14 DAY TRIAL // For the past few months, Blizzard has been full of surprises for the gaming community (even though most of their official statements were common sense and everybody was expecting to hear them sooner or later). However, it seems that the company now loves to share its secrets - and so do we. For example, during the latest Activision Blizzard investor phone call, Blizzard's president, Mike Morhaime has confirmed that his company is working on a brand new massively multiplayer online game! However, he stopped there and offered no further details due to "competitive reasons", but this is huge! Especially since it could be a brand new IP and a brand new universe!
During the same call, Morhaime admitted that Blizzard still hopes that World of Warcraft, the biggest MMO game in the world, will keep growing beyond the current 10.9 million mark. He said that constant development of new content especially as major expansion packs (such as Wrath of the Lich King) will draw even more consumers and basically turn WoW into a legend. An immortal one.
"We have a team of over 100 developers who are continually expanding the game. Any massively multiplayer online game that launches today is not just competing with the... content that we launched with back in 2004; they are also competing with a product and a service that has been continuously enhanced, expanded, and refined for almost four years now, as well as our years of experience in running the game," he said.
Addressing the release of Age of Conan, considered to be able to take the crown from Blizzard's game, Morhaime admitted that "some" of the World of Warcraft gamers left to test Funcom's title, but 40% of them have already returned and even more are expected to come back when the Wrath of the Lich King expansion gets released.
"It costs hundreds of millions of dollars to not only develop a game as robust as World of Warcraft, but also to create the infrastructure needed in order to support the operation of the game," he said.
So this means that now World of Warcraft is a giant bored to tears, ready to crush any competition - and it's not even getting too many worthy adversaries. So the guys over at Blizzard have decided to give it a try and develop a game themselves. But do they really want to move their own users from their game to another? I truly doubt that and this is the exact reason why I am sure the new title will have a completely different target. Hopefully it will not be a casual-type of MMO.