No WoW for consoles

By Robert Purchese Published 6 February, 2007

Executive man is adamant.

World of Warcraft is a cow with golden milk, but despite its obvious grazing success, it definitely won't be seeing the light of day on Xbox 360 or PS3.

Blizzard's vice president of business development, Itzik Ben Bassat, told our sister site GamesIndustry.biz that consoles still lacked the accomplishments of PC, specifically in the online department, which would have to develop further before it would appeal to the developer.

"We are not going to develop WoW for consoles. WoW was designed for PC and I think it will stay that way," he said. "Online console gaming is still in its very early stages, and it needs to be developed further to provide opportunities of a scale which will be interesting to us. "

However, he was far from rejecting the merits of next-generation consoles, heaping tankards of praise on Microsoft's Live Arcade offering - though he admits he hasn't seen as much of the PS3.

"We have been talking to Microsoft and Sony," he added. "Personally I love XBLA - I think Microsoft has done an excellent job developing it and there are lots of exciting things there."

"With my colleagues at Microsoft I can give my opinion on what I've seen. I'm very impressed, I'm impressed by the people who do it, and the service is very easy, very intuitive. I love it."

High praise, enough to get us pondering a downloadable offering from Blizzard, but we won't get our hopes up.

He also confirmed that World of Warcraft will continue to grow by an expansion a year, as Blizzard has a list of features it wants to include that was much too extensive to fit into The Burning Crusade.

And, as for what Blizzard do with all those chests full of gold, well, it uses it to fuel its creativity (as if we believe that).

"It's not like we're sitting around collecting the cash. Blizzard is a gamers' company; we do what we do out of love for the games. We want to be proud, and creativity is what drives us," he declared.

You can read the first part of the interview on GamesIndustry.biz now, and the second part will be available tomorrow.

Alternatively you can immerse yourself in our review of The Burning Crusade, Blizzard's first expansion pack for World of Warcraft.

Picture of Robert.

About Robert Purchese

Bertie is Eurogamer's Senior Staff Writer. When he's not hunting down news stories he's often found playing with his kids or gabbling about fantasy games and strange online worlds. @Clert on Twitter.

Read more articles from Robert by visiting the Robert Purchese archive page.

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Comments (36) Latest comment 5 years ago

Comments for this article are now closed, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • AcidSnake #1 5 years ago

    The subtitle had me confused for a moment...

    "Executive man is Adam Ant"

    I need a break...

  • magicpanda #2 5 years ago

    This is probably a good thing.

  • Rirekon #3 5 years ago

    Thank god, console MMO's generally suck hard!
    Kudos to Blizzard for not falling for the Cash-Cow trap and porting their game to everything available *glares at FF-Online*

  • Rirekon #4 5 years ago

    @Owen-B: Paying all the staff who are working on unreleased projects probably...

  • samk #5 5 years ago

    I haven't even tried the original WoW yet at all myself nevermind the newly released expansion.

    If they released a 360 version I'd buy it. Maybe I'm getting old but I'd much rather sit on my comfy sofa with my feet up playing games these days than sat in front of a PC monitor hour after hour, which I do enough at work.

  • alimokrane #6 5 years ago

    @""Thank god, console MMO's generally suck hard!
    Kudos to Blizzard for not falling for the Cash-Cow trap and porting their game to everything available *glares at FF-Online*""

    And why would they hah ? they sold 8 million WoW copies and soon another 8 million for the Expansion + plus the monthly subscription from those 8 million, all they have to do is crap out another expansion in 2 years time and they can retire. Hell they can retire right now.
    Edited by alimokrane at 06/02/07 @ 16:57

  • Nova5lag #7 5 years ago

    7 million players... even paying a nominal fee like say £5 per month to account for variations in exchange rate etc.. is like £35000000 a month! Thats £420000000 a year!

    I pains me... Blizzard can you gift a poor man with child and trying to buy a house a few thou?? I'm not even greedy just enough to pay the solicitor fees would be handy!

