14 DAY TRIAL // A former Blizzard developer who has left the company in order to work on mobile titles has said that the design principles of the World of Warcraft creator are a good base to create the popular social games that will determine the future of gaming.
Paul Della Bitta, who has worked at Blizzard for more than seven years as the senior director of global community and e-sports, has taken a number of other developers in order to create a company called Superplay Games.
He told Gamasutra that, “To me, when mobile devices -- tablets, especially -- started coming out with processing power equivalent of a PlayStation 2, that was a signal that there was a revolution about to happen.”
Blizzard has always been an innovative company but Della Bitta says that mobile development is superior because it allows designer to quickly prototype and get feedback on their ideas, without having to go through all the layers of management linked to a big video game developer.
Paul Della Bita also talked about the principles he learned at Blizzard saying, “The thing you need to take away from Blizzard is that quality and gameplay come first. We would build games with circles and squares, and if it's fun with circles and squares, then you know it's going to be fun with cute characters or whatever you decide to wrap around it. If the game's fun, the game's going to be fun no matter how you skin it.”
Blizzard has managed to dominate the MMO market with World of Warcraft, which has at one point gone past the 12 million subscriber mark, but in recent months the game has seen a decrease in player numbers.
This can be linked to an increase in the availability of free-to-play MMO titles and to an increase in mobile gaming, a space where Blizzard and Activision lack any real presence.