a shaman I'm Mr T and this is my night elf Mohawk T there's no such thing as a night elf Mohawk shut up fool this role playing game where Heroes like Leroy Jenkins do battles Leroy

that would be the World of Warcraft you're a player in the NFL but what you're most proud of is that you've raided third nationally in Dungeon progression timing was perfect that was fire for the alliance for the [Applause] for [Applause] azer ready to [Applause] work so uh just as Warcraft is celebrating 30 years it's been about 30 years for me as well I'll tell you a little bit of my background uh I didn't

start originally on on Warcraft Al although I did start playing back with Warcraft the RTS and then I played in the beta for World of Warcraft and I've I've been with blizzard uh 12 years now uh I started out first on uh misspend area as a lead producer and then spent a little bit of time over on Diablo II I brought it over to console and then did Reaper of Souls uh killed the auction house sorry about that for all of you that had investments in that um but hopefully the rest you were happy um then back to to the wow team um over the course of of my history which you know kind of portray it there um I worked on quite a few games as you can see either as executive producer production director and even game director uh it's really kind of special and cool for me to be here at GDC because a couple of those games uh really happened because of the meetings and people that I met here at GDC I was walking these Halls when I first ran into guy named Mike

Booth uh with a little game called KNX uh we made that together Mike went on to do great things including left for dead which I'm sure you've heard of uh at least I hope you have um also at the igf I uh was looking at a lot of student projects and became enamored with one called cloud and that led me to meet goova chin and and Kelly Santiago and we started that game company I incubated that when I was at at Sony so for all of you that are out there with your your hopes and dreams and and your game that you want to do I encourage you uh to network meet people I think this is a great place to do it um in addition to the games that I worked on my educational background I have a degree in computer science from the University of New Mexico probably not any Lobos out there but if you're out there you know uh put put your hands up okay I knew that um and then uh later in my career I went back and got my uh MBA and and that was it USC Marshall

School of Business uh wrote a book on project management and ended up teaching out of that book at the interactive media division of cinematic school at USC uh some of the students I worked with have gone on to do some pretty cool games uh so it was it was been a great experience for me there I've also uh was on the board for the AIS so that's uh dice um I think that kind of that kind of sums up me um why don't we get on to the stuff we really want to talk about which is Warcraft so Warcraft the universe our mission is to build a fantasy universe that Delights and connects everyone everywhere and so you know we chose our words carefully I mean for us you know that fantasy Universe means you know I can't even can't even read my own notes Here uh it means that we you know we essentially want to tell deep and cool stories we want to be engaging and and in in delighting it's important to us

that the game not only be a little dangerous you know there has to be challenges but there's an element of humor and that distinguishes us from a lot of other games out there connecting is important for us as we found and I'll talk about through the Journey of building Warcraft it's that building a community bringing people together you know people that you might not have otherwise met in real life you'll meet in in our games and we want to make sure that the games themselves the content and the communities that we Foster are inclusive that you can be who you want to be and Multicultural you know we and then the last part you know we want to be everywhere and if you notice there's there's elements of of you know mythology from across the globe but we operate in you know 247 across the entire planet in many many languages and cultures and we think it's a cool way to you know kind of get in touch uh with other communities other cultures and we pride ourselves trying to make our games

feel like they were actually made for the regions or the countries that we publish in like even when we do localization we'll take you know the little jokes that we tell that you know if you're playing here in North America you know you'll probably understand them but if we did a literal translation of them to you know other countries you know Germany or you know Peru it wouldn't make as much sense so our localization teams actually try to still have an element of humor but a joke that makes sense in in their culture so these are essentially the the games that we have released including the wow expansions over our 30-year history for uh for Warcraft um Warcraft itself is celebrating its 30 years coming this November World of Warcraft is celebrating 20 years in operation and again this is in in November um Hearthstone is celebrating

its 10e anniversary and Rumble our our newest baby uh is going to be one-year-old uh in November so I'm going to walk through some of the pivotal Milestones that we've had through the creation of these games and then later you know kind of connect that all together uh and talk about how we feel that this led to some of our successes and then also want to share with you a big mistake that we made so Warcraft the RTS started in 1994 um we were playing a lot of of real-time strategy games the genre was just starting to happen up until that point you know a lot of people were playing turn-based games a lot of them were adaptations of of board games and so this notion of having realtime strategy games where you click on units they go do the thing and you're not you know pressing a turn button was was still relatively novel um we love the genre we wanted to be able to would make a game in that genre so we actually

