The Matthew Effect : How WoW is Like Bill Gates
One theory in MMO’s games says : « Given the choice between similar games at similar cost, the majority of players will play the best game ».
For
exemple, in 2004 the fans of Everquest claimed that World of Warcraft
won out against the nearly simultaneously released EQ2 due to better
marketing. But Wow might be the standard by which they measured that new game (specially if they buy wow gold to progress…), obviously they were willing to try something else, and would have staid if that something else had had sufficient quality.
This theory is applying a version of meritocracy to MMOs and equating a games success in the marketplace with its artistic success. On his website many people challenge him regarding the second assumption. The whole art verses popularity argument seems to me to be based too much on subjective aesthetics to be susceptible to debate.
But the first point also has its flaws.
Will the “better” game always succeed in the marketplace ?
In his book Outliers, Malcom Gladwell tackled this question from the standpoint of individual success. In Outliers, Gladwell examined the factors that contribute to high levels of success. He looked at, for example, how two people with exceptional intelligence, Christopher Langan and J. Robert Oppenheimer, ended up with such vastly different fortunes. Gladwell notes that in most cases outside factors were as important – or even more important – than the intrinsic characteristics of each individual.For example, early in the book Gladwell examined why the majority of professional Canadian ice hockey players are born in the first few months of the calendar year. He noted that if you look at list of the best players you’ll see that most of them are born sometime in January through April — with the highest concentrations in the earliest months. Why is that?
He argues that the answer is that youth hockey leagues determine eligibility by calendar year, so that children born in January play in the same league as those born in December 31. Since adolescents born earlier in the year tend to be more developmentally advanced than the others, they are often identified as better athletes. This leads to them being “bumped up” to the better leagues and in turn receiving extra coaching and a higher likelihood of being selected for elite hockey leagues.
Gladwell observes that under this system “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer” through “accumulative advantage.” It is called the “Matthew Effect” after a bible verse that reads: “For unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance. But from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.”
Was there a similar “Mathew Effect” that benefitted WoW over WAR or other MMOs? I believe that there was. In this case, the effect was based on timing.
In Outliers , Gladwell observes that a significant majority of the world’s richest people were all born within the same 10 year window in the mid 1800s. This period also happened to coincide with the industrial revolution. You could be an exceptional entrepreneur born either before our after this window but in order to have the best shot to become among the very wealthiest in history you needed to be born during this time period. So the timing of your birth played as much into your success as your own efforts. (He noted a similar pattern among tech entrepreneurs with the richest and most successful, such as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, all being born in roughly the same year.)
I believe that WoW also had a lucky birth. At the time that wow launched, the biggest MMO in the space had just made a critical blunder : it launched a new version of itself that was incompatible with the old version. This basically served to give many in its player base their pink slip. This message – intended or not – was “this game is ending, its time to move on.” Everquest 2, the game that was intended to replace Everquest was not yet ready for primetime. WoW was the direct beneficiary of this blunder.
At the same time, people’s access to the internet had dramatically expanded. From 2000 to 2004 broadband adoption had increased from less than a million homes to over 60 million homes in the United States. In Asia, a culture of internet cafes had emerged around RTS games like Starcraft. Suddenly, there was a new and massive market for MMOs where none existed before.
Labels: matthew effect, sociology, Wow
posted by thiteu @ 12:42 PM
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