Burning Crusade distribution

On January 16 the Burning Crusade expansion for World of Warcraft will come out and literally millions of people will want to get hold of a copy, and preferably start playing on the same day. But if I look at the current information on how the expansion is to be distributed, I doubt that things will go well. Lets have a look at distribution and explore how it could be improved.

The only option we know about to get hold of the Burning Crusade is to buy a box with a CD in a shop. These boxes will be available starting from January 16, not before, and the Burning Crusade will apparently go live at noon on that same day. This method will result in maximum frustration for the World of Warcraft players. First it will be difficult to get hold of a box on the 16th. Mail orders will probably only arrive a couple of days later, and local PC games stores might very well be sold out rather quickly. Then all the people who actually got a box will have to register their Burning Crusade key on the World of Warcraft account management website. It is well known that the WoW website is one of the major weaknesses in the Blizzard infrastructure, and more likely than not it will collapse and not be available for many hours on end on the 16th. And once you got past that, you'll still need to pass the bottlenecks of the login server, and the patch download, before you can actually play. And that is if the game servers can withstand thousands of players all crowding the same zone, Hellfire Peninsula. There must be better possibilities to handle all this.

Frank Pearce, senior VP of product development at Blizzard, talked in an interview about the possibility of digital distribution. Quote: "It's something we're talking about, but no final plans for The Burning Crusade." As we haven't heard anything yet, it is likely that there won't be any digital distribution for the Burning Crusade, which is a shame. But even if there was one, if you can start that download only on the 16th of January, it would probably be very slow. The Blizzard servers could never handle direct downloads, and the peer-to-peer solution they use for patch downloads is crawling only at a snail's pace. The BC beta download took me 36 hours with that system, in spite of me having high-speed ADSL. And even if the Burning Crusade could be downloaded on the 16th, that wouldn't solve the problems with the account management servers etc.

So what the fundamental flaw of the Burning Crusade distribution is, is the timing. What Blizzard *should* do is to distribute the boxes and preferably also a digital download version at least one week before the expansion goes live. That gives everybody time to get hold of a copy, get the key entered into the account management website, and be ready for playing on the day that the Burning Crusade goes live. Blizzard has already realized the importance of distributing data early with their "background downloader" application, which downloads patches before they go live. What is true for patches is even more important for expansions, people need time to get everything set up.

Other companies have far better servers for downloading large amounts of data. Already many people download their World of Warcraft patches from sites like Fileplanet. Blizzard should team up with one of these companies for the digital distribution of expansions. The digital distributor takes a cut, but so do regular distributors, and then Blizzard saves the money for the CDs, box, and manual. If Blizzard would combine early distribution with outsourced digital distribution, every player would be able to get hold of the expansion in time. Even simpler, there are a lot of people already having a functioning BC beta client running on their PC, so if Blizzard would allow them to just purchase a key and change a small file to connect to the real servers instead of the test realms, they could get lots of people playing with minimal download effort.

But maybe Blizzard doesn't *want* all the players to be able to access the Burning Crusade on day one. I remember being lucky on the European start of World of Warcraft, and being one of the few players who got past the account management site before it broke down. That resulted in me being able to login and level up without too many other players getting into my way. Every player who doesn't get a box on the 16th, or who can't get his Burning Crusade key registered, will be one less player blocking the login servers or overcrowding Hellfire Peninsula. Makes you wonder if the bad distribution system is a deliberate strategy.