I admit it: I went out and bought World of Warcraft within days after seeing Joi Ito’s engaging presentation on it at Aula 2006. Today I gave my girlfriend Leena the included guest pass, allowing her to try out WoW for 10 days for free.
After the grueling five-CD installation (made worse by the DVD drive in her MacBook Pro being defective, just like mine is) and a 450MB online update, she was ready — to queue for admittance to Aerie Peak, the often-full realm I play in.
And then came the unbelievable part. Blizzard, the makers of WoW, have put the Guest Pass trial users on a shitlist: everyone else has priority over them, so the first time user will just end up staring at her queue position going from 2 to 9, from 9 to 30, and from 30 to worse. Needless to say, she, like most reasonable people, gave up after a few minutes of this.
This is probably the biggest tech marketing faux pas I’ve encountered in years. WoW’s figure of six million subscribers is all the more impressive seeing how they are avoiding to attract any new ones.
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