Blizzard Makes Excuses for No World of Warcraft on Consoles

In an interview with IndustryGamers, Rob Pardo (Executive Vice President of Game Design at Blizzard Entertainment) states the reasons that Blizzard has yet to port the massively successful World of Warcraft to the current generation gaming consoles. We pick on his arguments shortly after.

“I’d say challenge number one 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 to all the different controls and buttons? That’s a porting issue.”

First, most every current generation console supports either USB or Bluetooth enabled mice and keyboards. Sure, you might be concerned that you’ll alienate some gamers by requiring the user to buy additional peripherals, but them’s the breaks when it comes to console gaming. He then continues (and in a slightly contradictory statement) to the concerns of console hard drive space.

“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 that don’t have hard drives. So that’s a big issue,”

True, there might not be Xbox 360s that don’t have HDDs in them, but I can tell you one console that ALWAYS comes with a Hard Drive…the PS3. Did the lack of a hard-drive stop Sony and Square from releasing Final Fantasy XI to the PS2, PS3, and Xbox 360? Hell no, they got off their asses and sold a product and are still reaping the benefits.

The bottom line here is this. Blizzard, you need to quit making excuses and get to makin’ us gamers a port of WoW for the consoles (which I won’t play anyways). You’re ignoring a huge profit sector by not doing anything on consoles…then again you do have about 12 million users all paying a monthly fee, you’ll be alright I’m sure. Besides, we all remember the last time you tried to port something to the consoles…

by Alan Smithee

I sit upon my throne as the owner/shogun of this site, WatchPlayRead. But it wasn't always so. I too have had blogspots, I've done other community blogs, I've even written professionally for other sites out there...yet none of them provided the content I had a real passion for. It is then that I became tired of being a small cog in a big machine, and of writing about nothing but game news after game news article and the periphery that comes from such schlock, like knowing who Michael Pachter and Bobby Kotick are. I decided to start MediaWhoreNetwork.com and ran up my post count there for about 2 years, commenting about any and everything that I wanted to. I even started a weekly podcast that I feel has come into its own. It wasn't until earlier this year that I realized that having the word "whore" in your URL might be a bit limiting to my potential audience. I then made the website and its branding move over to WatchPlayRead.com.

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