Warcraft could have been a household name alongside Star Wars, LotR, Harry Potter

[Nevcairiel]

Mario, Sonic, and Final Fantasy say Hello.

I think you overestimate their popularity.

Mario is likely the most known out of that, and where are his TV shows and movies? They tried making those, and they all failed.
Sonic got a movie recently, which was sort of ok, but its hardly a status similar to LotR.
And Final Fantasy, really?

[Beloren]

Piss poor director and a terrible movie company. They literally went with two of the worst things directing that movie that they possibly could. It was a dud from the start.

Yeh, they managed to ruin warcraft somehow - focusing on the orcs was a bad move. Warcraft only becomes orc centric after Wc3, when people have already had 3 epic battles and seen the orcs mystery and situation revealed.

You have no sympathy for the orcs in WC1, Durotan and his family make littel sense to have so much focus on at this point, that stuff is better as a flashback in WC2 or Wc3 - it's the actual occupants of Azeroth being invaded that should have been focused on - they are completely ignored like 2nd rate characters in the story of the invaders - no one could relate to that. Even myself as ahorde player and lover picked that up.

[Wangming]

Considering wow is just a mix of basic fantasy tropes, pop culture references and very shitty writing, I doubt it would catch on. The gameplay may have popularized the MMO genre 15 years ago, but I would sooner expect the Elder Scrolls to become a hit.

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I think you overestimate their popularity.

Mario is likely the most known out of that, and where are his TV shows and movies? They tried making those, and they all failed.
Sonic got a movie recently, which was sort of ok, but its hardly a status similar to LotR.
And Final Fantasy, really?

Yeah. As much as I like the FF games, they don't translate well into movies. Or at least we had 3 bad ones out of 3 produced. Cool music, but that's a given. Probably the biggest problem is that the last 2 were tie-ins to games that are needed to understand what the F is going on.

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You have no sympathy for the orcs in WC1,

Or WC2, or MoP, or WoD. Maybe not in Cata eithervdepending on your taste.

[kappalol]

I think the Warcraft movie was the first attempt into doing just that...

Too bad they ballsed it up. First and only attempt, now.

Because it came like 10 years late.

[Beloren]

Considering wow is just a mix of basic fantasy tropes, pop culture references and very shitty writing, I doubt it would catch on. The gameplay may have popularized the MMO genre 15 years ago, but I would sooner expect the Elder Scrolls to become a hit.

That was their strongest asset they kinda failed to capitalise on. Their world works, and is the only place you get all these fantasy tropes and pop culture references together in one world. This is what's unique about them, and i think we started to enjoy it, but it just didn't develop as well as it could.

It needed to be lighter than the likes of Elder scrolls and Warhammer - aiming for the sort of ball park of the Dragon Prince would have been perfect.

Sadly it tied to be way too serious - or maybe I just over-estimate it's value and genius - mainly cos I'm addicted

[Wangming]

That was their strongest asset they kinda failed to capitalise on. Their world works, and is the only place you get all these fantasy tropes and pop culture references together in one world. This is what's unique about them, and i think we started to enjoy it, but it just didn't develop as well as it could.

It needed to be lighter than the likes of Elder scrolls and Warhammer - aiming for the sort of ball park of the Dragon Prince would have been perfect.

Sadly it tied to be way too serious - or maybe I just over-estimate it's value and genius - mainly cos I'm addicted

Definitely the latter. I'm never going to let Blizzard live down the shame that was Uldum. Seriously fuck that zone.

[Phuongvi]

Mayve it didnt happen because Warcraft lore is not much better than The Smurfs or Scooby Doo

[MoanaLisa]

Imo, they waited too long to expand to the big screen/small screen and didn't do it correctly either.

Hollywood has its ways and Blizzard is a very small fish in that pond. Blizzard had much less to do with the movie than you imagine. They consulted on it but in the end, big Hollywood movies are the creatures of their directors.

I agree that the movie came too late but it's unlikely that Blizzard could finance a big budget Hollywood movie at any time in the last decade. One, they are too busy being a video game company and Two, people forget that they don't necessarily control their finances in that way. There's zero evidence that Vivendi was really interested in doing a movie back in the day and a lot of Blizzard's profits were sunk back into developing other games. There were a fair number of years when WoW was paying for most everything at Blizzard.

I can't even imagine how the movie would have looked if it had been produced in 2008-2010 time frame.

Anyway, main point is that the movie you got is the one that Duncan Jones made. That's how it works.

[Nikeyla]

Doubt WoW could ever be as big as those series. I mean, just because it wasn't as popular as the examples you gave doesn't mean it wasn't successful. In the world of video games, specifically mmo-rpg's, WoW has remained the king and most prominent game for almost 16 years.

I think blizzard tried expanding the warcraft universe as we saw with the movie, but because it performed so poorly in the states, blizzard had no reason to push it anymore. IMO they shouldn't have done a movie, they should have done an HBO quality series, but unfortunately GoT was already a thing and warcraft would be too similar.

I think Blizz failed at this because their strategy to do half ass low effort job relying on free money from nostalgic ppl just doesnt work outside of their gaming community.

