Hit game may be the most popular MMO you’ve never heard of

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.

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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.

Source / H/T