Blizzard Entertainment Interview

VG247 has published an interview they did with Blizzard’s Rob Pardo about their PC development strategy, StarCraft II, the new Battle.net, microtransactions, and much more.

VG247: Have you made any final decisions on how you’re going to recoup some of the investment you’ve made in the new Battle.net?

Rob Pardo: Yeah, we’re still finalizing that. I know the big question out there is whether there’s going to be a subscription to Battle.net or anything like that, and we certainly are not doing that for StarCraft II. Our approach on monetization and business model for a game is really what’s right for the game. Just because something worked well on World of Warcraft doesn’t mean we’re going to put it on StarCraft II, because it’s an entirely different sort of game. As far as what we do for Battle.net, we have a lot of different ideas, some other things that we’re going to talk about, but nothing we’re going to talk about here other than we’re definitely not going to. I don’t want to put the scare out there that it’s going to be subscription-based. We’re not going to do that.

I think what I’ve said previously is that we’re going to take an approach that is a little bit micro-transactiony. You know, we have value-added services on World of Warcraft, where you can do paid character transfer, you can do the re-customization of your character, things that you really don’t need to play the game. You can get pretty much anything you want out of World of Warcraft without any of the value-added services. I want to try to take more of that approach with StarCraft II and Battle.net. So it’ll be things like if you want to rename your character. Things like that will be probably where we do the business model for Battle.net.