NowGamer grills Mike Ryder, the executive managing director of international operations at Blizzard

It’s about a year and a half since the merger with Activision. How do you reflect on that now? How has Blizzard benefited from that union?
It’s been a great thing for us. We’re part of a much larger, much stronger organisation, and overall it’s a very professional organisation that we’re really happy to be a part of. At the same time, going into the merger we had the vision of maintaining Blizzard as it is. We didn’t want the merger to affect how Blizzard performed in terms of its values, its culture, and so forth.

And as it’s turned out over the past year and a half, there hasn’t been any impact on Blizzard. We still operate the way we always have: our values are still the same, we still make decisions about games, about release dates, about feature sets, and all that sort of thing. Decisions are still made in the context of what’s important for the player, with quality at the forefront.

Activision has been very vocal about the dangers of establishing new IP in the current market conditions, and the value of protecting and expanding on established brands. Does Blizzard share in this view?
I can just speak for Blizzard, and we’re fortunate to have three really successful franchises that we continue to build upon and try and do more cool things with. We have a lot of creative people and we’re always kicking around ideas, and while we don’t have any specific plans to announce any new products, I can tell you that there are a lot of ideas within Blizzard. We’re always looking at opportunities to do something else that would be exciting for the players.

Do you think the Blizzard community wants new IP? The anticipation surrounding StarCraft II, Diablo III and Cataclysm has been huge…
I wouldn’t speculate on what the community would like to see, but it’s been very exciting to see how they’ve responded to those announcements… As long as we keep creating compelling content, and the quality is there, I believe they’ll always have reasons to be excited about it. That’s true whether it’s an existing franchise or something new – if it’s great, they’ll like it.

… continued