ANAHEIM – The final interview in my Blizzcon 2008 series is actually one of the first I conducted: A chat with Blizzard CEO and co-founder Mike Morhaime.
As Morhaime was utterly swamped throughout the convention, this chat is shorter than the three I posted earlier, but we do manage to cover a wide range of the company's current and future plans.
Gaming on the Mac, the Blizzard/Activision merger and the company's current slate of almost-guaranteed hit releases are all among the topics discussed, and we even briefly touch upon Blizzard's next MMO project.
For more from Blizzard's cadre of gaming industry luminaries, have a look at our recent interviews from Blizzcon 2008 with Rob Pardo, Blizzard's executive vice president of game design; J. Allen Brack, World of Warcraft lead producer; and Dustin Browder, StarCraft II lead designer.
Wired.com: First off, and I don’t know if I should be asking you this or the PR people, but do you know how many attendees you have here this year?
Mike Morhaime: We sold 15,000 tickets. So, 15,000, plus some amount of employees and press.
Wired.com: When I told my community, the greater Wired, um, "people," that I was going to be coming to Blizzcon they wanted to know ... a couple months ago we talked about the Activision merger ...
Morhaime: Yep.
Wired.com: ... You seemed really happy about it. Everything seemed to be working out pretty well, you seemed genuinely pleased about it, and not being, like, the “PR-business-diplomacy guy” ...
Morhaime: Sure. "PR-business-diplomacy guy?" [Laughter]
Wired.com: Are things still good?
Morhaime: Well, we’re about to have our very first launch using the combined sales force and everything. They are 100 percent behind the launch of Wrath of the Lich King, so things are looking very good from where we’re sitting.
Wired.com: Totally. And so what does that ... they’re a huge corporation. They’ve got tons of powers in the sales and retail arena. What exactly does them coming in and backing Wrath of the Lich King allow you guys to do that you wouldn’t be able to do before?
Morhaime: Good question. [Long pause]
What does it allow us to do ... ? Y’know, I don’t know if it allows us to do anything that we weren’t able to do before.
Wired.com: OK.
Morhaime: But hopefully it allows us to do everything better.
Wired.com: That makes sense. With this partnership with Activision and everyone seemingly very happy about everything, you guys, Blizzard, over the last couple years have been pulling your major presence out of the E3, the PAX, that kind of thing.
Morhaime: I think we were at PAX, weren’t we?
Blizzard PR representative Bob Colayco: Yeah, we had at a booth at PAX.
Wired.com: Yeah, you guys are, but you save your big announcements, your really big stuff, for your own events.
Morhaime: I think the big change is, there really is no ... E3 as it existed before doesn’t exist anymore.
Wired.com: True. If it did would you guys be there instead of holding Blizzcon?
Morhaime: Uh, no. [Laughter] I mean, Blizzcon is a great event for us. It’s a way that we can basically say “thank you” to our most passionate players, and it’s a great place for us to announce new things.
But, we do participate in other shows. We were just at Leipzig where we debuted the Wrath of the Lich King cinematic, so there are examples of that.
Wired.com: Are you guys ever going to have Activision popping up at Blizzcon? Or is that completely off on the side? Would it just not make any sense?
Morhaime: Blizzcon is a Blizzard show. It’s not an Activsion/Blizzard show.
Would it make sense? I think we’d have to look at the specific scenario. We actually had Guitar Hero at the Worldwide Invitational in connection with the “I Am Murloc” downloadable content.
Colayco: I think we have that here too.
Morhaime: Do we? I didn’t see it.
Colayco: I think so.
Morhaime: It might be here.
Colayco: But there’s so many giant halls that it might be tucked away somewhere.
Wired.com: You guys have three big games coming out in the theoretically near future: Diablo III, StarCraft II, and Wrath of the Lich King. Of those three games which one do you sit at home at night and worry “are you going to do this...?” and which one are you totally confident about? That it’s going to be an amazing hit?
Morhaime: OK ... Uh ... Probably, the one I’m most confident about is Wrath of the Lich King because its pretty much done.
That’s sorta the way it goes with Blizzard games: Until it’s done there’s always things to worry about, and to improve and so, we really haven't gone through that yet – you don’t really go through that until you get to beta ...
Wired.com: Which, is coming, when?
Morhaime: Don’t have a date yet.
Wired.com: Oh, alright.
Spore recently came out. It was the biggest PC release since ... you guys did whatever you released for the PC last ...
Morhaime: Burning Crusade.
Wired.com: There you go. And Spore took a lot of criticism from the media and from fans for its Digital Rights Management scheme. EA, with their last two releases: That and ...
Morhaime: What didn’t they like about it?
Wired.com: The system only allows you to install the game on three computers before it completely locks up and you have to call their customer service and get them to re-enable it.