chose the fantasy setting for it because at that time most the the RTS games were actually sci-fi or military in nature and that turned out to be a pretty important decision for us down the road it's also important that in an RTS game there's a very clear conflict and so we thought okay in a fantasy setting it's got to be Orcs versus Humans there's a lot of literature uh that has established that long-standing you know rivalry in our case competition for resources so we thought that would that would be a very simple concept to to start with and there it is in all of its Glory uh for those of you that played Warcraft like I did um that's what it looked like when it first came out um if you look at the the play screen down below the little green blobs or the the the Orcs they're busily harvesting things chopping down wood what have you building their their Village but Along Comes the little blue blob well that represents the humans and of course they're intruding on their territory and

thus the conflict begins um the early Warcraft game you could play solo in campaigns but you could also play with friends I remember it wasn't quite as convenient as as it is today but I remember hooking up you know my computer over land with my neighbor and introducing everybody in my neighborhood at Warcraft um the the storytelling was in the form of mission briefings which you see in that upper corner and it was voiceover but it was you know this scrolling text so we had a lot of success with with Warcraft uh did a sequel to it um and you know could have kind of just stayed there but you know a lot of cool stuff was happening in the industry not the least of which was 3D cards when this came out people didn't really have 3D cards on their on their computers so in the the late 90s mid 90s that's when they really started to become more prevalent and we did Warcraft 3 one of the first big evidence of it was going full 3D with it so now the camera could

come down a little bit you'd see a little bit of the you know the shadows and volume of your units a little more detail higher resolution the action was you know cooler uh we also wanted to tell more story so up until this point it's missions right go do this go Harvest that go take down you know this you know uh this human settlement but we wanted to tell a deeper story to help you feel more connected to what was going on in the game itself and that led to creating these what blizzard would later become pretty famous for is our pre-rendered cinematics we use those for the announcement of games sorry I'm going to go over here because I can't see some of you there thank you for for coming in and sitting up front I appreciate it um but we use it for the announcement of our games we use that in between missions to kind of propel the story along and to give it other connection we added Heroes to Warcraft 3 that was kind of an important decision because now you have these key Story characters that we could we could Tire everything to it was a lot of what they

were trying to accomplish and you as the general above were ordering the troops around to help them essentially but one of the really smart things we did uh because oh I forgot to mention we also had much deeper gameplay on this we now had 12 you know different factions that could play in these Maps um which by the way I got interesting story uh from Chris Metson who's one of the at that time one of the story writers um we had all these different colors 12 different colors for all the units right and you literally went on a menu and you picked pink or blue or yellow and he thought man this is boring as heck so he took each of those colors and he turned them into the various factions which would later be you know the regions of Ezra so uh you can you can thank him for the fact that Twilight's Hammer is called that instead of pink but anyway the the other thing that we did is is as multiplayer caught on and we could see oh this is pretty cool

there's a real multiplayer Community we thought how do we extend this so we created a very robust mod system for the game and that allowed our players to not only build maps to extend the game but also games within the game and what you're looking at there is a game or mod and a very popular one for Warcraft 3 called defense of the Ancients or DOTA so this mod actually gave rise to the whole MOA gen genre and also Tower Defense so it's really powerful it allowed an extension of the game um Warcraft 3 was by all accounts one of the most popular rtss of the time so where do we go next with this do we continue to build this do we continue to extend this well we're really excited about you know 3D and what could be done with it I mean when we're building RTS you have this God's eye view of of of you the map watching the soldiers below but

what if you could be one of them what if instead of from above the game is built in such a way that you're part of that universe and we loved MMOs at the time we were playing them we're like hey you know we've seen by creating a platform in the game that we can have multiple games inside essentially the same universe but MMOs would give us the opportunity to really immerse players you know it's like cyberspace is here and it was it was exciting for us to feel like hey we could be part of this you know this could be the future and we could have a lot of different gameplay inside of our game by taking Warcraft to an MMO so how does Warcraft become an MMO initially you know I mean MMOs based on role playing games you know you you typically level up to max level you finish the story campaign and you're

kind of done but the interesting and cool thing about MMOs is that you can extend that by having a lot of multiplayer interaction and so for us it was coming up with you know cool things for people to do together so that you know you level up to Max but you then you go on and do raids and Dungeons and you know a lot of of of activity together and essentially you forge connections with people that you would otherwise have never met and that was something really powerful about World of Warcraft so how did that change us how did that change in some ways uh the industry so when we released World of Warcraft the internet was really just kind of happening for a lot of people they were doing AOL chat rooms up until that point text based text based muds so this was an opportunity for them to literally go into a world be completely

