This article was originally published on June 20, 2025 - read the full issue here

By Marie Dealessandri

Assiduous Edge readers will remember that issue 405 looked back at 20 years of World Of Warcraft. Off the back of this retrospective and following a jam-packed keynote at Nordic Game, we sat down with game director Ion Hazzikostas again, to talk about the business aspects of WoW's longevity and what it takes to maintain a service game in 2025.

While Hazzikostas acknowledges the "tremendous debt" that the World Of Warcraft team owes to the group that created the game in the first place (he himself joined Blizzard in 2008), he says the challenge has become about "how to evolve that world over so many years."

"Without a strong starting point, none of this happens," he tells Knowledge. "But then obviously, as good as the game was back then, if we had not continually changed and evolved, we wouldn't be here having this conversation today."

He continues: "[Service games are] an incredibly competitive ecosystem. What hallmarks a lot of the things that identified the MMO genre and were unique to the MMO genre 20 years ago are now present in almost all games: online persistent progression, interconnection.

There's "still room for outstanding games to rise to the top," he says, sharing pointers about what it takes.

A strong starting point

Hazzikostas acknowledges that there isn't a "magic formula" to launching and sustaining a service game in a way that ensures its success and longevity. In fact, many studios have stumbled over the challenge in recent years, from indies (Velan Studios' Knockout City) to triple-A (Sony's Concord).

But Hazzikostas says the role of a creative vision is crucial to getting it right.

"That vision needs to be powerful, well articulated and really aiming at something that doesn't exist out there in that form or at that level of quality, that can really capture a large chunk of players, excitement, and enthusiasm.

"It's no secret that World Of Warcraft, when it came out, stood very much on the shoulders of giants, in the form of EverQuest, Ultima Online and the first generation of MMOs. There's still plenty of other opportunities to evolve genres, to combine things in a way that hasn't been done before. Once you have that, the role of a creative leader shifts from having this strong vision that shaped the experience to having a more flexible vision that can bend and meet players where they are, to keep it exciting and compelling for them."

If someone tells you they're not having fun, believe them

Constantly evolving that vision is another key pillar. During his Nordic Game talk, Hazzikostas said that if your game isn't fun today, that probably means it won't have a tomorrow – unless you let go and adapt.

"There's plenty of room in the artistic medium that is game development to put out a singular product of someone's vision, and people can take it or leave it," Hazzikostas says. "But when you're making a live service game that you expect to be host to a community – and presumably part of your original vision was for that community to prosper – that becomes the first order thing that you need to serve. And that means running a lot of your decisions through this extra filter step of asking, 'Is this serving my players' interests, or is it serving my personal preferences as a creative?'

"And that's not to say that there's anything resembling a complete abdication of creative autonomy and design in doing this. We're not just sending out surveys to our players asking them, 'Hey, what do you want us to change about the game?' and implementing those things. There's still tremendous work that needs to be done. It's solving the problems and often arriving at solutions that are not precisely what players may be asking for, but maybe what [they] need.

"It's often said that players aren't necessarily the best at providing solutions to problems. But they're incredibly good at identifying problems," he smiles. "If someone tells you they're not having fun, believe them. They're not having fun. And try to understand why through their [perspective]."

Understanding players

This means reviewing player feedback with intention and clarity, filtering out the noise to uncover what truly matters. As part of his Nordic talk, Hazzikostas reminded attendees that perception is key: your job isn't about balancing numbers, it's about balancing how people feel about these numbers.

He advises looking through multiple sources of data as well as objective telemetry and metrics to balance feedback you're getting from social media, forums and content creators with some more tangible data.

He notes that the people with the loudest voices are usually the most committed players.

"So ultimately we need to make sure that we're always building tools to see what all of our players are actually doing – where they're spending their time, what's holding their interest, what isn't – and then having that holistic picture to make our decisions."

Making big games with small teams

Considering the challenges of the sector, launching a service game as a small team may feel like an unachievable ambition. While Hazzikostas agrees that running such a production as a solo developer would be a challenge ("though not impossible"), he notes that there are a vast range of ongoing indie games that are online and interconnected.

"I think what scales is the range and diversity of your content, the size of the audience that you're trying to reach, and the diversity of the audience that you're trying to reach," he says.

"A smaller team and a smaller game can focus on a single play style and a single [type of experience]. In some ways that simplifies some of the problem solving compared to a game like WoW where we're trying to balance a dozen different competing motivations and play styles.

"I'm mindful of the fact that most developers are not facing the exact problems that a game like World Of Warcraft is, with 20 years of design baggage to juggle. But hopefully some of the universal principles about looking at trust as this key currency you're aiming to nurture with your player base, and making decisions with their interests in mind first and foremost, are things that can be applied to really any scale of game."

This article was originally published on June 20, 2025 - read the full issue here