Blizzard Gives BioWare Some MMORPG Advice

Eurogamer has published some comments made by Blizzard's Paul Sams, in which he talks highly about Star Wars: The Old Republic while also offering BioWare some advice for developing and maintaining an MMORPG that will most likely be very popular.
"Running this type of game, building this type of game, maintaining this type of game is exceptionally difficult," he said.

"And so while we know they have some excellent developers and some excellent leaders, time will tell as to how they can react, and how they can prepare themselves to do all the other things... There are a lot more back-office things to running a game like this than you can ever imagine."

In particular, he pointed out that the level of success that World of Warcraft has - and that The Old Republic is tipped to reach - brings some problems of its own.

"It's a bit more tricky than it might seem, and I think that that is also why we haven't seen any other games that really have blown up from a huge subscribership perspective," he said. "Because how you react when it scales is very challenging, to say the least."

He also admitted that Blizzard hadn't done everything right itself.

"We've gotten a lot of bumps and bruises along the way - we're not perfect, we're far from it, right? We've had to learn a lot of things the hard way," Sams said.

"So it's a hard road, and it's also a very expensive road. [BioWare] have the benefit now of being with EA as relates to money, and EA has a pocketbook that is fat," he pointed out.