Partly it isn’t because creators haven’t adjusted their methods to match the new technology – we’re still wedded to a single start-to-finish process, with one outcome at the end. Partly it isn’t because feedback can be hard to gather and digest, and even hard to act upon.

An iterative method has become one of the defining characteristics of how I like to write, organise, and present text on the internet. At least, beyond this domain. But until now, I’ve struggled to apply it to internet-based video.

This article introduces internet-based iterative design, and uses YouTube’s “Hot Spot” analysis to show how we can start to apply an iterative approach to video and movie-making.

Iterative Product Development

The author of a published paper book generally gets one shot. One chance to have their works committed to paper. To be read by milllions. Or tens. A huge amount of effort goes into “getting it right”: Construction of text and story, editing, proof-checking. And in spite of this, book publishing remains a high-risk activity: For every top-selling author, there are others whose work ends up as pulp.

In contrast, the cost of making corrections or changes on the internet can be minor. At the extreme, the author simply types some new words. An update that might have taken a book publisher months or years, can be committed in minutes.

The ability to make rapid changes in response to rapidly gathered feedback makes the internet interesting: The most basic server access logs can be analysed to reveal that chapter 2 is generated much more interest than chapter 1, yet chapter 4 is hardly getting read. With enough readers, those patterns can be seen in days, or even hours. So perhaps the content in chapter 2 should be expanded, and we should re-write chapter 3 to better maintain interest?

Now we’ve expanded chapter 2, and noticed it has become even more popular. Obviously there’s a greater demand for the writing or information in chapter 2 than the author thought there was. Gradually the content evolves and gravitates towards (in the language of entrepreneurs) the nearest unserved market. Iterative product development isn’t just about “making it better”. It’s a way of finding an audience, customers, earnings.

The written word is an easy example to understand, but maybe all good design iterates in response to user feedback?

Probably always has. Stone wheels? Computers sold as recipe books? Especially where a cool technology is looking for a problem: An inventor that doesn’t start by trying to address a problem, but merely discovers a method of doing something. Post-It notes are a popular example, but this pattern is common from the Victorian era onward. For example, it took half a century of different people trying to use pressurized air for land-based transport propulsion, before a market niche was established.

The internet allows this process to happen a lot faster, but only if the presence of the internet becomes integral to the design process.

Personally, this methodology has turned a few highly technical pages on the mechanics of fishing, into a fishing guide read by millions (see Appendix: Iterative Writing in Practice at the bottom).

Limitations

Iterative product development isn’t a panacea. Or a free ride to perfection and untold riches:

• While internet-based products and services are comparatively (to manufactured goods) cheap and easy to change, constantly making changes can become very time-consuming. Designing with the expectation of change, helps. But ultimately you will reach a point where further changes don’t generate enough extra audience interest to (financially) justify the time spent making the changes. This is when to stop.
• There is no guarantee that your product will find the absolute biggest unserved market, merely the biggest such market near to the topic/interest area you started with. If you started developing an idea in an obscure niche, it’s not realistic to expect to grow outside of that niche.
• Iterative development is not an excuse to design garbage. Quality remains important: The first attempt has to be sufficiently “good” for enough people to use/read it to generate feedback.
• The process of analysing feedback, and developing new content, requires 2 distinct skill-sets. Someone that is good at the second, may be unable to do the first. An instinctively good designer might still produce a better product, although (I would argue) their method leaves more to chance.
• It’s not clear that this method could be applied to an entirely physical product – Zara’s version of fast fashion is a good example, yet customer feedback still takes weeks to filter through into new clothing.

Video

Most internet-based text content is easy. Changes can be made and distributed in seconds. Reasonably good feedback is available using tools like Google Analytics.

Video content poses a few problems:

• Minor changes require re-rendering and uploading, which (for anyone without Hollywood-scale production facilities) can take several hours, even for just a few minutes of video footage.
• Major changes mean re-filming, editing, sound design, and similar alterations that could take days. May not even be possible, if showing specific events or people.
• Detailed feedback is hard to get. At best you’ll get a reaction to the whole video – typically a number of people that watched, and the rating or comments of a tiny proportion of them.