  • BadBoyBonner #8 5 years ago

    Cranks up the Itzik Ben Bassat translatortron "XBL seem's good, as it can extract money, until the money extraction process allows a direct flow to the developer instead of MS then FK em!"

  • Darren #9 5 years ago

    I'd love to see a console game similar to World of Warcraft that makes full use of the 360's voice communication but with the same charming art style of the PC classic.

    One of the annoying things I found with the PC version of WoW when I played it two years ago now was all the typing I had to do (although I still thought the game was brilliant). I'd imagine taking out the need to type responses every few seconds would transform a fantastic game into a... well even more uber-fantastic game! It would be far better than the dreadful 360 port of Final Fantasy XI, which is the only console MMORPG I know of.

  • Bertie Verified Senior Staff Writer, Eurogamer.net #10 5 years ago

    Use TeamSpeak or Ventrillo ;)

  • George-Roper #11 5 years ago

    "It's not like we're sitting around collecting the cash. Blizzard is a gamers' company; we do what we do out of love for the games. We want to be proud, and creativity is what drives us," he declared.

    Fuck. Off.

    VU are a bunch of money hoarding cunts, as anyone who played WoW in the first 6-9 months will attest to.

    No worthwhile content added and a big 'fuck you' to all the players screaming for new hardware/servers.
    Edited by George-Roper at 06/02/07 @ 17:15

  • Lebowski #12 5 years ago

    Marvel MMO scares WoW away shocker!

  • Waldo #13 5 years ago

    WoW's graphics are circa-2002, so one would think the Wii could handle this.

  • Rirekon #14 5 years ago

    I do love how everyone looks at the Subscription of an MMO, multiplies it by the Subscribers and goes "OMFG they make teh lootz".
    Bandwidth for an MMO is expensive, really expensive!
    Oh and don't forget hosting costs, dedicated servers aren't cheap, and WoW will be using tons of them.
    Then look at the sheer number of support staff involved, then the support staff for those staff, etc...

    Sure Blizzard are making money, and they deserve it, but I really doubt the figure is as high as some of you are making out. Also they'll be using the money from WoW to finance their next games.
    Oh oops, did I just burst someone's bubble? Sorry to break it to you kiddies but game development is not cheap! It doesn't matter if the game is still in development, staff still need paying!

    WoW has put Blizzard in a position which most developers can only dream of, they have the financial security to make what ever the hell they please. I for one applaud their success and look forward to their next game.

  • George-Roper #15 5 years ago

    @Rirekon

    You are aware that Blizz are owned by Vivendi Universal, right?

    All the money that WoW makes doesn't go into Blizzards pocket.

    Say what you like about server and hosting costs, bottom line is that WoW makes VU shitloads of money, very little of which actually goes back into WoW. Why do you think it took so long to get Burning Crusade out? Because of the content? LOL!

  • Nova5lag #16 5 years ago

    I know that the volume of money is obviously reduced somewhat for server and bandwidth costs. Im not an idiot... however. I also know what a new server costs and the running costs of bandwidth and constant tweaks / patches associcated with online games.

    Their costs are high and a game like WoW will have even higher so because of the strain on the servers (volume of players) however... this dent in their profit is akin to a fly hitting the front of my car.

    I would even guess that their overheads as a company are higher than the runnings costs of WoW but still they will have posted a huge profit. More than most people and business' could dream of.

  • Your_Dumb_Child #17 5 years ago

    So, no WoW for consoles..thank god. Leave that shit for PC "no mates" Anoraks.

  • lambtron #18 5 years ago

    "Online console gaming is still in its very early stages, and it needs to be developed further to provide opportunities of a scale which will be interesting to us. "

    Haha.

    Translate - its not at all clear how it would work on 360 (what with people already paying for live) and PS3 has neither the infrastructure or the install base to make it viable.

  • kangarootoo #19 5 years ago

    "Online console gaming is still in its very early stages, and it needs to be developed further to provide opportunities of a scale which will be interesting to us."

    Read as.