Morhaime: OK.
Wired.com: Obviously DRM is kind of a hot-button issue with fans nowadays. What kind of Digital Rights Management scheme are you guys going to be using in StarCraft II and Diablo III?
Morhaime: Those are things we’re still evaluating, but we do wanna make it pretty easy for players to play the game, wherever they are.
Nowadays people have multiple systems. They shouldn't necessarily be able to play the game ... they shouldn’t be able to log in multiple times on as many computers as they have without buying multiple copies of the game.
Like, you can play WarCraft III, or World of Warcraft even, from multiple locations. I think you should be able to do that.
Wired.com: Mac support: I’ve got my MacBook here. I play all my games on this now. You guys have been, moreso than any other computer gaming company, have been really strongly behind the Mac as a gaming platform. All your games come out with PC and Mac versions on the same disc.
Morhaime: Yep.
Wired.com: Why?
Morhaime: [Laughter]
Wired.com: Why do you guys do that, and nobody else does?
Morhaime: Well, nobody else does because the Mac gaming market is substantially smaller than the PC gaming market, and it does take effort to support the Mac.
We have internal expertise in supporting the Mac. We’ve been doing it for a very long time, and we have the volume of interested players in our community that makes it important for us, I think, to continue supporting them.
Wired.com: I appreciate it, personally. It saves me a lot of hassle only having to carry around the one laptop.
I didn’t want to ask any of your other employees this when I was interviewing them, because I assumed that if they answered it honestly there would be a lot of wrath about it ...
Morhaime: [Laughter]
Wired.com: ... You guys have had a lot of job postings, things that hint at a “next-gen MMO.” It’s a “secret,” but it’s not a very well-kept secret. I’m not going to ask you to detail the game – because you’d say no – but, is it going to be ... are we looking at a World of Warcraft sequel or is it going to be something totally different?
Morhaime: I can answer that. It’s not going to be a World of Warcraft sequel.
Wired.com: Something totally different?
__
Morhaime:__ [Pause] It’s gonna be different.
Wired.com: Just “different?” Not “totally different?”
Morhame: Uh ... that’s starting to get into details where I’d have to start explaining things.
All: [Laughter]
Morhaime: ... So let’s just say it’s going to be different and it’s not going to be a sequel to World of Warcraft. It will be different.
We’re not trying to replace World of Warcraft with this new MMO. We’re trying to create a different massively multiplayer experience, and hopefully World of Warcraft will still be going strong when that one is released.
Wired.com: Speaking of going strong, I was talking to ... I forget, but I was talking to somebody about it: World of Warcraft’s coming up on five years now. It’s obviously been very successful for you guys. How long is the plan to keep it going?
Is it until people no longer play it enough to make it profitable, or, after 10 years, are you guys just going to be like: “Ok, screw it. We’re gonna go work on something else?”
Morhaime: No. We definitely don’t have a deadline where “at this point we’re not going to support World of Warcraft.” We wanna support it as long as people want us to support it.
Y’know, a game like that, we have the ability to evolve that game in whatever way we choose to evolve it because basically everybody is connecting to our servers. We can patch, we can update, we can change, we can evolve. That’s completely within our ability to continue updating and keeping the game compelling.
Wired.com: This ties into my earlier Mac support idea: As you can see I’ve got an iPhone and it’s my favorite toy ever.
Morhaime: Yup!
Colayco: Oh yeah. [Shows me his iPhone]
Wired.com__:__ A lot of companies are branching out into iPhone gaming – EA for instance. Do you guys have any plans to go down that road?
Morhaime: At this stage ... we think the iPhone is a great gadget. At this stage, our interest is focused on “How we can use mobile devices to allow players to stay connected to the community?” We’re exploring what form that takes.
When you think about World of Warcraft as a social network, and you think about the future version of Battle.net as Blizzard’s social network, then you wanna stay connected to your social network.
Whether you’re in-game, whether you're out of game, whether you're at home, whether you're on the road. I think that, for us – that’s probably the first area that we would take advantage of mobile devices like the iPhone.
Wired.com: Speaking of future versions of Battle.net: Every time you guys release one of your big non-World of Warcraft games – the Diablos, the StarCrafts – a lot of upgrades come to Battle.net along with that. What can we expect from the future of Battle.net with StarCraft II and Diablo III coming out?
Morhaime: Yeah. We’re not talking too much about Battle.net yet. I think we’ll do a thing as we get closer.
At a high level we’re very committed to e-sports, we’re very committed to supporting the community. So, community features, e-sports features, and what shape that takes, I guess we can talk about later.
Wired.com: Fair enough, but there will be changes?
Morhaime: Yes. We are doing a ... basically taking Battle.net and doing an “upgrade” to the service for StarCraft.
Images courtesy Blizzard Entertainment
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