China Electronics Wholesaler

If anyone has a chance to steal the MMORPG spotlight from World of Warcraft, it's Bioware's recently unveiled Star Wars: The Old Republic -- a fact not lost on Blizzard. During a pre-Wrath of the Lich King interview with Eurogamer, Blizzard chief operating officer Paul Sams recognized the potential recipe for success behind the Star Wars MMO, but also warned of the tremendous burden of supporting a game in this genre.

"They have as good a chance as anybody. I wouldn't bet against them, that's for sure," Sams confessed to Eurogamer, adding, "They are an excellent company and they're utilizing a well-known franchise as the backbone for that game. I think the combination of those two things bodes well for them, just because not everybody can say [that]."

A talented developer and popular license alone aren't enough to usurp World of Warcraft as the reigning MMO champion, though, or Lord of the Rings Online would've made much bigger waves. The Blizzard executive explained the inherent hurdles involved in bringing an MMORPG to the top:

"Running this type of game, building this type of game, maintaining this type of game is exceptionally difficult."

"And so while we know they have some excellent developers and some excellent leaders, time will tell as to how they can react, and how they can prepare themselves to do all the other things... There are a lot more back-office things to running a game like this than you can ever imagine."

"It's a bit more tricky than it might seem, and I think that that is also why we haven't seen any other games that really have blown up from a huge subscribership perspective. Because how you react when it scales is very challenging, to say the least."

If you need any more evidence of the challenges of MMO development, look no further than Blizzard's own record of goofs -- like this week's accidental PVP item and mailbox glitches. Sams is quick to admit Blizzard's past, present, and future imperfections, telling Eurogamer, "We've gotten a lot of bumps and bruises along the way -- we're not perfect, we're far from it, right? We've had to learn a lot of things the hard way," continuing, "So it's a hard road, and it's also a very expensive road. [BioWare] have the benefit now of being with EA as relates to money, and EA has a pocketbook that is fat."

Blizzard's 11 million World of Warcraft subscribers obviously aren't going anywhere anytime soon, but it's refreshing to see that they're still fairly humble about their success. If Bioware does actually manage to challenge their genre dominance, one can only hope they remain just as modest and thoughtful of their competition.