immersed in it have a 3D avatar in a 360° world and interact with people you know they went out and and harvested things they they they quested together they you know conquered you know demons and and bosses together they tanked they healed they cried they hugged each other they fell off of cliffs but they were connecting with each other and we became or or the the wow became a lifestyle for many people uh I mean some of you already and I appreciate you've come up to me you told me the stories about how wow brought you together made you friends and it was a really powerful thing for us uh as a company and it absolutely changed us the very first BlizzCon that we had was for burning Crusade it was the first expansion that we had for World of Warcraft and like I was talking to one of the the or developers uh the other night and I said

tell me about those experiences and he said you know what was really interesting for us is that when we went to BlizzCon we didn't know if it was going to be you know a success or not but thousands of people were descending on the Anaheim Convention Center and it blew them away and the developers were like staring and looking at each other it's like oh my gosh all these people here for us what they quickly realized is all those people were there for each other and we went from being a game developer to being the caretakers of a community I mean it was a Dawning realization to us that we no longer owned this game exclusively all of you some of you they played it we that Community is your game and now we had to take great care and how we were we we we were the stewards of your world your lifestyle

so this recounts some of the uh the expansions that we've released over time for for uh World of Warcraft we you know we have one coming up as well um really excellent run for for wow we hope to have it uh even longer hopefully another 20 years at least but one thing that was happening was about Midway through the release of these expansions is our players were talking about you know really want to be able to recreate you know that that experience that they first had when they first joined wow that sense of Discovery uh that sense of of playing together again because many of the the things that we had done to make wow more you know convenient to play and many of these things were asked for by our player community had actually in in the minds of some especially some of the oldtimers like me had had had

weakened some of the social bonds that making the game a little bit more difficult a little more dangerous a little bit harder to actually which seems counterintuitive making a little bit harder to actually get to meet people uh made it easier to make it stick and so largely at the urging of our fans we released or re-released this we took an evolutionary step back [Music] someone once said that you can't go home again but they lacked vision and a temporal discombobulator [Applause]

[Music] [Music] [Music] so Warcraft classic was certainly not something we we anticip ipated um we've

now had we re-released to the expansions for it it's a very Vibrant Community for us and really a second Community for wow um we started out it was really pretty difficult because we didn't build wow with the intent of ever going back and and replaying you know that experience so we had literally lost some of the data required to do that we had to recreate it if you would now it's based on our modern you know client and server but we wanted it to be a a truly authentic experience and maybe we were a little too overzealous in that we wanted to reassure players that we weren't going to have any changes whatsoever so we had we developed this hashtag you know no changes and then over the course of Time Players like you know this community is a lot of fun but there's a few things that you did that we'd like for you to go ahead and put back in and so now we have hashtag some changes but they're they're informed by our community community I think one of the funniest things is that you know we went back and we took a lot of effort to fix

bugs you know things that were broken in in the the old wow and we had players tell us no don't fix that bug that's a pretty cool exploit you know so we'd go back in and reintroduce the bug but it was uh it was a really cool uh experience for us it's really awesome for us to be able to have two communities in WoW uh one reliving the past so to speak uh and some and for some people it's it's their first experience they chose to go into wow classic uh as the first wow that they've ever played so we talked a lot about wow so what are some of the other Expressions that we've had of Warcraft um like you know our love for rtss and then our love for MMOs one of the things that we love playing at at at blizzard was tcgs or trading card games Magic the Gathering was super popular we actually did our own Magic the Gathering uh you know type game trading card game in in the form of

a World of Warcraft trading game and so that led to the creation of hearthstone this was Project Pegasus uh internally and you know the challenge for us is how do we make this physical game because up until that point there really wasn't a digital TCG um how do we turn that into you know a really cool digital game how can we take advantage of that technology and do something that would be hard to do you know in in a in a in a paper you know game um we actually took inspiration from Warcraft so the foundation for it was to look at the various classes of wow and create you know the card families for Hearthstone and it turned out to be you know worked out really well uh it also created a great connection if you'd never played wow um if you understood the card families in in Hearthstone you could make that transition to wow and kind of get oh I know what a hunter is all about they're going to summon a bunch of beasts or at least they're going to have a beast you know or you know Warriors are you know got a lot of armor on them

and they can do a lot of damage uh but they also have to take a lot of damage and that became sort of the foundation of of how we design Hearthstone um some of the ways in which we you know things that we did inside of hearthstone you could you really couldn't do practically on a on a on a on a regular card game is we actually have some cards that allow you to make duplicates of whatever's in your opponent's deck you can imagine how messy that would be if you're trying to do that you know at a card tournament the Hearthstone brought millions of players in into to play billions of matches it initially released on on PC uh and then we moved it to tablet and then on into Mobile here you can see some of the the extensions we've made to Hearthstone over its 10year history we've actually done 26 different expansions for it uh five different Adventures on top of the You original card set

