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Originally Posted by Qhue  One of the more interesting aspects to WoW over the last 4 years has been Blizzard's tenacity in scheduling significant content releases to coincide with the arrival of any potential challengers to its marketshare. Someone even jokingly asked Scott Hartsman (Gallenite) to move up the release of the EQ2 Kunark expansion in order to get a major patch released for WoW.
Now in nearly every case the product that Blizzard counter-programmed against was not even remotely a threat to their established customer base or even a serious threat to their increasing market share, but nevertheless they still continued to counter-program and even seemed to pace out their content updates to match the other offerings from their competitors.
Age of Conan seems to be enjoying some really good buzz at the moment and has gotten quite a bit of free marketing on here and various news blogs. I don't see it as a significant threat to the global behemoth that is WoW, although I can easily see a good number of MMORPG regulars venturing to try out the game due to boredom with Blizzard's 4 year old extremely sllloooowwww to update title.
Does Blizzard believe that "Season 4" of the Arena counts as counter marketing because they perceive AoC as primarily a PVP oriented title? Or is it that after so many quarters of unparalleled success they've grown complacent and believe that minimal response at best is all that is needed and will only start to really worry if their subscription rate starts to slow its steady advance?
My personal bet is that they intended Sunwell to counter-program against AoC / Warhammer and realized that they simply couldnt hold the finished content back any longer and thus had to release it rather than continue to track AoC / Warhammer's series of delays. While Sunwell was a very much overdue infusion of new content into the game, the timing of its release didnt really coincide with any particular threat or historical downturn in subscription numbers (Summertime or early Autumn for example).
Funcom's greatest move, albeit perhaps unintentional, might be in setting a release date that slides nicely into the downward stroke of the occasional Blizzard content updates. |
I was expecting them to announce expansion talents when AOC launched, but nope nothing came about really.
AOC is good enough to affect wow perhaps not the way some would expect (take half their subs) but its a good enough change of pace so that the 2-3 year players who are tired and burnt out and want a fresh perspective are going to drift here at least for a few months