The first 2 problems aren’t going away anytime soon. The best defense is to save all the footage you shot, including materials that didn’t make the final edit. Recording at full 1280×720 pixel resolution, 30 frames per second, I find that for each minute of the final movie:

• I shot about 20GB of footage,
• take about 10GB to the editing stage, and
• use about 5GB in the final version.

So I’ve already created a lot of redundancy – until I run out of hard disk space. That redundancy helps make minor changes, such as altering the length of a scene, but it won’t let you re-write the story or change the location.

However, small edit tweaks can make the difference between “good and great”, so some iteration is possible within video. In theory. The problem is that without detailed user feedback, how do we know what to improve?

A friend who worked in “new media” when it was new (in the mid-1990s), used say, “the skill was to know when to stop”. To misquote Damien Hirst, “a painting is finished after a long period of looking at it, during which nothing is added”. Personally, video editing involves a lot the later: Constantly replaying a rough version and making changes, until I start making adjustments that seem to make it worse again.

Unfortunately, the creator is not the audience. It’s easy for them to produce things that simply don’t appeal to anyone apart from themselves, don’t solve whatever problem their audience were having, or don’t appeal to viewers’ emotions.

Hot Spots

Which is why I find YouTube’s Hot Spots fascinating.

As often, it started by accident. I couldn’t upload the video below to the host I normally use for embedded video. So the YouTube version of the video became the primary version. Almost all of the video’s 10,000 daily views were hosted on YouTube. This meant that within a day, YouTube’s “Insight” analytics were displaying some representative data about how users were viewing the movie.

The video is primarily a tutorial, intended to introduce the new World of Warcraft fishing contest. All the footage is captured in-game – some of it “live” during the contest, some recorded afterwards. The whole movie was conceived, scripted, filmed, edited, and rendered over the course of 2 days.

Fishing is a good test, because it isn’t a terribly interesting thing to watch. It’s hard to make a “good” fishing video, especially for an audience that aren’t all hardcore anglers.

The video has been favourably rated, comments are complementary and (critically) not (yet) asking questions that the video was intended to answer. Plus a few other sites have embedded it. Good start, but could it be better?

Frame-Based Feedback

Below is the “Hot Spot” graph generated from the first 20,000 views. YouTube’s explanation of the measures:

The ups-and-downs of viewership at each moment in your video, compared to videos of similar length. The higher the graph, the hotter your video: fewer viewers are leaving your video and they may also be rewinding to watch that point in the video again. Audience attention is an overall measure of your video’s ability to retain its audience.

The base (x) axis shows the time the video has been running – it lasts 2 minutes and 2 seconds.

Let’s try and analyse what the graph shows. Numbers refer to points marked on the graph:

1. I added 12 seconds of introduction and title, primarily to give the viewer time focus, adjust the volume or screen size, or let any navigation/control widgets fade away. There are no credits – this is a 2 minute tutorial, not a feature film. Unfortunately there are several ways to read the initial downward decline:
   • Viewers think they missed something at the very start, so are restarting the video (the first sound is triggered while the screen is still black).
   • Viewers have observed the water, net, and title, and didn’t want to still be observing it 5 seconds later – they’re getting bored and leaving.
   • Some viewers started the video by accident, and never intended to watch, however good or otherwise.

   I compared this video to the graph for an earlier YouTube-hosted video. It has the same structure of introduction, but a longer, less focused (a wide, familiar city-scape) initial image. That second video was much colder over the first 10 seconds. So perhaps introductory shots need to be shorter, and move to “the action” faster?