[Jessicka]

Video game, and a tremendous act of self-sabotage by the game community trashing the movie before it was even released. Personally, I enjoyed the movie, as did my friends who've not played, or played very little since the RTSs.

Sure, it could have been better, as could a few of the Avengers universe films, but it simply never had the support of the people playing the game in the first place to carry shit like Iron Man 2 and 3 had.

[msdos]

WoW reminds me of DBZ in terms of eventually fighting gods and power levels, they both do the same thing.

I think that fact lends more to Shadowlands. At least Shadowlands is story driven and not about destroying perfectly graduated bosses that lead to a God final boss, because we've been doing that since WoD, if not MoP.

[Adamas102]

That was their strongest asset they kinda failed to capitalise on. Their world works, and is the only place you get all these fantasy tropes and pop culture references together in one world. This is what's unique about them, and i think we started to enjoy it, but it just didn't develop as well as it could.

It needed to be lighter than the likes of Elder scrolls and Warhammer - aiming for the sort of ball park of the Dragon Prince would have been perfect.

Sadly it tied to be way too serious - or maybe I just over-estimate it's value and genius - mainly cos I'm addicted

Again, it's not the only setting where those tropes and references come together. I'm curious to see how the Magic the Gathering productions that are in the works fare. The game is older than the Warcraft franchise by one year, has crossed mediums from it's original inception as well, and isn't on a downward trend of popularity. I'd say it's still a bit more niche than WoW, but hey it too has gotten it's own South Park episode so there's that.

[Devilyaki]

The problem with Warcraft is that it’s Warcraft. The movie wasn’t terrible, and would of done great if not for the stigmata that it’s “that nerd game”, why I see it didn’t do so well in USA.

[TrollHunter3000]

Srsly, how did blizzard fail to capitalise on this? It was so addictive, captivating - it's stories, use of pop fiction pushed all the right buttons, it could have been the world of worlds - not because it was original, but because it was the only place so many of the most popular strands in modern day fiction could exist together in one universe - whether classic fantasy elves/orcs/dwarves, or the zombie apoacalypse world, the supernatural one of demons, and twilight werewolf/worgen world, it even had aliens - complete with a unique charm.

It's obvious it had a world that could go far beyond a video game. llike far.

Who knows the real scope of htis, - but they could have spanned blockbuster hits, 3-4 tv shows,, and shoudl have been ambitiously planning on a far bigger WoW2 sequel and upgrade to the first VR world.

They had what it took, their world was interesting, their stories, their races were also quite unique, and they had the momentum going - why didn't they? Or how did they fail so hard to make the leap??

How is it not a household name? I've never had a single person tell me they haven't heard of WoW

[msdos]

Who is the final boss in SL?

Dunno. Maybe it's the Cookie Monster?

[Lightning-]

They should make an animated series ala their cinematics. THAT would get billions of view.

I also think that would be cool but I think those cinematics are a huge huge amount of work, not sure if it's worth it for them.

[msdos]

You’re the one who made a declarative statement that its final boss isn’t some God level threat. How do you know?

I said I don't know. As far as I can tell, Shadowlands is story driven. I don't get why this statement is worthy of you randomly trying to pick it apart and then get an attitude after I was joking lol, calm down.

And what I meant by story driven (before this gets picked apart) is I wanna play Shadowlands so I can see what happens with the story.
BFA was just BFA.. Faction war.. I didn't go into it anticipating a story.

[BrintoSFJ]

Srsly, how did blizzard fail to capitalise on this? It was so addictive, captivating - it's stories, use of pop fiction pushed all the right buttons, it could have been the world of worlds - not because it was original, but because it was the only place so many of the most popular strands in modern day fiction could exist together in one universe - whether classic fantasy elves/orcs/dwarves, or the zombie apoacalypse world, the supernatural one of demons, and twilight werewolf/worgen world, it even had aliens - complete with a unique charm.

It's obvious it had a world that could go far beyond a video game. llike far.

Who knows the real scope of htis, - but they could have spanned blockbuster hits, 3-4 tv shows,, and shoudl have been ambitiously planning on a far bigger WoW2 sequel and upgrade to the first VR world.

They had what it took, their world was interesting, their stories, their races were also quite unique, and they had the momentum going - why didn't they? Or how did they fail so hard to make the leap??

Because they fucked up the movie, the story was extremely generic, cgi was garbage, acting was garbage. Even China, where the movie made the most amount of money, people forgot about the movie next week and a hong kong movie took the 1st position of box office and held it for 3 weeks straight. This kind of shit never happened for marvel and disney movies in China, they watched those movies week after week. Warcraft movie was that bad. I am not sure who was the moron that wrote screenplay but that person should be extremely ashamed. with so much material, how could that person fuck up the story so bad?

[Gaidax]

In order to be "household" anything there needs to be a massive exposure. For games it's already tough since they require this extra step of dedicated hardware.

Then there is a difference between something like Mario, which was tossed at you, often for free, included with just about every simple pop console back in 80s and 90s and Warcraft which always was a more exclusive club and still remains this way to this day with no console reach.