'Guild Wars': An experiment that worked

Kristin Kalning Games editor • E-mail

With more than 3 million units sold, legions of passionate fans and heaps of critical acclaim, “Guild Wars” is probably the most popular massively multiplayer online game you’ve never heard of.

It’s easy to see why. Blizzard Entertainment’s “World of Warcraft” is a seemingly unstoppable juggernaut, with 8.5 million worldwide subscribers. “Burning Crusade,” the expansion to the original game, sold an estimated 3.5 million copies in just one month.

“Because of those big numbers, and because ‘WoW’ is the first subscription-based MMO that’s broken out of hardcore market, [Blizzard] gets a lot of attention,” say Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, the company that developed “Guild Wars.”

But small, scrappy ArenaNet thinks it has plenty to brag about, too. In seven years, Strain and its co-founders, have taken a pretty radical idea about online gaming and built it into a successful company.

Beginnings in Battle.net
The idea, an online game without monthly fees, was born in 2000. The dot com boom was about to bust. Strain and the two other ArenaNet founders, Mike O’Brien and Patrick Wyatt, held big-time positions at Blizzard in Irvine, Calif. All had been involved, in one way or another, with the company’s string of successful franchises: “StarCraft,” the “Diablo” games and the “Warcraft” games.

O’Brien was the original creator and champion of Blizzard’s Battle.net, a free service that let gamers go head-to-head against each other online. Because it was free, it was an instant hit — and, as Strain puts it: “one of the single most important and positive decisions in the history of that company.”

But Battle.net was expensive to maintain. And Blizzard was looking ahead to “World of Warcraft,” an extension of its popular “Warcraft” games played completely online. It was a pricey proposition, requiring constant care and feeding. But the upkeep would be paid for by the $15 monthly subscription fees.

Traditional MMOs like “World of Warcraft” and “EverQuest” are based on this subscription system. And the whole design of these games is indivisible with the business model: If people are paying $15 a month, they want to get their money’s worth. So developers architect gameplay that rewards those who spend hours and hours online killing rats for experience points. For these players, time spent leveling up is a badge of honor.

'MMO for the rest of us'
But Strain, O’Brien and Wyatt wanted to do something different. They wanted to create, as Strain puts it, an “MMO for the rest of us.” Those folks who may have played their fair share of “Ultima Online” as teenagers, but were now looking for something that didn’t require five hours a day to feel satisfying.

“Our design goal when creating ‘Guild Wars’ was this: ‘If I’ve got 30 minutes before dinner, will I have fun playing this game?’” says Strain.

It took the trio a year and a half to build their “secret sauce,” a smart publishing system that would let them stream cool new stuff to players in real-time, rather than the massive downloadable patches used by traditional MMOs.

Plenty of naysayers
There were plenty of naysayers, including, at least initially, Robert Garriott, CEO of NCsoft North America, the company that would go on to acquire ArenaNet in 2002.

“Back in the day, everyone was looking at subscription-based games,” he says. “That seemed to be where the action was and the money was.”

In the end, Garriott — and NCsoft — was swayed by the quality of the technology — and the pedigree of its creators. And, ultimately, by the fear of being scooped.

“We looked around and thought: ‘what would we feel like if one of our major competitors released a product like this?’” says Garriott. “We thought this could revolutionize the business model for online games.”

By the time the first “campaign” — which is what ArenaNet calls the stand-alone installments of “Guild Wars” —  rolled out in the spring of 2005, the game had generated good buzz. “Guild Wars” was — and is — stunningly beautiful and meticulously detailed. Ex-Blizzard guys were running the show. And, NCsoft believed in them. But still, some in the industry and the game press believed “Guild Wars” would fail.

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