2. The titles are gone, and the video moves to a slow-paced tutorial, with gentle text and rather repetitive scenes. If you watch, the video, you’ll notice a lot of views of the same Walrus-like character, with a lot of gnomes (the pink-haired creature) casting a line or catching a fish. The graph says that’s “ok”, but remains far from hot. In contrast, the comparison video performs better at this stage. The main difference is that the comparision video moves between topics faster, with less repetition of similar-looking scenes. There are a few reasons for repetition: The gradual building of momentum (ever faster scene changes – see next point) was intended to create the sense of excitement that these “first player wins” competitions create, but I don’t think it works. I also wanted to show that the shark (the aim of the contest) could be caught in lots of different places. Past videos have lead players to conclude that only the one precise place shown in the video was valid. Overall, this stage should drag a lot less than it does, and if possible, be made less repetitive.
3. The video gradually builds momentum, until by point 3, the scenes are changing at the rate of around 2 per second (slightly more by the end of the sequence). Audience engagement warms. Possibly this is “exciting”. Possibly too exciting, forcing some viewers to re-wind because they cannot digest the scenes fast enough?
4. The top of this second rise in temperature is marked by the 3 bangs and flashes, cutting to blurred, greyscale, slow-motion sequences. If those don’t make you look, nothing will! In the video’s narrative this is the first time something happens: The gnome caught the shark, and is now running home, desperate to get back first. It’s one of those heart-stopping moments (and in the original storyboard, was intended to use heartbeats). Cool. That is, hot. But worth noting that special effects alone can provide a negative distraction. For example, the comparison video’s coldest moment is when a sequence of quotes and images of their who said them, are merged together into beautiful blue water. Looks great artistically, but doesn’t engage the audience.
5. The heat is maintained while the first prize is displayed. This may be because the tempo of the video doesn’t slow down enough to let viewers digest everything (I had to win quickly, so making sure I had enough footage wasn’t a priority…). It may also reflect greater interest in one of the prizes (the ring). Either way, this section should have been longer.
6. Contest won, interest is dropping. The 6th point occurs when the runner-up prize is displayed. Sadly, the high-point of the story is “the win”, yet the tutorial aspect of the video has to cover not winning. And chronologically, not winning happens after someone has won!
7. We’re ending on a low, which can’t be good. I suspect this is because there isn’t much interest in “the boots” among many players. Perhaps I shouldn’t have dedicated 10 seconds to showing them being used, when the main aim of the video (how to win the contest) was clearly complete? The final giggle was an attempt to liven this section up a little, but comes too late.

The Hot Spots graph doesn’t show everything. Doesn’t reflect any variation between different people viewing it. It may not even be desirable to keep a movie “hot” throughout. There are almost certainly other ways of analyzing viewer behavior.

But areas for improvement emerged that were not seen when making the video. Even if I don’t re-make this particular video, some of improvements will hopefully filter down into new videos.

Yes, But

It’s easy to dismiss this as an expensive training exercise: Wouldn’t it be better just to ensure movie-makers were experienced before they started? If all of them turned out Casablanca, I’d agree. In reality, expertise does not mean infallibly. While YouTube is almost infamous for showing how apparently (to my eyes) terrible videos can be highly popular.

It would be great to think that Saturday night’s cinema audience might see a slightly better version of a film than Friday night’s audience, based on what the first audience enjoyed most. But not terribly practical. Similarly, television news might be history before the second iteration.

But down at “YouTube level” iterative production methods start to become more viable. Still tricky, but something that only took 2 days to initially create, can probably be remade daily, if required.

This isn’t just about rapid re-production. More important is the ability to start to read the minds of an audience the creator can never see. Try to assess what aspects of the video should be expanded. What the audience want, but are only partly getting. And to do that analytically, without the movie-maker ever meeting their audience.

At the extreme, it’s the introduction of almost scientific methodology into an artistic process, traditionally based around the artist’s opinion of their own work, and their experiences to date.

