Former World Of Warcraft Lead Systems Designer Responds To Morhaime’s ‘Social Decline’ Comment

Just the other day, Blizzard Entertainment co-founder Mike Morhaime commented that the social value of World of Warcraft had declined due to gameplay changes that made the game more accessible to casual gamers. Former WoW Lead Systems Designer Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street, responds with a short Twitter thread defending the game.

“People forget sometimes that when WoW became popular, things like instant messaging didn't really exist, let alone having social features in every game,” tweeted Street. “People connected on WoW. It was the first experience for many gamers of making a friend online instead of IRL. [. . .] It is going to be really hard for any MMO in the future to recreate the sheer novelty of social interactions that WoW produced. The world is different than it was then.”

The community, however, was quick to point out that instant messaging was already a thing years before WoW was released and that “social features”, specifically chatboxes and friends lists, were also available in much older games and MMOs.

Thoughts? Let us know in the comments section below.

I have been asked a bunch about Mike Morhaime's chat with Seth Schiesel. While WoW did a lot of things right, some of its greatest contributions were social....

— Greg Street (@Ghostcrawler) April 29, 2020