Author Archives: Donny Rokk
Blizzard’s Booty Call with Facebook
World of Warcraft is capital H huge, with an eleven million account subscriber base. According to their 2008 numbers, WoW made a 72 million dollar profit. These days, with all the pets and such for sale, that number is probably more. Impressive for an online video game. I’m sure Bobby Kotick thinks so.
Bobby loves him some World of Warcraft, spelled $$$
However, there’s a game on the horizon that may have already begun to change the face of online gaming. That game is Farmville.
If you have a Facebook account, you are most likely familiar with this game. It’s free to play, no subscription necessary. In it, you’re given a plot of land that you farm. That’s more or less the whole thing. I don’t play it, and that’s all I’ve been able to glean from people who play it. They spam their friends list, looking for fellow players to help them out with raising a barn, sending them seeds for crops, and other most fascinating things that people would never do in real life.
Sounds barely like a game at all. And yet, Zynga (the company responsible for this time-killer) boasts a claim of 70 million unique monthly visitors.
Look into the face of true evil.
Farmville also has RMTs. You can earn money by selling crops, then using your Farmville bucks to buy things like tractors. Or you can use real cash to buy the tractors yourself. According to Zynga, five hundred thousand tractors are sold per day at twenty bucks a pop. And you thought twenty-five dollars for a sparkling horse was crazy!
Now you see why Blizzard wants to simplify the game and draw more players. Same reason that Nigerian Prince emails tens of millions of people – a one percent success with these money-making schemes rakes in more cash if you’re trolling an ocean of fish rather than a puddle, or even a lake.
So to increase their exposure even more, Blizzard has reported that they will be integrating Battle.net with Facebook. Their first step will be to allow Starcraft 2 players to add their Facebook friends to their Battle.net friends list and share in-game achievements with them. This will mean that you can expect even more spam on your Facebook account. However, given the size and popularity of Facebook, saturating users with their product is a great way to increase their advertising exposure.
Everyone loves spam!
They may not pull in Farmville subscription numbers, but Blizzard is gunning to challenge them in the annoying Facebook announcements.
You Make Me Yawn
I had to stop and think why I haven’t been blogging lately.
It’s not like there’s a shortage of news coming out. The Cataclysm beta feels like it’s just around the corner, what with all the updates about zones, classes, raiding, and most recently emblem changes in both PVE and PVP. But is there anything out of all that news that has me all sorts of bothered? Not really, no. They’re posting ideas, discussing things that may or may not happen. People are getting twisted about things that may not even go live. That’s what the beta is for. I realise that I’m probably in the minority in that I don’t boo hoo stupid things that might not even happen. Such is the cross I must bear.
Did you hear what they’re doing to 25-man raids?
I actually have to give people credit. With all the raiders out there, I’ve noticed a definite lack of “End of Days” doomsaying regarding the changes to 10-man and 25-man raiding. Granted I haven’t really been looking, and I do still have a few podcasts to catch up on, but by and large there’s been a lot of shrugging. The negative nancies have been saying this change will kill 25-man raids, which could also hurt the associated raiding guilds. But just a few weeks back when they were discussing the Guild XP system, people were mourning the impending death of smaller guilds. Folks are not happy unless there’s something to complain about.
Nerf my class, kill my raids, and you think an overpriced pony makes everything ok?
I suppose what it boils down to is that I don’t have much to complain about. If I want to be silly I could go off on theories, get mad about unproven and unfounded commentary. But what’s the point? I could make a blog post where I rant about the player base, much easier than I could about things like Cataclysm changes. After all, the changes might not happen. It’s a proven fact how self-centered and ignorant the player base can be.
But I have been in a good mood lately. Therein lies the root of my silence. I haven’t logged in too often in the past few weeks. Spring has sprung and there’s plenty of work to be done around the house.
Make no mistake: I may be taking care of business, but I have not forgotten about the World of Warcraft.
This is Herc the Merc. Now go out and get some sun.