Most intriguing is that “the next” Steven Spielberg (or similar) probably isn’t learning their art with an amateur 8mm camera. They’ll be uploading camera-phone videos, animating Lego, or “machinimating” goblins. And there’s a chance they will start learning to use the analytical feedback available to them, in a way older generations never could…

Learn More

• The long lost formula for start-up success. No, really – Nigel Eccles (an Edinburgh acquaintance, although I don’t think we’ve ever discussed this) wrote something similar about iterative development. That we’re thinking alike isn’t entirely unexpected, since we’re both rather analytically-minded.
• Incremental versus iterative development – Useful clarification of 2 often-confused terms, by Alistair Cockburn.
• Wikipedia – Introduces various similar software-orientated methods.

Appendix: Iterative Writing in Practice

How did one small gnome attract so many readers, in spite of initially writing about the wrong thing? A healthy chunk of curiosity helps: Search and you may find things that work even better. But since you asked, consider this:

• Split text into separate pages (not like this article): It is far easier to trace and monitor page views, than to work out where on a page a reader is reading.
• Write around the edges of your topic: Both broader introductions and more specific detail than your core starting material. If the introductory material becomes more popular than the core, expand that introduction, and so on.
• Understand who is trying to read: Specifically their education, age, time-pressure – and write to a style and length that this audience can read.
• Watch what users do: Extensive forum discussions or comments are subtle indicators of what you need to offer. See what users do in the absence of anything you’ve written. A 200-post forum discussion about something you thought was trivial, clearly isn’t.
• Personalise it: The internet is a scary place, and you don’t help ease that fear by presenting words as a robot.

That isn’t the whole story. And there are many techniques within that. Remember that all the basic design guidelines on things like the structuring of text still apply.

In my opinion, it’s an on-going exercise in the discovery of the fact that most people aren’t like you, and have different problems and needs. Logical, really: If you write for yourself, you’ve optimized the text for people like you. Yet people like you write… and so have the least need of someone else’s writing!

On this page:

• What
• Why
• Integrity and Safety
• Quality
• Passion
• Threatening
• Advertising
• Control
• Enforcement
• Direction
• A Challenge
• Learn More

What

World of Warcraft (WoW) supports a simple scripting language, primarily intended to allow developers or users to script operations originally provided in the default user interface. Most players use many different add-ons to help them play and manage the game. Each player can decide which add-ons to use (if any). If a player finds an add-on unhelpful or annoying, they can simply turn it off, or delete it completely.

The UI Add-On Development Policy is a set of 8 guidelines, published on 20th March 2009. The policy critically prevents:

• All significant forms of revenue generation from addons. Even “soliciting” donations within the game.
• Obfuscation (hiding) of code.

Donations can be requested outside of the game, but due to the way addons are distributed and used, donation revenue generated from out-of-game sources is a fraction of what can be currently generated in-game.

Why

Why? We don’t know why. The news article [link will rot] accompanying the changes, states:

“…to help ensure their integrity, safety, and quality for the community.”

So let’s try and break down that slice of motherhood and apple pie.

Integrity and Safety

The only apparent use of code obfuscation is to prevent copying and free redistribution. It should not be assumed that copy protection is essential to the viability of paid add-ons (the music industry has examples where allowing free online redistribution actually increases paid download sales – although individual programmers may have their own view).

It is apparent that if you obfuscate code, nobody can really be sure what your addon is doing.

The game should regulate what the addon can do, and so limit the scope for damage. But, assume Blizzard believe they are responsible for regulating everything within the game engine. Regulation becomes a lot easier if they can read the code, rather than trying to test an addon’s functionality against an almost infinite number of possible scenarios.

The Power of Add-Ons: Relatively innocent addons, like SpamMeNot, demonstrate the influence that an addon developer can have if enough players run the addon. This addon attempts to detect unwanted “spam” in chat channels. It is very effective at blocking adverts for Real Money Trading, so commonly installed (it is one of the few addons I run on live realms). For whatever reason, there are a few words it immediately takes exception to. One word seems to be “anal”. Everyone running SpamMeNot automatically informs Blizzard’s chat game servers that the comment is spam. If enough individual game clients report the “spammer”, that “spammer” is (certainly was) automatically muted on the main public channels, and ignored (all forms of communication blocked) by large numbers of players. In an inherently social game, that’s a high price to pay.

