The First Million Players that Weren’t in Azeroth Anymore
I love seeing our game’s launch campaign come up even today.
For a game that came out twelve years ago it surprised me to see this article sent to me by one of the folks on our launch team just yesterday.
With absolutely no hard feelings toward the author, I’m glad to have a reason to tell this story and talk about some things we learned from the experience. This is a tale from the launch of RIFT, by Trion Worlds.
I was the Executive Producer and studio head, and I vividly remember the day our head of Marketing, David Reid, came over to my desk and said, “We got some ideas back for the launch campaign. You’re gonna like some and absolutely hate one of them.”
David knows how to sell.
In rebooting the game to RIFT about 12 months prior, we had assumed lapsed World of Warcraft players, who numbered in the many, many millions, would be our best potential audience. That also fit our team’s ex-EverQuest, ex-WoW, ex-other-MMORPGs background and ability to build. And we really needed a way to stand out.
The right way to connect with that audience had been eluding us.
He went through the presentation (from HWH) and as he approached the last one he paused to say, “So, I did say you were going to hate something.”
The last page in the deck screamed at us in all caps, “WE’RE NOT IN AZEROTH ANYMORE!” The first words out of my mouth came instantly: “Oh, hell no. We can’t do that.” Then a beat.
Then we both looked at each other, and at the same time realized, “We HAVE to do that.”
“Are we really doing this?”
“I think we have to, don’t we?”
“Yeah. We do.”
After briefly convincing our CEO, that was that.
It didn’t just resonate, it hit hard. It was the perfect inside joke for the people we were trying to connect with. People who were still playing WoW could get angry at us for the audacity, and the people that weren’t playing it anymore who, quite literally, were not in Azeroth anymore, would think: “Holy shit. What is this?”
When you’re no one, and you have just enough money for one shot, that shot has to work. I’ve heard analogous thinking described recently as “bombs, not bullets,” and I like that a lot. For us, there in the pre-influencer, magazine cover, retail box era of 2010 it was get noticed or die.
That campaign was critical to us getting to a million subscribers. At the time, the biggest launch in the post-WoW era. It worked.
I did get an email from my counterpart on WoW that had a body of “Really?” and nothing else. We worked together at a previous company so I like to think that he laughed, or at least groaned, a little.
To us, punching up like that was genuinely done in good fun. None of us, or them I assume, thought for a moment that it translated literally into us saying “Yes we are going to take all of your players, and we don’t like you, and you are bad” despite that being the outsider take from time to time.
As for what happened after, there are three key things we knew we needed for a AAA massive online game launch to take off and stay growing:
- The unique proposition for fun, at amazingly high quality, that resonates with players
- Stability, stability, stability
- Responsive live operations, with meaningful short- and long-term updates giving people a reason to stick around
Stability we absolutely nailed. RIFT was often referred to as the smoothest launch in MMO history. (Rehearsing, or iterating your own launch end to end, pays off.)
Quality I give us an 8.5 out of 10. That was coincidentally the Metacritic score at the time, which I think was entirely fair. Uniqueness, the cool stuff you could only do in our world, generally worked well. The right things were really resonating with players. In our case, our unique character class system (which inspired a few future MMOs, their EPs later told me) and our massive events and overall concept of dynamic content that adapted to player populations and locations and tried to take over the world on its own. This is a thing we should have pushed on much harder after launch.
Live operation we thought of in three tracks — Rapid ongoing patches, meaningful periodic updates, and major content drops (for us, that meant expansions).
People now recognize the need to actually grow teams when warranted to take advantage of success at launch. That wasn’t in the cards for us. The company had commitments to two other AAA MMOs (both already over budget and behind schedule) and with money going out as quickly as it was coming in we weren’t able to grow the team.
Painfully, it wasn’t long before we were asked to shrink the team and, also, figure out how quickly could we get to the first paid expansion. That further took focus away from live game content. We weren’t able to get to a solid quarterly pace of universally appealing, cohesive, themed new content and events, nor iterate enough on the parts that were making us truly unique.
We were able to do the first track of patches very well and extremely reliably. We’d even set up the game to where many balance changes and small updates could be done without any downtime. Responsive and important work, but that didn’t keep pushing the launch themes the way they should have.
Over our regular updates, we were able to add content for different parts of the audience, but they were bullets, not bombs. That mid level track of meaningful periodic updates wasn’t anywhere close to what it should have been. Nailing all three could have keep RIFT on the growth trajectory we all wanted. That absolutely would have required growing, not shrinking the team.
It’s 12 years later, the company’s changed hands, the game’s still running, and it still comes up in conversation. Those of us who poured ourselves into it know that no matter what else happened, Trion was the house that RIFT built, and that we were all a part of something very special that did phenomenally well, beyond any reasonable expectation.
We all know in our hearts it could have been even more, and that every one of us would have loved the chance to take it there.
But when it comes to what we did accomplish, there’s a hell of a lot to be extremely proud of.
With all that said, I am really glad we got your attention.
