Blizzard Entertainment Interviews

Gameplanet is offering up two separate interviews with Blizzard Entertainment’s Rob Pardo and J. Allen Brack about the future of Battle.net, their World of Warcraft: Cataclysm expansion, why other developers are abandoning the PC, and more.

From the Rob Pardo Q&A:

GP: If when StarCraft II is released it sells just as well as a top of the range triple-A console title, something like Gears of War for example, if the sales figures are as powerful as that, does that just mean that everyone else isn’t really doing PC gaming right?

RP: I don’t know if I would say everybody else, I think there’s some companies that do PC gaming exceptionally well, like Valve would be a great example. It’s just, I think there’s a lot of challenges with the PC market for people. Single-player games struggle on PC because of the piracy challenges, so I think the games that you see do really well on the PC tend to be multiplayer games. To be honest it sometimes confuses me why some developers have abandoned PC, because if you do a great PC game, it actually financially makes a lot more sense, because you don’t have to pay Microsoft or Sony, so cost of goods stays low. So I don’t know why everyone’s leaving it to us and Valve and a few others!

And a bit from the J. Allen Brack Q&A:

GP: We have a question here about World of Warcraft in relation to Battle.net 2, just wondering is the intent to basically scrap the conventional World of Warcraft login and push it all through Battle.net 2?

JAB: Yes, more or less. We launched Battle.net accounts at the beginning of the year, so now players have an optional conversion period, where they can use their existing account or use a Battle.net account. As time goes on there will be a point where we say, OK, everyone must convert to a Battle.net account. We haven’t really decided when that is going to be and when the right timing for that is, but Battle.net is the future of how you’ll login to World of Warcraft, absolutely.

Developers should take Rob’s advice. A good, closed-server multiplayer experience is key to taking piracy out of the equation. If Titan Quest would have had it, for example, I am 100% certain that Iron Lore would still be around.