Activision Bliizzard's Rob Pardo has been speaking about developing MMOs (yes, you World of Warcraft) for console. As ever, he's not impressed with the idea.
Aside from control devices (do you ship with a keyboard and mouse?) and hard disk space (WoW is about 10Gb), the business model concerns him.
"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."
This casts into sharp focus ideas that Blizzard is co-creating an MMO with Microsoft for Xbox 360, as some reports had hoped for based on this quote, "Microsoft has shown us some stuff they have in development and they asked us our opinion about it – that's all that was. "
Read the full interview here.
Aside from control devices (do you ship with a keyboard and mouse?) and hard disk space (WoW is about 10Gb), the business model concerns him.
"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."
This casts into sharp focus ideas that Blizzard is co-creating an MMO with Microsoft for Xbox 360, as some reports had hoped for based on this quote, "Microsoft has shown us some stuff they have in development and they asked us our opinion about it – that's all that was. "
Read the full interview here.
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