Blizzard Entertainment Interview

Videogaming247 was able to squeeze a few comments out of Blizzard COO Paul Sam at London’s Wrath of the Lich King press event, mostly concerning WoW and the upcoming MMO. First, growth is still important to World of Warcraft.

(I think growing the subscribership is important,) he told VG247, speaking in London ahead of tonight’s launch of Wrath of the Lich King.

(People leave. Taking a moment to talk about things from a company business perspective, continuing to grow is important if we want to maintain our subscribership.)

And new MMO is different and next gen.

(We want to create a great game,) he said. (Something that’s cool, and new, and different, and kind of next generation in terms of look and feel and gameplay. That’s a challenging endeavour.)

Sams indicated that the project is in the very early stages of development.

(We’re definitely at the beginning, in the first half of development,) said the exec, explaining that Blizzard tends to work to a two-half process when creating new games.

(When we’re building a new game from the ground up, what happens is that it’s slow going for the first bit, while the team goes round and round and round figuring out how it’s going to look and feel, what the player experience is and what the differentiators are, and then the speed at which we then bring in the contet and polish and actually get to the finish line. I think the second half of the process is always substantially faster than the first half of product development,) he said.