we've had over50 million people play Hearthstone in 158 billion games and Hearthstone just last week celebrated its 10th birthday so happy birthday harston so we were intrigued by mobile as a platform form I mean a lot of us were playing mobile games and we thought now what if we you know and we were certainly you know emboldened by the success of hearthstone on mobile like how how would we envision a game built from the ground up for mobile so we went back to our strategy routes and we made Warcraft Rumble um Rumble is is was actually game directed and and led by you know folks from the the wow team so while it has strategy roots in it um you'll see a lot of elements of of

wow in Rumble Rumble is if you haven't played it encourage you to do it but um you're essentially you're picking leaders You're Building troop armies um you go on these you know maps and essentially try to take down you know your opponent's home Tower so to speak and the families themselves the key Story characters are based on the characters that you see in World of Warcraft the maps and it's interesting the transition we made in original Warcraft RTS the maps became the zones of wow well now the zones of wow become the maps of Rumble um but Rumble was was was you know it's we just released it in November um it was a really cool exploration for us to get into mobiles and and it's actually taught us some things that we brought back to how we regard the support of our games both wow and Hearthstone and like Hearthstone has that element of Whimsy and humor in

it so now I want to tell you a little bit about the philosophies and decisions that we made that we think contributed to our success the three excuse me the the five areas I want to cover are set setting visual style story our evolving gameplay and then our community so the setting turned out to be a really important uh choice for us because that classic fantasy setting is very familiar to people um it also gives you a a a technology that is reasonably easy to understand you know everybody knows or hopefully everybody knows how to wield a sword and a shield or a bow and you know as opposed to science fiction what sometimes has to explain you know what it's all about you know what how do you use the Weaponry that's in it it's also you know medieval fanas has been expressed over many many

decades in literature uh in you know in film and so people were understood that they could get into it super accessible and it has Global appeal you know I mentioned earlier but you know while we base a lot of it on on Western mythology we put a lot of Eastern influences in in our particular BL uh brand of of fantasy in the visual style you we could have gone you know strict ly photorealistic uh you know 3D cards when Warcraft first came out you know were were you know just becoming the rage but they were improving literally every every six months you know how many of you went out and you know spent a lot of money bought your first 3D card I got you know I got my Nvidia Reva only to find it obsoleted within a year I like oh man well the same thing was happening with the visuals that people were creating for those games and when you approach photo real especially over course of you know a long a lengthy

lifespan that Warcraft has had um you quickly get kind of outmoded your graphics look dated and we wanted to make sure that they didn't look dated that they would be timeless for us so that turned out to be a really good choice for us we also could have gone cartoony but we wanted to appeal to you know a little bit older audience we didn't want it to be seen as a kids game you know very much a social game it is a family game you know it's certainly in World of Warcraft but by and large we want to make sure that that people still saw it as some what serious and so we went for this stylized look you know bulky shoulders and you know which would looks great when you're putting armor on it right um a lot of uh in the animation of our characters squash and stretch so it had a lot of personality and this actually kind of became the blizzard look and and you can one of our goals is that when you see somebody playing one of our games that people look over and say hey is that Rumble is that wow is that hearon Z because it's a very distinctive look for our

games and you can see how we we each game kind of interprets or reinterprets the style of a character in this case this is Jana proudmore that's how she appeared in the original Warcraft 3 and over the course of our games how she's you know expressed so she looks different but you can still see the you know key things that make her Jana and then story you know RTS games didn't necessarily have to have a story but it was a way to propel people through the missions and by creating a story we laid the foundation for an intellectual property a franchise it was those things that helped you know connect people across games it was part of what connected them to the worlds themselves and when you think about it you know especially a game like World of Warcraft know people aren't ingesting the story in the same way as they would a movie it's not a linear experience where it's like okay two hours I'm in I know what's

going on with every one of these characters and and you're following the plot to the end you may be interrupted by you know hours weeks months in your play experience so how do we keep that thread together and having those key Story characters you know sort of propel it so they always had some big conflict that they're dealing with sometimes you know an existential threat to our planet Azeroth um or maybe just you know they have a real beef with each other and you're the heroes in there assisting these these leaders but you understand both the conflict and the world around you you see here arthus if if you you know he was in The Frozen Throne in in Warcraft the RTS he certainly was the the center of the lichking uh ratha lichking and which is what our classic players are playing right now um that I think one of our more poignant stories um about how power

