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No WoW for the 360

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the azeroth-less dept.

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."

8 of 132 comments (clear)

  1. Queuecraft by pjh3000 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Considering the server problems they've been having - http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/01/ 1519225 - I don't think World of Queuecraft could handle the millions of Xbox 360 players.

    1. Re:Queuecraft by guice · · Score: 3, Informative

      Queuecraft hurdle is hoping to be alleviated by April. They've recently built a very large rearchitecture of servers which they're going to be putting live for the 1.10 testing phases and hoping to hit the live servers with the 1.10 patch. Rumor has it they are suppose to handle 2-3x the number of users on the current systems.

  2. Re:Well, DUH by pjh3000 · · Score: 3, Informative

    The Xbox 360 has support for mice and keyboards. Just plug them into the USB ports on the front or back.

  3. With 6 million+ active subscribers... by CaseM · · Score: 4, Insightful

    as told here, is there any doubt that porting WoW to the 360 would be a waste of time? When you have 6 million paying subscribers, you're already exceeded your goals by your wildest imaginations and it probably wouldn't be a sound financial investment given the technical hurdles and (relatively) small install-base for the 360.

    And, yes, you can use a keyboard with the 360, so this is not one of them.

  4. Re:Well, DUH by Onan · · Score: 4, Funny

    I'm not so sure. If you just bound a few buttons to pasting in "lol", "nub", "wtf", and "hax!", I think it would be sadly difficult to distinguish from most existing players.

  5. Re:Well, DUH by Lewisham · · Score: 4, Funny

    d00d, i loled. for realz!!!ELEVEN11

    Can you imagine Xbox Live smacktalking 13 year old's combined with Barrens chat? Surely that would be the most offensive place in the whole world.

    It would make your ears bleed.

  6. Waste of Time by panthro · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Here's the potential market -- people who:

    • Own an XBOX 360
    • Have a keyboard and mouse for their XBOX 360
    • Can connect to the Internet on their XBOX 360
    • Play RPGs and want to play WoW
    • Don't already play WoW on their PC

    That's a pretty small market, considering there are only 1.75 million XBOX 360s sold, and the original XBOX sold 25 million units. Knock off the vast majority of that already slim market if the expectation is that they will pay for XBOX 360 Live and Blizzard's monthly fee (I'm sure they wouldn't do this, but how else would it work?). Complete waste of Blizzard's resources.

    --
    If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
  7. Build a WoW IM Client already by Swanktastic · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If Blizzard really wanted to keep folks hooked, they'd just build an IM client for subscribers. For those of us with jobs, it be a great way to stay unproductive at work. I'd wager it's the social aspects of guilds that keep folks subscribing over the years.