 |
|
|
| |
Blizzard Will 'Definitely Work On A Console Game At Some Point'
by Staff [PC, Console/PC]
|
|
| |
|
December 18, 2009
|
| |
Massively successful PC MMO World of Warcraft is celebrating its fifth anniversary, while the over-arching Warcraft real-time strategy franchise has been around for 15 years now. At the core of both properties: The PC market.
We reflect with Samwise Didier, senior director of StarCraft II and art director of the first three Warcraft games, and J. Allen Brack, production director for World of Warcraft, on Blizzard's storied history in our latest Gamasutra feature, and part of the discussion deals with how the company sees the state of the PC business.
"I don't see the PC market as being bad. I mean, we didn't have 12 million players ten years ago," says Didier. "Whatever the format, console or PC, I think if there is a good game, it's going to be played."
"We're working on PC because it's familiar to us and it's relatively easy and it's not changing formats every other year and there aren't three different versions," he continues. "Console, we have to worry about [those things]. I think the PC is really a good market to target."
Brack says he's aware that there's a perception that Blizzard -- which has made only PC games for 15 years -- is somehow "anti-console": "That's absolutely not the case," he says. "We just want to make the right game for the right platform."
"Think about StarCraft II," says Brack. "Some real-time strategy games have tried to happen on the console. Some of those have been successful, but overall, our experience is that it's going to be a better game on the PC, ergo it's developed on the PC."
Same with WoW, Brack adds, a game developed for the PC and with a PC-centric control scheme. "But we're a company of gamers," he says. "I have two consoles at home. Sam has consoles. We're a culture of gamers. We will definitely work on a console game at some point. I have no doubt about that. It's just [a matter of] what game. What makes the most sense?"
|
| |
|
|
Personally I'd go console specific and UP to PC as experience with the opposite leads to a product of minimums rather than leveraging increased capabilities per platform though you do tend to lose some velocity in development and planning has to be tighter and more focused.
On the whole of it though, it's going to be interesting WHAT products and processes come out of it!
Box art: http://tinyurl.com/y9foo45
I just hope its nothing like warcraft, and by that I mean elves, leprechauns, and dwarfs.
I just hope that its not too long before they actually do it, and I hope its good....perferably xbox 360 exclusive lol.
This is exactly what I've been saying to people who defend companies like IW that ditch the PC market to go to the consoles "oh, theres just more money in the console market, its not worth putting all the time into making a PC engine that can run on different levels of hardware just for the small PC market".
It didn't seem to be a problem for Valve or Id or Blizzard last decade!? and there were LESS PC users back then, and hardware was even MORE expensive!
Just because you can't make THE MOST money doing PC games, doesn't mean to say that you can't make MORE THAN ENOUGH! thats why I hate IW and such, cause it's driven only by greed. and any game developed with MONEY as the number one priority, is gonna suffer in my opinion.
As for blizzard doing a console game? why not? would be nice to have more blizzard quality games on them. I would think that blizzard's incredible attention to detail would make it hard for them to just port a game to a console, makes me think they would do a console specific game, in which case the fact that their project development times are usually longer than the lifetimes of consoles (and small pets) might be a problem... ;)
WoW is the exception to the rule. Other PC games rarely sell millions of copies, whereas most successful console games break the million barrier. In the last two decades development costs were MUCH MUCH lower. Id made Doom for pennies in comparison to modern video game budgets. Activision spent more on Marketing MW2 that most companies spent in development costs from 1990-1999.
If you are a developer (like Infinity Ward) you are making games because it is your passion. If you are a publisher, you are financing games because you want to make money. If you're desire is to make big, beautiful games, you need to attract a publisher willing to give you tons of money to pay the hardworking programmers, artists, and designers on your payroll so they can work on your project. If you want to get money from the publishers, you need to demonstrate the ability to sell millions of copies of your product, else you don't get the big budget (or worse your publisher backs out or never green-lights your project.
Successful console titles sell millions of copies. Which is why game development studios embrace the console market. It attracts publishers because it has the track record of success. We would not be able to make the high budget games that we are making right now if we did not make games for the consoles.
But IW DID ditch the PC market, or they may as well have. No dedicated servers, modding, pro gaming stuff at all.
If it wasn't for the keyboard and mouse, there would be no reason to play it on the PC, and I get the feeling that even that was a strain. Some FPS game recently actually had "Keyboard and mouse support" as a listed feature of the PC version...
Passionate FPS developers would never have allowed concessions like this...