Shane Dabiri, now the lead producer on the next Blizzard MMO, says "back then I was one of our first beta testers for Warcraft. I did more supporting of the business than anything related to the games." Dabiri's humble beginnings as an IT guy, beta tester and general computer handyman failed to tell of both him, and his company's, future successes.Seven years later, Blizzard announced World of Warcraft to huge fanfare, and a big departure from their roots.
He admits, "up to that point we had been, for the most part, creators of games with multiplayer components to them. We always focused on not just the single-player component, but how we could get three people together to play an RTS, or a game like Diablo. Back then, Ultima Online and EverQuest started to become very popular. The MMO market was small, but a few of the guys in the office started playing. We saw the possibilities and we thought in the future we have to do something like this.' I mean, with all of the stuff we were doing with Battle.Net, it made total sense to go in that direction - that, and a lot of us had been playing EverQuest."
Blizzard World of Warcraft must have done something different, as five years and two expansions in, World of Warcraft has passed the 12 million subscription mark. "You know, back in 2004 we didn't plan to say by 2009 we'll have 12 million subscribers. There was no way in a million years that we would have thought that we would be as successful as we are today. We just decided to - like in all of our games - make something epic and fun. As far as World of Warcraft's success, though, Dabiri couldn't tell you how long it's going to last. "There are a lot of things that we did to make it this far. But I don't think we did them because we thought they would get 12 million customers. Here wow-gold-team.com also wish World of Warcraft will bring more suprise in future.
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