The real source of paranoia may be unseen. For example, cyber-crime continues to plague World of Warcraft: Each set of stolen account details risks losing a customer and increases administrative burden (aside from the wider impact on Real Money Trading, money laundering, and similar). So it is possible that code transparency is a way keep any malicious activity out of addons.

Of course, banning such addons isn’t the only solution. Addons could be formally approved (and even distributed) by Blizzard. Formal approval increases Blizzard’s costs and risks, but (in concept) those can be recovered from revenue generated by the sale (or similar) of the addon.

Valid reasons. Questionable solution.

Quality

Adrine [link will rot], author of one of the most popular WoW addons (Omen) – who (by his own admission) has dedicated hundreds of hours to development of addons, and recieved a mere $300.01 in donations:

“Banning them [pay-for addons] gains nothing, and significantly diminishes the incentive to innovate and compete.”

Below is my analysis, but I suspect we think in similar ways.

Most WoW-related “fan-based” services (addons, websites) start from classic entrepreneurial problem solving: The individual had a problem or inconvenience while playing. They couldn’t find a solution, so solved the problem themselves. They place the solution on the internet, and other players benefit.

Perhaps one of those players finds the first solution useful, can see areas for improvement, and writes a “better” solution. Even the threat of competition can be enough to encourage further innovation and creativity. Product innovation follows, and progressively better solutions emerge.

In some cases these innovations are so profound that they are eventually implemented directly by Blizzard. The most recent example is a gear manger feature, which allows sets of equipment and clothing to be changed in one button click. A relatively simple feature, that for years had only existed in addons. Other innovations are more subtle. For example, the plethora of leveling guides and addons that help questing have almost certainly influenced the way new quests are designed: Northrend’s quest lines are much easier to follow that those developed in previous years (yet still many players seek assistance).

Innovation not only benefits players directly. It also helps the game’s designers build a better product. Everyone’s a winner!

Passion

I contend that almost everyone working in this environment is primarily driven by passion. Even if there is money involved, that’s not the prime motivation for the vast majority. Many add-on/fansite developers/authors actually transpire to be professional developers or business people. People who are very capable of making far more money from “the day job”. They don’t fit the sterteotypical college dropout, living in their parents’ basement.

Continual innovation (and even maintenance) of an ever-more-popular “product” gradually occupies more and more time. There comes a point at which the author is suddenly aware that their passion is taking over their lives: Maybe they spent so long coding or writing they ran out of time to play the game themselves. Or found themselves answering users’ emails when they should have been sleeping. Suddenly they become aware that their “hobby” is occupying more time than their “job”.

Guilty as charged. Although my experience is from “fansites“.

(And before you retort, “that’s only about fishing!” – it has a quarter of a million individual users each month, currently requiring almost daily content updates, with all the unexpected “exploding server” drama that busy websites generate. My words are not entirely theoretical…)

What to do?

1. Stop. Abandon it. Burnout. Problem solved, but don’t expect your users to be happy.
2. Give it to someone else. Preferably many people, otherwise the new author will immediately be faced with the same problem as the original author.
3. Stop innovating and simply maintain it. Unfortunately, the “creative types” that enjoy the initial innovation, tend to dislike routine maintenance.
4. Make it pay. At least enough to survive after reducing your conventional workload (“the day job”).

1 and 3 destroy innovation. And 2 probably limits innovation significantly: For example, the people who replace you are likely to be signing up to maintain the thing they use (addon, website), not to radically change it. So, we conclude:

Passion alone limits the scale of innovation. To innovate beyond that point requires a somewhat viable business model. A method of generating money from the activity. Like selling, advertising, donations.

So the addon policy supports innovation until those innovations become really popular. Success is simply unsustainable. How does that contribute to quality?

Threatening

The WoW communities map marks the location of famous battles: Places where Blizzard have threatened (often legally) certain parts of the wider community. Most battles were in, or near, “The Evil East” (with appologies for all the geo-political biases within the name). In contrast, addons are far more mainstream – most players use add-ons. And addons are legit – officially supported, hosted by large “reputable” fansites.