corrupts so evolving gameplay what we've done through the course of time is to you know either take existing genres uh or or even games that we've we you know had ourselves and and iterate on those but always find a way to reduce the complexity in playing those games make them more AC accessible and experiment with new modes of play and we like to iterate on those on that proven gameplay then finally uh and this has really been the most important thing for us is community we behave as the caretakers of you know some people told me you know you own my childhood but we we we're the caretakers of their community of their lifestyle and we you we take that seriously and what has helped us is it through the course of of of taking care of that community we've grown through a network effect people invite their

friends to be part of the game people incorporate that in their lifestyle that becomes something that they get together they do on a Tuesday night and and there's a little bit of almost you know pressure from your friends like oh we're going to go do this thing together but then you also know you have a place to go and you have a way to connect with people uh you can make friends you know across borders across cultural you know differences uh and and that's a really important aspect of our game and especially and wow and then we you know we Tred to keep the games fresh through regular content updates so this just kind of sums up the things that we attribute to the success of our franchise so now I want to talk a little bit about um a more recent case study on how things maybe didn't work out for us so if you look at this is the

subscriber curve for World of Warcraft we have a really predictable pattern where every time an expansion would come out a lot of people would come in to play that expansion uh they'd reunite with their friends they'd level up they'd you know get through a lot of the content they might down a you know a raid boss they and and a substantial group of them would continue on you know all the way through the expansion and on to the next one and it and it the this isn't a steady state right we have a constant inflow and outflow you know we literally have almost as many new players coming in as as you know other players going out you know the churn so to speak but they always would come back every expansion we released for pretty pretty much it was very predictable the same number of folks would come back and then when we released classic you can see we actually in between expansion releases had another big peak so we brought back or we created a new community of players and if you

notice that that actually led to when we had saw that tapering off after the release we're now at a higher level so when shadowlands came out very high and healthy you know subscriber base for the game so as we're heading into all right we're going to do the next two expansions for for classic and we're going to release dragonflight so this is what we expected to see as a result of that now we recognize that you know okay shadowlands came out during Co and so that might have been a little bit higher but we expected dragonflight especially with the you know remember this is the overall subscriber base we we expected that to still be a really strong healthy showing that's what we got uh and I put professor putride in there if you played he's he he rarely means good news even though he talks about good news a lot uh and this was not good news for for us instead of seeing that that that big

healthy Peak at at dragonfly it was much lower and a lot of that was attributed to people losing their interest uh and even in some cases their trust in US during shadowlands so what went wrong I mean it's we did surveys of our players we looked at forums uh we said we had a community council we consulted with them we consulted ourselves a lot of us are players and we just got real about it uh and we and ironic that some of the things that went wrong for us are some of the things that we felt led to Our Success that we might have you know strayed from from the things that that we believe so strongly so first off was the story and setting in shadowlands you know you're essentially going to a place that was never expressed in the RTS but it's this afterlife and people players felt like they were a Stranger in a Strange Land

uh we had similar concepts with burning Crusade and Legion but this felt pretty alien to our players and Azeroth which is the place that they leveled up and they'd spent a lot of time in their characters was was their anchor was not a place that they were visiting anymore you know they're literally playing in the in the afterlife also the the the main you know antagonist you know the Jailer was not a character that we evolved very well in the course of that expansion wasn't understood to our players we hadn't really introduced him before he also had this kind of annoying habit of of taking credit for all the things that had ever happened in in in wow and it felt a little bit too contrived and then lastly we diminished some of the key Story characters characters that you know our players had grown to love or hate but nonetheless expected to see have you know a powerful presence we we kind of diminish them in

in shadowlands and so from a story standpoint players are disappointed and from a you know franchise standpoint it was tough to see some of those important characters uh reduced next was the game playay itself you know we had been clinging to the idea that hey you know the way we have done expansions in the past is the way we should do it for shadowlands and one of the things we introduced all the way back in Legion was this notion of borrowed power that is that you get items in the case of Legion it was an artifact weapon that you're leveling up and that you're you know your accumulating points but the power is in the item and not in your character the thing that you've invested time in and players didn't like it and they were telling us that in subtle ways from Legion and then on into battle for Azeroth but it really came to a head with shadowlands they had simply had enough with that um we also I mean things changed players

