IndustryGamers: It seems that the MMO space has been heavily moving in the free-to-play, micro-transaction supported direction, especially in Asia, but World of Warcraft has been incredibly successful with the traditional subscription model. Is there any thinking at Blizzard about creating something that's free-to-play?
Rob Pardo... seen here sitting on his MMO throne
Rob Pardo: When we create games, we create a game and then we decide on the business model that makes sense for that game. We don't do it in reverse. So whatever game we make next, it's not going to be like “Let's make a free-to-play game.” It's going to be, “What's the game we want to make?” Then we'll start thinking about how we want to monetize it. Will it be subscription based or free-to-play? I don't know yet.
IG: Right, it just seems like one of those trends that Blizzard, as an online leader, can't ignore. Subscriptions are working great right now, but what about the future?
RP: Trends are trends; they aren't necessarily mandates. For every trend you look at, there's always the exception too. I don't know if I subscribe to the notion that everything's going to be a free-to-play game in the future. I don't think that's true at all. With digital distribution, cloud computing... if anything there's going to be more business models.
IG: We've yet to see a blockbuster MMO take off in the console space. Sony Online Entertainment is going to be bringing its MMOs to the PS3. What about Blizzard? You said you talked with Microsoft?
RP: Microsoft has shown us some stuff they have in development and they asked us our opinion about it – that's all that was. But as far as MMOs on consoles, there's a lot of challenges. I'd say challenge #1 is the input device. So if you're going to port a game like WoW how does that work? Do you ship a keyboard and a mouse? Do you try to make a game that [adapts] to all the different controls and buttons? That's a porting issue. The bigger issue would be things like hard drives. I think WoW now is about 10 gigs and we're always pushing out more content. That's something cloud computing could eventually solve, but in the current generation of consoles that's a lot to deal with. You'd have to eat almost the entire hard drive, and there are Xbox consoles [sold to consumers] that don't have hard drives. So that's a big issue.
Another big issue is how to actually do patches because the certification process is pretty arduous to do that. I know that's something Microsoft is trying to work out so you can do more updates and the certification process is faster, but it's not going to be nearly as fast as we can do it. We just put it through our QA department and upload to our servers. ... Then, the other big issue is the business model. Right now, Microsoft and Sony charge platform fees for retail, but if you do an MMO there and it's subscription-based, they're going to want a cut of the subscription revenue too, and so that becomes a hurdle. So there's definitely a lot of hurdles right now for doing MMOs on a console, but it all can be overcome and I think in the next generation of consoles it'll be much easier.
IG: Looking at online games like WoW, which have vast user bases, the virtual communities are almost like countries or states unto themselves. In fact, I believe some social scientists said the populations were large enough to justify the online social interactions in the games. How much do you pay attention to the social nature of WoW? What have you observed or learned from it?
RP: That's kind of a large question! I guess what I'd say is we observe the social part of it as it relates to game design and gameplay. We're not social scientists at Blizzard. There's definitely lots of academic researchers out there that are starting to study MMOs more and more... but as far as what we've learned, it's generally more applicable to [helping us decide] what type of content to bring out and how to enable to interact better to further their gaming experience. So it's more about observing “how do people like to play the game, how do they interact, and what kinds of things should we be designing for to allow them to enjoy the game more?”
