Blizzard Entertainment Interviews

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Written by Brother None on March 8th, 2011

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"I see World of Warcraft as having many more years in front of it," Sams forecast. "We have over 12 million subscribers. We're continuing to grow and we feel very good about them. We're going to continue to support that product for many, many years to come."

"As it relates to that other [MMO], we think that it's going to be very impactful in our industry and, we hope, very impactful to the world," Sams continued. "We think that that will be, after Diablo III, the next big thing from us. The thing that we hope will happen is that it will not stop World of Warcraft but we believe will eclipse it."

VB: I remember when you folks talked at the Dice Summit about how many games Blizzard had developed by decided not to ship over the years. That said a lot about your stance on quality control.

PS: There is a huge number of those games.

VB: You are brutal on yourselves that way.

PS: I will tell you something. When you look at our brand, players support us and trust us. From our perspective, you get very few opportunities to build that trust, to keep that trust, and if you deliver a game that does not meet their expectations and it's just okay, it's acceptable, well then you breach that trust. We are very thankful to have the players that support us. They consistently vote with their pocket books that we are fulfilling their expectations and their wants and dreams as it relates to games. And we are very mindful about what those people feel about us, what they think about our games and whether or not we've addressed their wants and needs. We are very connected with them. We've got a few thousand customer service people. I think we have the largest service group of any video game company in the world.

VB: How many developers do you have?

PS: It's less than 1,000 of the 5,000 who are in development. The rest are service as well as headquarters and the other functions that you anticipate like in PR. So we have the largest number of community team members of any game company out there. We listen to our players intently, and we really try to be focused on delivering what they are asking for. We are on the forums, we read every post, we get tons of petitions and contacts. All of those pieces of information come in we break down to bite-sized actionable chunks. We deliver this intelligence to the applicable people so they can effectively address concerns and issues quickly. We do make mistakes, and we hope we learn from them faster.

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