Diablo III Auction House Closure/Titan Reboot Interview

Polygon chatted up Blizzard Entertainment president Mike Morhaime at last weekend’s BlizzCon, and this particular conversation revolved around the company’s difficult decisions to remove the auction house from Diablo III and reboot their long-in-development MMORPG Titan. An excerpt:

Morhaime, who used the real-money auction house himself to buy better loot, said Diablo 3’s upcoming expansion, Reaper of Souls, was a motivator in shutting the service down.

“We saw the expansion as an opportunity to make some changes,” he said. “We all sat down, we talked a lot with the developers, especially the game director Josh Mosquiera, and just tried to look at ‘If we could do anything we wanted, what is the right thing to do for the game?’

“We all agreed that the game would be better without the auction houses.”

Morhaime said Blizzard considered keeping the gold auction house, but ending the real-money auction house, but “I think that, between the two, the gold auction house probably had more impact on the game than the real-money auction house.”

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Morhaime also addressed another difficult development decision at the company, the reboot of its long-in-development, next-generation MMO, Titan.

“I think we’ve been pretty transparent about the thought process there,” he said. “We did an evaluation of our technology, the platform that we were building for the game. We realized it wasn’t going to do what we needed it to do without some significant changes. We just used that as an opportunity to take a step back, look at the game and ask hard questions: ‘If we were going to start something new, what would we make? Would we make this? Make something different?'”

In August, Morhaime said Blizzard was “in the process of selecting a new direction for the project,” which he said was “unlikely to be a subscription-based MMORPG.”