changed you know during this time you know we're bringing a lot of new players but I think that time is really important to people and and you know you can't we couldn't count on them spending as much time grinding their way through something as they had in the past and so we were competing with a lot of other entertainment experiences so how do we change you know what we're doing the last part too is with our community we had uh you know again as I mentioned you know we released shadowlands in Co it was pretty tough for us we had everyone had to go home and and work from home we'd never done that before and we put all of our all of our resources on getting shadowlands out it was important for us to be able to do that for our players we we made that Paramount but as a result we hadn't really adequately you know resourced the first update for shadowlands so there was kind of a lengthy gap between the release of shadowlands and the first update and players are like hey I'm kind of bored I I want something to do what's

going on blizzard was you know did you you ran out of steam and we weren't consistent in those updates and we also weren't communicating with our players we'd always kind of prided ourselves and like we're going to do something amazing and then you know surprise you with it and hopefully you're going to love it but our players needed to know no I'm you know I want to know I mean I'm invested time here I want to still hang out with my friends who want cool things to do what are you up to you know and are you even listening to us anymore and here's some of the comments that you can see a couple of comments complaining about borrowed power um complaining about the respect for players time and that quote was so important to us that's become a mantra for us respect your players time so what do we do now we already you know as we were you know after we finished off the initial release of lands we're talking about where do we go next we realized that you know maybe

this was going to be a little bit too far out for our players and that we wanted to return to high fantasy so that was already in the works we wanted to go uh to the dragon AES we wanted to tell that story it's an important aspect of you know the history of Azeroth um and so that was already in the works to do dragonflight but dragonflight turned out to be exactly what players wanted in terms of setting High fantasy get to be on dragons deeper storytelling you know for um for our players we worked in you know those key Story characters and we tell told you a lot of the threads uh that we had either kept a little mysterious or we hadn't connected before and we reintroduced dangerous but humor it was more light-hearted it wasn't as somber as you know the afterlife you know that we saw in shadowlands and the the zones themselves were vibrant you know bright light and you know really Majestic and beautiful things this is actually a shot from a quest in the game where all you do is stay a while and listen uh you sit down

on this ledge and you look at the dragons flying around and you have a little you know dialogue with the character and then gameplay we got rid of Barrow power yay our players were pretty happy about that um and our design decisions became player Centric as opposed to being more about the game that we wanted to build I mean originally it was like we build games that we love which is a great way to start and all of you should be considering that if you don't like it then you certainly shouldn't be making it but think beyond that you know think about what your players want and and the longer you run the more you you know you know what they want I mean we have all kinds of data in our players in terms of where they're playing how they're spending their time and and looking at that reviewing it talking to them and using that to inform Your Design decisions and I and I a specifically say data informed you know we we didn't go

so far as to we're going to look at all the data and that's the game that we're going to do we're going to check all the boxes but rather hey here's some stuff we want to do here's a whole list of things that we want to do what are the things that we think our players are going to like the most uh based on what they're telling us and we prioritize those things and that made a pretty big difference for us uh we also for those of you who play WoW at the very beginning it was two factions it was horri versus Alliance right and that was that's an important part of the story but people when they first came into the game they would often choose you know one faction over the other on the basis of how they looked you know I want to be an orc I mean this is cool you know they ride motorcycles and you know they're you know they're spiky you know or you want to be part of the alliance because actually they look very pretty and they wear they look awesome in shining armor and their buildings are so cool they're like those you know you Fairy book castles fairy tale

castles but that decision up front could actually trap you because you meet somebody in real life you're hanging out at GDC it's like oh you play wow that's awesome what do you play I play alliance oh I play hard yeah well I guess we can't be friends and it's like well why should we create that division so we broke the cardinal rule and we allow crossfaction play let's see oh and I can't forget portrayed here dragon writing so flying is something that our players have have loved to do and and we release an expansion and within minutes it's like when are we going to get flying you we're like you don't get flying because we want you to walk around on the ground and really get immersed in the story and it's a good reason right experience it more but it's like yeah but I really want Flying when are you going to have flying um so with dragon R like you know what it's it's an expansion about dragon it'd be kind of weird if we don't let people fly so we built a whole new

flying system Dragon riding that allows you from the very beginning to you know you get your dragon and you get to you know fly around the entire Dragon aisles and we designed all the zones so that they could be taken in from the air and and that you know and we made a joy of flying I don't if if you've tried it you know hopefully you agree that the arabaticum before it's literally like a flight simulator in a good way not a bad way no no controls for your dragon so the other thing we did is we committed we' never done this before but excuse me we laid out the full year of what we were going to do we told our players hey this is what you can count on from us and we delivered on it and the way we did that is we we put aside dedicated