That shift is important:

• Blizzard are now doing things that risk annoying a significant proportion of their customers. The creator of Quest Helper (which scaled down development in response to the policy, because the author was paying for their apartment with donations) estimates around 20% of all players use the addon. Exploration is Dead examined the growing inability of players to discover anything themselves without help. While tools like Quest Helper may continue to emerge (the problem needs a solution), the addon will never reach its full potential, because success cannot be sustained.
• People providing content for the mainstream of WoW players can now hear the bombs dropping nearby. Blizzard used to get upset with those people in the “Evil East”, like gold farmers and ‘bot writers. Yet the difference between some fansites and an add-on like Carbonite or Quest Helper is minimal. One is used on the web, the other in-game.

Beyond Advertising: The add-on policy closes the door to another potential method of generating revenue, at a time when many “fansites” are struggling to remain online. For example, European banner display advertising has roughly halved in value over the last 6 months – depending on what currency you operate in. That’s non-trivial – the margins were not excessive to start with. Initial reactions have been to implement more intrusive adverts: Full-page ads, pop-ups, in-content advertising links, and even sponsored paragraphs in the middle of user-generated content. But the underlying problem remains – there simply aren’t enough advertising dollars being spent. As more sites adopt aggressive advertising, the value of that advertising space drops. If conditions continue to decline, expect to see a lot more subscription-only content (the only way many gaming sities survived the advertising slump following the “dot com” bubble in 2001). Likely followed by a formal challenge for re-sale of Blizzard’s intellectual property. Ick.

While many addon authors are indifferent to the policy, and some are even supportive (often arguing that addons should be a hobby), plenty of the most prolific addon programmers have reacted badly: Even if they were not benefiting financially themselves, Blizzard’s policy is seen as heavy-handed, a betrayal of past contributions that reduces future motivation.

It is important to differentiate the prolific contributors from the everyone else. The majority of the popular addons are created by a handful of people. Losing the support of those few people has a vastly greater impact on the player community than losing anyone else.

(What’s most revealing from recent discussions is that nobody in the addon developer community seems to have been consulted or warned about the change. For a business whose most valuable asset is probably community goodwill, Blizzard seem remarkably indifferent to it sometimes.)

So why does Blizzard feel threatened in this way? Threatened enough to risk antagonising some of their most passionate enthusiasts. Here are 2 themes that may explain why the addon policy is written as it is. These are both speculation:

Advertising

Preventing in-game advertising and “soliciting” of donations is most easily explained as a conflict with the Massive Inc in-game advertising deal. If you sell advertising rights, those rights have to mean something. Carbonite’s (free-version) in-game adverts were most obviously advertising, and evidently not part of any formal agreement. But since modern advertising is remarkably difficult to define, perhaps they need to resort to the draconian step of banning any activity that looks like it might be generating cash or promotion?

That might be characterised as a massive over-reaction to one particular addon. Or evidence of a fundamental disconnect between a business’s operations and the needs of its customers. But not entirely irrational.

This is less likely to be a logical follow-on from the Glider case (automation of software): Addons are still being actively supported within the game engine. If specific code or actions were deemed undesirable, it would be relatively easy for Blizzard to break them by altering the programming language.

It is unlikely to be a move against advertising support of WoW-related services outside of the game: The Machinima policy still allows commercial advertising to be placed next to movie content that is “free” to the end user. Blizzard officially endorse many advertising-funded websites.

Control

This theory will be to dark for most readers, because differentiating a business from its product is difficult. (Blizzard’s Tech Support isn’t actually staffed by cute gnomes, but we’re still inclined think that way.)

Blizzard are almost unique to the mainstream video games industry in having thrived without being controlled by publishers. Valve is probably the only similar games developer (achieved in part by becoming a publisher themselves via Steam).

Having gained almost complete control over their product and its development, it is conceivable that anyone that threatens that control will be dealt with aggressively. It is possible that the idea of a third party selling a useful product to WoW’s customers, legitimately operated within Blizzard’s game, was to frightening.

