How Blizzard changed the world, then spent 20 years changing its World

BY JENNIFER ALLEN

Back in 2014, World Of Warcraft lead game designer Ion Hazzikostas said that “without a question” the game would be around to celebrate its 20th anniversary. Now, in 2024, his prediction has been proved correct. Not only that but, having been appointed game director in the meantime, he’s renewing his optimistic prediction. “I’m confident the game will still be around ten years from now,” he tells us. It’s a bold statement in an industry where even the flavour of the month can struggle to maintain its appeal for a full 31 days.

Truly quantifying World Of Warcraft’s growth over these two decades is difficult given that Blizzard doesn’t make player numbers publicly available. But while the game has gone through peaks and troughs – affected by everything from the increase in people playing games online in general to the expansion release schedule and even the COVID pandemic – it’s safe to say that it has remained very popular indeed, even if today’s numbers don’t match the levels of its original peak.

At his GDC talk this year, Warcraft franchise SVP and GM John Hight was coy about specific numbers, but according to MMORPG specialist Bellular Gaming’s analysis of the accompanying graph, about 7.25 million people still play WOW actively. That’s compared to a peak popularity of 12 million shortly after the 2010 launch of its second expansion pack, Wrath Of The Lich King, in China. Since then, the number has steadily ebbed and flowed with dips going as ‘low’ as the 5.5 million mark, with an estimated 500,000 players logging in each day. In terms of account numbers, World Of Warcraft greatly outranks other MMORPGs such as Final Fantasy XIV, with a mainstream cultural reach comparable to the likes of Fortnite and Minecraft.

During WOW’s lifespan, many other MMORPG challengers have come and gone, while videogames as a whole are almost unrecognisable compared to what most of us were playing back in 2004. What is it that has enabled Blizzard’s game to retain its crown for all this time? To answer that, we need to go right back to the beginning.

Rob Pardo arrived at Blizzard in 1997, during the development of Starcraft, before moving onto Warcraft III – both projects a natural fit for someone who played a lot of RTS games at the time. After being promoted to EVP of game design at the studio, he became part of the original development team for World Of Warcraft. It was, again, a perfect fit, since alongside his working life Pardo was a prominent EverQuest player, as the leader of Legacy Of Steel, a highly successful raiding guild.

EverQuest was the biggest MMORPG of its time, albeit a far cry from how we’d picture one now. More a survival game with RPG elements, it was heavily tied to the text-based Multi-User Dungeon games that had preceded it, themselves inspired by penand-paper RPGs. Very little of the game was user-friendly; players even needed to draw their own maps to learn the layout of the world, and its approach to death was notoriously brutal, requiring players to make ‘corpse runs’ in order to retrieve their character, lest they lose everything they possess.

As much as he enjoyed EverQuest, Pardo’s job was to make an MMORPG that was “more approachable and easier for people to get into,” he says, while still appealing to experienced players. To achieve that, Blizzard worked to take a game that Pardo believes was “inherently viral”, and expose it to people outside the development team as early as possible. By bringing in a “lot of uber guilds” from EverQuest, the team effectively relied upon a “large community” from that game to spread the word about WOW through forums and in-game chat, slowly building hype among MMORPG communities.