resources people to just make content for these patch updates now some of these things were part of what we call the expansion team especially the blue banners there but a lot of the white Banner stuff was that live service team and it's funny because you know we've been operating you know live service since the beginning but it's actually kind of the experience that we had with mobile we're like oh these people are looking at data all the time they're constantly worried about what their players are doing they're using this to plan their updates maybe there's some good learnings for us there and it turned out to be the case some of the same disciplines that you know your mobile mobile colleagues are going through your product managers are going through we've we kind of had to relearn for the the wow team and we continue that for classic as well and we actually got creative with classic you know we have a lot of people on the team that they're part of the classic Community themselves they love

it we asked them you're like okay so we want to be careful you know classic is about no changes but what are some clever things that we could do to engage this classic community and so we did hardcore mode which was crazy you know for us it was it turned out to be a lot of fun for Content creators you know because they could show people trying to level up as far as they could before getting killed off uh but it wasn't hardcore for was us wasn't always just competitive either we'd see groups band together and try and you know survive as as long as they could but it was it was a lot of fun and then season to Discovery was a new way to let players re-experience classic but with a Twist you know they could actually we made some modifications that our players could make modifications to their class and and discover if you would those powers and then finally on on Warcraft itself modern wow itself you know we've extended this commitment to our players you know we are releasing content every eight weeks in the game um and if you'll

notice there if those of you you may have been traveling yesterday but there's a little Pirate Flag well yesterday we announced plunder storm which is actually a a mode for Warcraft world Warcraft it isn't inside of wow modern and it isn't inside of wow classic what it is is it's a battle royale version of the game that you can just jump into with a you you don't take your existing character from either of those games you you roll a new character if you've played Battle Royale games you kind of know how that that functions but you know when you killing off your opponents you know they as as they die they put out a Pata of of of the loot in the form of the spells that they were using so you pick and choose which of their spells you want and then you carry on and it's you know we we did it kind of for fun we just thought this would be a cool mode to put in we wanted to see if players would like it the response has been really good for

us uh I think people are having a lot of fun they were totally unexpected uh I think what was really interesting for me I was reading some of the comments yesterday is that um you know there were you know it might surprise you but they're actually people that you know will get on the internet and complain about your game you know and uh yeah I know weird right at least it was back in the 90s certainly not today it's pretty common place but there there were some people like you know man I wish they you know why did they make this you know Battle Royale thing blah blah blah and our own we knew we'd done the right thing when our own players were coming forward and saying why are you complaining they give you something essentially that you that that you didn't know was coming it's a pleasant surprise it seems to be a hell of a lot of fun um I don't understand why you're complaining you people just complain and it was I was watching the comments from the players towards the players and I'm like okay we did we did something right and we want to continue to do you know kind of creative stuff keep it stirred up just really you know don't don't get

stuck in in the Rut you know that we had been in where we were kind of repeating the same pattern and then finally we announced the next three expansions at blon we've never done that we committed to where what's what's the story going to be set in you know what are the major plot points or at least the major plot point for each one of these and we're committed to delivering on that so summing up the things that we feel we did right you know to to to turn around uh you know what was happening on World of Warcraft in story and setting gameplay and community and these are some of the comments as a result of it you know they're ecstatic that we got rid of Barb power they're happy with dragon flight they like the story they love the pace of content updates and that's the stuff you like to see

right so what was the result we actually for the first time in the history of of World of Warcraft we have more subscribers before the next expansion comes out uh than in any other time in the life of an expansion right so normally we would see a drop off that would continue and then it pops up when the next expansion comes out you see that that nice big you know uh increase which was really that trajectory happened just as our live Services was kicking in as we were making commitments um and so we're you know we're feeling pretty good about you know where where we are now and and crisis averted but we have to stay vigilant right we have to stay on top of our community we have to continue to deliver things that excite them so I think I've covered some of this but

I make sure so um biggest lessons for us that I wanted to impart to you is that players want Evolution you know they these communities are deeply invested in the games and they they don't want to leave your game don't give them a reason to leave you know give them a reason to stay and Community sentiment during shadowlands was a real wakeup call for us what our players want it had fundamentally changed and we hadn't recognized that so we had to throw out our old Playbook that had worked for us for you know 18 years at that point and now we're crafting a new playbook but our players are co-authoring it with us uh I think I I think I pretty much covered it so uh our motto uh on top of of of our mission statement which is was original and is true today is to honor

the past and Forge the future so with that I want to thank you and I think we have J we have just a couple minutes yeah okay if anybody wants to ask a question head up to the mic if you want uh it's right behind you there if you if you don't mind hey there hi I'll do my best on this side hi hi hi how you doing John um Ben Fox uh I was at blizzard for a little while uh running uh some some data uh applications and I'm curious where you I saw some of the the data information that you provided on you know how well the the game has has done over the years where do you see that kind of taking you in the future and how big of a a a part will data play in how you evolve the game and continue to move

