Brave New Worlds: Blizzard Q&A

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.

From the outside looking in Blizzard seems to be untouchable, specifically in the MMO space. Is that how it feels from the inside? Can you even risk feeling that way?
We don’t take anything for granted. We feel really fortunate that we’re in the position we’re in, and we work hard to figure out ways to continue having the success that we’ve had. Blizzard has a lot of respect for some of the other great development organisations in the industry, and we know that they’re working hard to do great things, too. We still feel like we have to come to work every day and do our best.

Is there anything on the horizon that you see as a real threat to World Of Warcraft’s dominance in the MMO market?
There’s nothing that comes to mind right now that we’re worried about, but of course we keep an eye on everything that’s going on. We have an opportunity at an event like [gamescom] to take a look at products in development at other companies. All I can say is, we’re watchful. We have a lot of friends at other companies in the industry so we know what’s happening, but we really focus on what we ourselves are doing, on things that we can control.

Is there a tendency to underestimate the difficulties of establishing an MMO?
I think there’s a lot of learning [to be done]. Clearly, Blizzard has learned an awful lot about how to manage an MMO on such a large scale, for a global market. It’s a complex operation that takes a lot of planning, a lot of vision and a lot of resources. We’ve got where we are because we’ve worked hard at it, but we have definitely learned some key lessons along the way.

How much more room for growth is there in the MMO market?
We expect to build our business by continuing to add content to the game – which we’re always working on – by looking at new markets as broadband penetration increases, and how that might help us expand our presence in existing markets. We can also build the business by offering additional services. There’s still quite a bit of room for growth.

How important is growth in the East, and particularly China, to those plans?
We’re really committed to the Chinese market, and we think that overall in Asia there’s some great opportunities for us. China, specifically, is a market we’ve been working really hard to establish a presence in. We’re working with partners and with the government to make sure we’re delivering the right kind of content to meet the local policies. We’re definitely giving it a lot of focus.

How do you view your progress so far?
We’ve had a great deal of success. We recently decided to transition to a new partner, NetEase, and we knew that transition would be challenging but we’ve made a tremendous amount of progress. We’ve brought in a completely new infrastructure and new technology. All of our servers are up and running now; we’re going through a beta-testing process and our concurrency is quite high. We’re not having any issues with the new hardware, and we recently migrated to the Battle.net account management system there. We’re just in the final stages of getting approval from the government, and then hopefully we’ll be able to move on.

The dominant model for online gaming in China is free-to-play. Is that essential for widespread success?
The most important thing is to create great content. People want to play a game, not because of the business model, but because of the content. That’s where our focus is, and we try and adapt the business model to the local market; to what we think is going to allow as many players as possible to enjoy the game. For us, right now, our model is working very well. We’re looking at what people are doing with free-to-play, to see if there’s anything we can learn from in the future, but we’re happy with our current positioning.

Battle.net is also being repositioned as an “online destination platform”. Can you tell us more about your overall vision for the service?
The big thing is that Battle.net has already been a successful platform for multiplayer gaming, and what we’re trying to do now is take it to the next level. We think it’s a great platform for people to play all of Blizzard’s games from going forward, and we’re looking at new enhancements and new features. We haven’t announced what they’ll be yet, but you can expect that there’ll be initiatives in terms of e-sports, helping players to communicate more, as well as the traditional features that Battle.net has always had. We’re excited about it, and more information will be released in the future.

Lookout for the full interview in a forthcoming issue of games™.