Blizzard Entertainment Interview

Gamasutra had the chance to chat it up with Blizzard Entertainment COO Paul Sams about their successful IPs, integrating mods into their games, growing the PC market, and more. Since the first question is sort of important, I’ll quote that:

Is Diablo III going to have subscription elements, or just be a boxed product?

PS: Well, it’s going to be a co-operative game much like Diablo II in the way of the networking gameplay experience, but as it relates to what the business model is and those types of things, what you find with Blizzard is we don’t really get into those types of things until quite late in the development process.

Right now, we’re really focusing on gameplay, and trying to figure out exactly what the overall experience is going to be, and the whole gameplay progression and everything. And how the game’s going to work on Battle.net, and what the feature system will be there.

Traditionally, what we really try and focus on doing is making a great game, and then we try to wrap the business model around it. But the business model is never and I know it may seem funny to hear us say that but it’s never in the forefront of our minds. We really are focused on the game.

Like the WoW business model, as an example, we didn’t determine what that was going to look like and what that was going to be, until quite late in the game. We didn’t finalize what that was going to look like until the last six months prior to launch.

And I would expect with Diablo III and StarCraft II and anything that we do in the future, we’ll approach it similarly where we really focus on the game and then talk about what the business model will be.