14 DAY TRIAL // This year, World of Warcraft, the Blizzard-made MMO, celebrates five years of existence and is still the biggest subscription-based game in the world, with more than 12 million active players logging into the experience.
The company is now working on a new expansion for the MMO, called Cataclysm, putting the finishing touches on real time strategy title Starcraft II and also preparing Diablo III for a release, which will probably come in 2011. And all these will only come to the PC, leading some gamers to ask why the firm is not interested in gaming consoles.
Samwise Didier, who is the senior director on Starcraft II and art lead on the Warcraft real time strategy series, told Gamasutra that “I don't see the PC market as being bad. I mean, we didn't have 12 million players ten years ago. Whatever the format, console or PC, I think if there is a good game, it's going to be played.”
J. Allen Brack, who is production director on World of Warcraft, said that “Some real-time strategy games have tried to happen on the console. Some of those have been successful, but overall, our experience is that it's going to be a better game on the PC, ergo it's developed on the PC.”
The two men from Blizzard are stating that the company is not ignoring the console market because, for some reason, they hate the idea of playing on the Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo devices, but the entity they are part of is focused on making sure that if they put out a videogame for the Xbox 360, the PlayStation 3 or even the Nintendo Wii, they do so while reaching the same level of quality delivered for so much time on the PC. Maybe Warcraft IV will have a console version.