Not a fear of current applications, which are very limited in scope. But frightening because this has a much larger, unrealised potential.

Enforcement

The sky is falling! It is easy to over-react to the unexpected.

A policy is only as good as its enforcement, and Blizzard have not yet attempted to enforce this. While the policy is not a legally worded agreement – it describes itself as “guidelines” – it does clearly state:

“…failure to abide by them [the guidelines] may result in measures up to and including taking formal legal action.”

The final 3 words must be taken seriously: Blizzard are not afraid to resort to the law. The addon policy is legally interesting to enforce. The API (where the addon code runs) is owned by Blizzard, but does that imply a legally enforcable contract with someone writing some code? Or would the users of addons need to be pursued?

But this is unlikely to become a legal issue. Most addon developers are individuals, who are unlikely to be able or willing to defend themselves. Especially not for $300 worth of donations.

Blizzard can make it difficult for developers to test code. Ban developers’ accounts, and force them into the shadowy realm of resold accounts. And over time a culture will develop among players that addons that breach the policy are somehow “bad” or “likely to get your account banned”. Gradually changing reactions to Glider and RMT provide ample evidence of how players’ views morph to reflect those of Blizzard.

But again, that probably won’t happen: Most addon developers want to be loved, not hated. Remember the passion?

Some of the more professional “guide writers“, who are currently selling add-ons, have proved themselves to be remarkably resilient. The most obvious loop-hole would be to provide a free add-on to display quest information, and then sell the commercial guide data to be displayed in the addon. This is also called creativity.

Direction

There will be some immediate fall-out from the introduction of the addon policy. A few developers will quit in disgust. Some players will whine about the demise of their favorite add-on. But after a few weeks everyone will adjust to the new order, and we can all get back to the important task of complaining about how under-powered my class is.

Which understates the importance of this policy as a key inflection point in the development history of MMOGs (specifically WoW, which dominates). I’ve previously written about the potential to open up WoW as a platform for 3rd party developers. The addon policy is a very clear move in precisely the opposite direction. It may as well say, “if you want to make a serious contribution, please f*$% off and write applications for Facebook/Metaplace/etc.”

But at least they now have a sense of direction.

Or do they?

No.

As things appear to be, you can make all the money you like from a website about WoW, but if you do the same in-game, you’ll struggle to earn a cent.

(That analysis may be optimistic: There simply is no written policy regarding most websites. Yet.)

The worst part of this contradiction is that all this information should be available in-game. The game world is designed as an immersive experience. So why are users routinely alt-tabbing out to a browser to read information about that world?

In spite of understanding why this makes no sense, I’m still perpetuating the madness: WoW’s user interface add-ons impose a lot of limitations (missing functions like internet access, lack of good feedback loops), but the main reason for writing websites and not addons, is that website authors have a lot more freedom to fund their habit. Websites simply scale better than addons: If your work becomes popular, there are some almost-viable business models to support it. And the (modest) revenue stream provides some incentive to maintain content. Addons are more-or-less setting their authors up to fail, since a successful addon will struggle to be adequately supported and further developed.

(I should clarify that I’m not about to retire on proceeds of a guide to fishing. Economically it’s an extremely irrational use of my time. I’m along for the ride, and currently this ride is just to fascinating to get off.)

A Challenge

Does anyone care?

If you play the game, but don’t care, perhaps you are a little too addicted to the free stuff created by the wider community? Try playing the game regularly, at high level, without using addons or referring to any commecial website/service (with advertising or subscription), except those provided by Blizzard. I contend that many players will find the game much harder to play.

Perhaps the pro-active members of WoW’s community are needed much more than Blizzard are prepared to admit?

Learn More

• Platform Azeroth: Why Information is Broken – Explores why the best information in World of Warcraft (WoW) is not available from within the game. It considers how to better bring information into the game environment.
• UI Add-On Development Policy – The “guidelines”.