14 DAY TRIAL // Paul Sams, who is the Chief Operations Officer at video game developer Blizzard, has said that the offer of free Diablo III for all those who get an Annual Pass for the MMO World of Warcraft is designed to show the player base how much the developer values them.
Speaking to Venture Beat he stated, “We talk about, all the time, how can we do something cool for our players that’s going to benefit them, benefit us, and that they’ll feel is a give-back of sorts. That’s where this started. There’s a variety of benefits that come from it. Certainly the players get DIII, which is pretty exciting. That doesn’t mean they get the expansion sets, it means that they get DIII, right? So we get people excited about playing that.”
He added, “We don’t want to take players from our universe and shift them over from World of Warcraft. There’s a lot of players playing WoW that have huge amounts of friends and family that they play World of Warcraft with, so says, enjoy both of them. You don’t have to pay any more than you already do for WoW.”
Paul Sams acknowledges that the fact that Diablo III is offered to a larger player base means that more people will engage with it and that more might potentially use the real world money Auction Houses, which will mean a bigger source of revenue for Blizzard.
But he says that this will only happen if the audience finds the game engaging and that players can also be satisfied with getting for free something that they would need to otherwise pay for.
The Diablo III offer is not the only perk associated with the Annual Pass for World of Warcraft, with those who get it also set to receive the exclusive Tyreal's Charger mount and access to the beta stage for the Mists of Pandaria expansion.