14 DAY TRIAL // With roughly six million copies sold over the past two years, World of Warcraft has proven to be one of the greatest PC enterprises in online play. A great way to expand the market appears to be a cross over to new mediums, namely next generation consoles as they most certainly have the raw power to handle such an endeavor. Eurogamer thought of a change and had a thorough chat with chief operating officer Paul Sams at Leipzig Games Convention, to address the issue of bringing WOW to consoles - an idea which Blizzard is considering but, by the sounds of it, is in some way far from being committed to.
"We've met with Microsoft, we've met with Sony, and we are exploring these things, but the list of challenges is long. One really big challenge is that one of the key features of a massively multiplayer game, especially WOW, is consistent and regular content updates. They require hard drive space, and there's a finite amount of that on each of those platforms... On PC, we make it, we test it, we deploy it. On console, we could be waiting for days, because you've got to submit and test it. And if they don't like something, we've got to go back to the drawing board."
Blizzard's platform of choice has ever more been the PC, the only medium to present the required versatility in the creative process, control and security over the product as well as an established market able to absorb the development costs of such a daring enterprise. But the question is if console gaming can provide the same range of features, to make World of Warcraft successful on this new market.
"I think that Live will reign... [Microsoft] has a much longer track record and history of multiplayer gaming, and I think they absolutely will have the lead. It's going to be excruciatingly difficult for anyone - including Sony - to take that away from Microsoft. They're way too far ahead."
Sams also confirmed Blizzard's plans to release a new World of Warcraft expansion pack every year. Thus starting with the Burning Crusade, the company's official way to get new subscribers will be the introduction of major content overhauls every twelve months. This has certainly been done before in the MMORPG world, yet Blizzard has the required fan base to actually make a perpetuum mobile, a game that never ends or runs out of subscribers and relies solely upon itself to survive.