Blizzard Entertainment Considering iOS Development

I doubt we’ll be playing Diablo or World of Warcraft on an iPhone or iPad in the near future, but according to this brief interview with Blizzard Entertainment’s Greg Street on Eurogamer, the company is at least interested in porting and/or developing titles for Apple’s popular devices.

“Everyone I know here has an iPhone or an iPad so we’re huge fans of the hardware,” he said. “If we could make the right game changes to make that work, it’s something we’d be interested in. It’s not something you’re going to see in the next week or two, but it’s the kind of thing we’re always looking at.”

Once again, the challenge of bringing WOW to console platforms was discussed.

“That’s a really big topic. The one [issue] that comes to mind is that WOW is designed for use of a mouse and a keyboard and we haven’t yet seen a console solution that lets us replicate it easily,” he said.

“I suspect that we would also want to own a lot more of the back-end than most console companies would be willing to let us have. Right now we’re being pretty successful just supporting the PC and Macintosh. We’d love to do it if it ever made sense – I’m sure we would.”

The interview continues into World of Warcraft territory, too:

“We know that frequent content updates is the key, but I compare WOW development to a battleship – and it’s hard to get a battleship to turn quickly… If we’re looking back three or four years from now, we’ll be saying how much better Blizzard has got at delivering quick expansions… We’ll keep working as long as the players keep playing the game. It doesn’t look like the game is going anywhere soon.”

One new feature that we may see in an upcoming expansion is an additional level of difficulty for the game’s raid and dungeon instances.

“We have a very wide variety of player skill. I look at a lot of other games and see that they might offer five difficulty levels – but we really only offer two. That’s something we talk about a lot, do we need to offer more difficulty levels?”