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Up until recently, the words “Blizzard” and “console” were rarely found in the same sentence. Sure, a couple of games made it into the hands of console gamers (StarCraft 64, Warcraft II), but the developer has been primarily focused on PC gaming for over two decades. However, with Diablo III just around the corner, that might be about to change. Jay Wilson sat down with Game Informer this week and discussed some of the challenges that breaking into the console market brings. “We don’t want to port it,” Wilson said. “We want to build it for console. There’s a key difference. Certainly, a lot of things get brought over, but a port is trying to take a PC game and graft it onto a console. Our goal is to make a game that feels like it’s natively made for a console. If we make it, we want it to feel like a Blizzard game and that we built it for that platform from the ground up.” 
“It’s obviously because we’ve made only PC games for the last 15 years, but there’s a perception, I think, that Blizzard is anti-console, and that’s absolutely not the case,” said J. Allen Brack, a member of the World of Warcraft team. “We just want to make the right game for the right platform. Think about StarCraft II. 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.” Personally, I think Diablo III would be the perfect game for Blizzard to make the transition into the console market. Console gamers are already very familiar with the action role-playing genre, so Blizzard’s player base would increase exponentially, but Blizzard rarely makes decisions just to rake in money. If they did, we would have seen a console game 10 years ago, and they’d find a way to get their games out on schedule. By Josh Engen |