For context, initial WoW was developed until 2005, and up to roughly 2003 Blizzard was going to release it only for the US and Korea, because they thought “Europeans only play racing games” (source: WoW dev diary by Staats)
For context, initial WoW was developed until 2005, and up to roughly 2003 Blizzard was going to release it only for the US and Korea, because they thought “Europeans only play racing games” (source: WoW dev diary by Staats)
The release date was late 2004. It's definitely true that Blizzard massively underestimated demand. They expected the initial printing to last for months, and it sold out immediately. They needed to race to roll out more datacenter capacity as fast as possible. (This was pre-AWS)
Source: was there
That's because both Americans and Asians see Ye Olde Europe as somethiing fancy to stay and/or meet and for us Europeans it's just fancy but old, boring trash from the old town in our cities, something to run away from... or to look from a distance with a nice scenery ;)
I mean, when you can see a 12th century church daily by just taking the subway in 20 minutes, Medieval stuff gets boring fast.
Even more if you own volumes at home older than the half of the US' history like nothing...
From that perspective, what you want to know and met it's the new, fancy, technological futurist stuff.
The US loved Ultima and maybe FFVI and medieval ARPG's. Europeans... maybe urbanites, townsfolk people loved racing/soccer games and futurist games like Half Life and Deus Ex.