    "Not enough console players care about MMOs yet".

  • spongebob #20 5 years ago

    Yeah, we don't need WoW for the consoles. Diablo we might need on the other hand. Or maybe some truly innovative MMORPG for a change. One that is not in a fantasy setting, perhaps?

  • space_ace #21 5 years ago

    pc and mac! :p

  • Lov3 #22 5 years ago

    "Online console gaming is still in its very early stages, and it needs to be developed further to provide opportunities of a scale which will be interesting to us."

    I can't marry this statement with the Xbox Live gold experience. Their unified online service is shockingly good, especially compared to microsoft passport for PC, and all that crap.

    The potential market for WoW on Xbox numbers around 4 million Gold subscribers, more if you don't require Gold to play their game (like FFXI, which bypasses Live altogether). On the other hand, how many people buy macs to play games? I honestly doubt it's even half this number. There's something going on here that isn't being said, and I imagine that something is being forced to redesign WoW so it works without a keyboard and mouse, or some disagreement with Microsoft about royalties on their Xbox platform. The interviewer needed to ask some more probing questions about that, in my opinion,

  • InfiniteFury #23 5 years ago

    I read a more indepth interview with a WoW technical dude the other day saying one of the main reasons they can't port to consoles is they need to be able to hotfix bugs and roll out code immediately rather than going through Microsoft or Sony's horrendous certification process which takes weeks/months.

    Microsoft are understandably unwilling to open up their network to anyone and Blizzard (equally understandably) don't want to release a game they can't manage from a technical standing.

    Edit - oh wait, I meant they're so busy scrubbing their arse with fistfuls of cash they've forgotten teh gamerz lozls
    Edited by InfiniteFury at 06/02/07 @ 20:07

  • OfficialBlue #24 5 years ago

    PS3 u know you want to lol!!!!!!!!!!

  • rommy667 #25 5 years ago

    Thank god WOW is the crap ppl paying $ every month after buying the game LOL who would want such crap on a great concole like 360?

  • kangarootoo #26 5 years ago

    @Lov3

    XBLive might have an installed based of 4m, but truth is only a small percentage of that base care about MMOs. The 360 ownership demographic is not overall an MMO centric one. GEoW and similar is far more their (generally speaking) bag, as we have seen. Currently, its just not worth the cash or structure for Blizzard to bother.

  • kangarootoo #27 5 years ago

    @rommy667

    Here is a free . for you to use as you see fit in future posts. You can thank me later.

  • NegativeZero #28 5 years ago

    While WoW has had 8 million unique subscribers, you're kidding yourself if you think all of them still play the game. Myself I gave up after a month or two because I found it mindlessly repetitive. I imagine you'll find that there's more like 2-3 million that are actually paying and playing regularly still, not 8 million.

  • zendragon #29 5 years ago

    For each one of you that quits there is another one that comes hence the 8 million constantly (and growing still).

    Blizzard in consoles hah hah ah. They take forever to develop a game. That console's lifetime would be over before yet another delayed release. Besides their games remain popular for an insane amout of time longer than most consoles lifetime.
    They don't need to share $€ with Mcsft or Sony.

    These days a successful developer needs to come out regularly to say that it doesn't have plans to go to console!!!

  • peterfll #30 5 years ago

    Doesn't anyone else think he is just another one of those elitist "teh PC is the best" people?

    Personally I think he talks a load of old bollocks.

  • stevencole7 #31 5 years ago

    GOOD!!! DONT WONT THAT RUBBISH!!

  • jonsaan #32 5 years ago

    How about the original warcraft for Live Arcade. Thanks.

  • spaceman #33 5 years ago

    george roper, you have absolutely no idea what your talking about.

  • Wite_Noiz #34 5 years ago

    "it definitely won't be seeing the light of day on Xbox 360 or PS3."

    So... still hope for the Wii crowd, then? ;)

  • miiiguel #35 5 years ago

    office desk gaming sux.

  • George-Roper #36 5 years ago

    @spaceman

    Why's that then?