forward data has a significant part of the game right now we we have a uh a very close relationship between our product management team and our Dev team as I said we have a dedicated Life Services team we actually have an associate game director Jeremy feasel that is his life and uh if you if any of you knew the history of feasel um in missa Pandaria you know we were we needed a little more time and we're like hey feasel go create something for us to keep the players busy and he went crazy and created the Timeless aisle uh so it's and it's it's in his DNA I think he's the right person to lead it but they work closely with our our PM group and and we literally do weekly review of what are the things we'd like to do what are the things our players would like us to do and we use a kind of a methodology to to stack rank you know about the how how big an effort is it to do that and you know how much excitement do we think our our engagement is like how we want to measure things we'll get for our players

we also have put a lot of effort into variety of activities and not over index on hey it's just for the Raiders or the you know the Battlegrounds folks but you know even for the folks folks that are there to just kind of role play and and go out and be in the world together we want to make sure we're giving them new content yep anybody else yeah uh hi uh I just have a question I thank you for the talk was great but how do you engage new players that are coming to all for the first time they can feel left out with so many expansions so many stuff to do they can feel left out because they're just coming into the game after 20 years how do you cater to those Gamers yeah good question and you know this is an area that we we have to continue to evolve but what we introduced is when you when you first come in if you start from the very beginning you know you go to a special place called Exiles reach don't be thwarted by that terrible name um but you actually are there with other new players and you level to to 10 essentially and you get to know the

ropes of how to play the game and we kind of walk you through all the mechanics of it and from that point you you will once the next expansion is out you'll go into dragonflight and you'll level up to maximum there and hopefully you know we try to keep that group of people together so we'll even suggest a realm that you can go to that that group will be in um but a lot of people don't enter that way and most people are you know they're or not most people but a lot of people they're friends will say hey come and play WoW with me and so we offer a boost to them uh and in that case they go right into max level and they can play right along with their friends but you know as you pointed out Wow's got a lot of of complexity and depth to it and so we encourage friends to play together and kind of you know show them the cool stuff to do and you know here's the dos and don'ts of of you know how to down this boss uh but I think that's an that's a area for us to to grow as well I mean I think watch ing how new players are coming in what's exciting for them what isn't you know

how much time commitment you know do they feel comfortable with and I think that's going area you'll see us you know fine-tune quite a bit over the next few years thank you thanks hi so uh when we have a University's 30 years old there is a difficulty when it comes to keeping consistent and delivering on the continuity of story especially when you have other mediums like books Comics Etc are there any lessons or any interesting challenges that you've had to overcome to get to the point that you today yeah I mean most of the uh so the question was related to creating cohesion and consistency across our stories in various forms of media so one of the things we do is that we review all of it you know so re read the books read the comic books look at the board games um you know reviewed the movie you uh and you know that's a honestly a big

part of Chris menon's job now he's returned uh to work with us uh because it's so important right you want characters to be true to their what you know their nature you know and their motivations um and we'll continue to explore you know other forms of media because you know that's a great way for people to to get to know the universe we're excited about it we think you know there's a lot of great parab Parables and and lessons in in in wow and the way the denisons of Azeroth you know behave and treat each other uh but we do we do monitor all that we don't just throw it out there and and and let you know anybody do what they want with the universe but you know that being said is as you point out it's 30 years there time to time we even have our own inconsistencies um we've established databases to be able to go back and track okay what exactly did kagar say and you know what was medivh's thing so yeah thank you so much

yeah I'll probably I'll probably have to end it because I think Drew wants to drag me up let me take your question and then uh okay go ahead first of all thank you for the presentation and this amazing game so I'm a big fan I just wanted to ask um maybe what was the role of intellectual property in building your franchise maybe you can share some priorities or challenges in this terms yeah it's funny we didn't set out to build a universe that would last 30 years but that's why I wanted to show some of the decisions we made along the way that that worked out really well towards it uh a couple years ago we we reorganized and you that's how I became general manager and that's a big part of my job is to you know Safeguard Warcraft you know as an intellectual property uh but I'm a developer you know and so I think of that through the games that we make and so we will always be Central in games you know uh if you look at something like Marvel they were Central in comic books new characters were were created there um story was created there and the movies and all and the games

were an offshoot of that and I think for us it's the games you know we'll Express the story first through the games and then you know we'll look for cool and new things to do and find you know different ways for you to experience Warcraft In other media but games will be the center for that thank you thank you all thank you so much [Music]