No WoW for the 360

Next Generation reports that Blizzard COO Paul Sims has dispelled any ideas that their hit MMOG would appear on the Xbox 360. From the article: "WoW is built as a PC gaming experience. Porting PC games to console often compromises games, and we'd never allow the WoW gameplay experience to suffer ... Also, it's important to us that the entire player base is able to play together. Microsoft's Xbox Live architecture is very protected from all sorts of outside influence, so shared play between 360 and PC owners would be very tough. We wouldn't even consider WoW for 360 unless we could overcome that hurdle."

Comments

Re:What exactly is this hurdle Blizzard speaks of?

[tukkayoot]

The thing about Final Fantasy XI is that the user interface sucks, hard ... and I think a large part of that sucking has to do with the fact that you can't create an interface that is as robust or customizable on the console as you can for the PC.

This isn't a problem if you have a servicable but necessarily somewhat poor console interface, while allowing PC players to enjoy all of the benefits of having a more powerful UI ... that isn't the route Square Enix has chosen to take, though, and it's one of the things that alienated me and ultimately drove me away from Final Fantasy XI. I suppose they don't want to give an "advantage" to PC users that console users don't have. Maybe Blizzard has similar reservations, but they don't have the option of crippling their existing game because it'd mean losing lots of customers.

And just because Square-Enix has shown that interoperability is possible, it doesn't mean it was easy for them, and this was a game that was created from the ground up to be playable on a PS2. Porting a game that was designed for the PC to a console would impose some significant new challenges, I would assume.

Re:Queuecraft

[east coast]

The latest figure I can find that's not from Joe's Weblog puts the figures around 1.5 million in late january.

With this much of a slump in projected sales you may soon get a free XBox 360 with the purchase of a carton of Camel Lights.

Gates is certainly limping away from this one like a dog that has been given a savage beating by a drunk on some high power amphetamines.