If You Play WoW, You’ve Also Tried:

It’s not easy being a startup game company. Heck, it ain’t easy being a startup ANYTHING. Unless you are rolling in so much venture capital that you’re getting one dollar bills stuck to your… feet… you have a limited amount of advertising money. The easiest way to spend efficiently is to put up your ads in places where people who are likely to try your game are congregating. Predicting crowd behavior is a lucrative business for certain species of consultant, and to avoid paying consultants, most bootstrap operations go with “like attracts like.” This is a perfectly good theory that’s even mostly true – people who like cartoony sword and board games will give another cartoony sword and board game a spin, as long as the second game offers a small variation.

But as a long term strategy, it doesn’t expand the market. It cannibalizes existing markets, as companies who have released a sequel have proven.

So, this week, I’m looking at “also-played” games. Today I’m looking at what games WoW players have in common. There are opportunities on this list!

41% of WoW players play/have played Counterstrike.

35% – Battlefield 2.

26% – COD4, and the same number play Oblivion.

All of the MMOs on the market appear on the list, which suggests that if you’re trying to sell an MMO, you don’t even have to bother targeting a type of MMO players, because the genre players will try anything in their category. Swords, lasers, pirates, fantasy armor, stormtrooper gear, they don’t care. It’s the experience. They eat ice cream – and the number who are totally devoted to pistachio ice cream and won’t consider a different flavor are minimal. (Of course, if you look at time played, the evidence suggests that while they’ll TRY anything, they’ll drift back to where they own houses, vaults full of currency, and friend lists, unless you make it easy to recreate that feeling of being at home for them.)

But this isn’t about how MMO players are. This is about a hidden opportunity with MMO players. Why try to pry WoW players away from WoW, when you could appeal to needs that WoW doesn’t meet? I look at that list of games, and I see that a huge number of WoW users:

- enjoy the adrenaline rush of evenly matched PVP combat, where gear is less important than skill

- enjoy short term goals that can be met without enormous amounts of pre-planning

- need the occasional break from virtual worlds, but still want to kick some ass

- love richly detailed, open ended stories in which they are the hero/never have to wait to enjoy

My next post will take a look at how this list might vary compared with players of a different MMO.