World of Warcraft on the 360? ‘Fraid not…
Earlier, we reported about MS’ Peter Moore‘s take on MMOs making a transition to the Xbox 360. He said that “there obviously is a resurgence driven by ‘WOW’ (World of Warcraft), and we love it because it’s driving PC adoption. The question is, is it a console experience? They’ve never really done tremendously well on the consoles. There’s a lot of stuff you need to do.”
Mr. Moore also said the demands of MMOs in consoles, “the content constantly needs to be refreshed. There’s patches, there’s updates. We could do it … but it’s always been a keyboard-and-mouse, kind of lean-in experience. You look at ‘Guild Wars,’ you look at ‘WOW,’ obviously. … Now, we’re going to an MMO with Marvel. I think that is a nice bridge because it’s familiar characters and a familiar environment, a kind of comic-book look and feel. But for a lot of people, still, MMOs are a little too intense and a little geeky at times (to make sense for a console).”
From that alone, it seems that WoW and other MMOs are not yet a good fit for the consoles…for now. And now, it was Blizzard‘s turn to say for the nth time that “no, we are not making Warcraft for Xbox 360″. This again was caused by a Vivendi presentation wherein the WoW publisher and official rights-holder announced that all future Blizzard games would be massively multiplayer online games.
The denial continued with Blizzard saying that “we do not currently have any MMO development plans beyond the upcoming expansion for World of Warcraft…Furthermore, we don’t have any intentions to focus on only one genre or platform with our future games.” But you know what they say about rumors that don’t die down – if there’s smoke there’s a fire. It may not be true for now, but in the future, we’ll never know. Until then, we will keep you posted.
Via Xbox 360
Earlier, we reported about MS’ Peter Moore‘s take on MMOs making a transition to the Xbox 360. He said that “there obviously is a resurgence driven by ‘WOW’ (World of Warcraft), and we love it because it’s driving PC adoption. The question is, is it a console experience? They’ve never really done tremendously well on the consoles. There’s a lot of stuff you need to do.”
Mr. Moore also said the demands of MMOs in consoles, “the content constantly needs to be refreshed. There’s patches, there’s updates. We could do it … but it’s always been a keyboard-and-mouse, kind of lean-in experience. You look at ‘Guild Wars,’ you look at ‘WOW,’ obviously. … Now, we’re going to an MMO with Marvel. I think that is a nice bridge because it’s familiar characters and a familiar environment, a kind of comic-book look and feel. But for a lot of people, still, MMOs are a little too intense and a little geeky at times (to make sense for a console).”
From that alone, it seems that WoW and other MMOs are not yet a good fit for the consoles…for now. And now, it was Blizzard‘s turn to say for the nth time that “no, we are not making Warcraft for Xbox 360″. This again was caused by a Vivendi presentation wherein the WoW publisher and official rights-holder announced that all future Blizzard games would be massively multiplayer online games.
The denial continued with Blizzard saying that “we do not currently have any MMO development plans beyond the upcoming expansion for World of Warcraft…Furthermore, we don’t have any intentions to focus on only one genre or platform with our future games.” But you know what they say about rumors that don’t die down – if there’s smoke there’s a fire. It may not be true for now, but in the future, we’ll never know. Until then, we will keep you posted.
Via Xbox 360