http://f13.net/?itemid=167 wrote:Vivendi Universal Games gave a presentation to Wall Street today. Too much to report on everything said, but the big one was:
"All Blizzard franchises will become MMOGs."
All. They claim they have a model now to develop an MMOG in 3 years for $50 million. WoW cost 50 million euros and took 4 1/2 years.
They have bifurcated the MMOG market into two parts: long session games (more than two hours per session) and short session games (less than two hour sessions.) They will also be rolling out a bunch of short session games under the Sierra Online brand. An example is FreeStyle, a pick-up basketball online game scheduled for 2007 release. No details on pricing model for the short session games.
Shiznitz sent this in this morning and all I can say is good for them. Apparently splitting what will probably end up as 8-10 million customers (maybe more, asian gamers are unpredictable about things like STARCRAFT) across 3 games isn't a concern to them. They're lucky stock brokers know nothing about video games.
I'm not much for Blizzards games - but I know some of you are. (and yes, I have actually played WoW now..I played the 10 day trial...didnt like it).
Apparently this is a load of BS, for the time being at least. Blizzard have said they have absolutely no plans for anymore MMOGs atm. Someone said it could be differences between Blizzards business plan and Vivendi's but ultimately it's down to Blizzard and right now, they say no!
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why would blizzard work on another mmorpg with their current golden calf?
edit: i actually liked WoW...for a 2-3 months, just because it was new..once you know the game a bit better, you can't go around the fact it's very imbalanced crap.
" wrote:After playing zupiler and repeatedly getting beat by him (bastard)
Who knows - it might just be that they spoke too soon without the authority to do so and now they try to cover it up (wouldnt be the first time things like that have happened)....but its proberbly more likely that it was just a misunderstanding.
Well as the Blizzard guy said, they've lost a lot of artists since WoW was released, so it sounds like they're struggling to keep up the staff for new content, let alone start a whole new MMOG...
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