More WoW, Major 2007 Announcement for Blizzard

Blizzard has announced their intention to follow up this year's Burning Crusade expansion with a new World of Warcraft add-on every year. While not terribly surprising, they have also announced that they're working on a major announcement for next year. Consensus seems to be that it will likely be another Starcraft game, given comments by Blizzard COO Paul Sams. "StarCraft is my absolutely favorite game of all time. As you probably already know, there is no doubt that we will continue the StarCraft and Diablo franchise, and trust me, I will be the happiest person in the world when we announce StarCraft 2."

Comments

Geez, and this is news?

[theRhinoceros]

Wow. An announcement that there will be an announcement next year about a game that likely will not come out for a while after that, barring no (ahem) delays. Anything to get hits on a blog/AdSense clicks, right?

Re:Geez, and this is news?

[jackbird]

With a billion a year in WoW subscriptions, I think retail Xmas sales are icing on the cake to Blizzard.

Re:Geez, and this is news?

[happyemoticon]

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

San Francisco, Calif., August 22, 2006: Happyemoticon today disclosed breaking news on behalf of Channel 2 that sometime, possibly within the year, there would be breaking news of titanic proportions reported by Channel 2.

"We cannot overstate the magnitude of this 'newsish' report," Happyemoticon stated, his jowls flapping manically with the stress, "Although none of our reporters have yet been tasked with the assignment of finding this 'news,' current research by the boys in R&D suggests that we're onto something. We're not ready to disclose what this 'something' is, but rest assured, when we ascertain what this news is, the release of the news that our breaking news is ascertained will certainly be big news. Really big. News."

A variety of claims and speculation have emerged as people try to piece together facts in an attempt to determine what the news referred to by this news report is referring to, from aliens to typhoons to the Rapture, many of them in turn framed as news stories. Jim Joebob, a news theorist working for News Corporation (parent company of Fox Channel 2), theorizes that the news' news may be so new it hasn't even happened yet. "A contact in their lab mentioned they had a perpetual random number generator which they use to 'sniff out' incoming stories, by sensing local anomalies in causality as evinced by the frequency of 1 or 0. I am sure of the integrity of this device, as it is apparently powered by a hamster, gerbil, or some other rodent, known to be extremely high sources of entropy."

"Apparently for the last two weeks," he continued, "they've been coming up with nothing but 1/2. If this hearsay news is news, then there should even be a news story about the news flibbilityblah."

Ladies and gentlemen..

[Rob T Firefly]

I have an important announcement to make...

..and that is next year, I shall make an important announcement.

*bow*
Thank you, thank you ladies and gentlemen, you're far too kind. I'd like to thank you all for being here today, I'd like to thank Rob Malda and everyone else who made this possible, and I'd like to thank my mom.
*bow*
Thank you all for your time, please enjoy the cocktails.

We've Heard This Before

[Blakey Rat]

They also promised that they'd release a patch every month for the at least the first year when the game came out, and we've seen how they've hit that goal. They also announced that WOW was a game intended to make casual players happy, before adding in that "grade-on-a-curve" honor system that casual players can't possibly excel at. Not that I have anything against Blizzard, but considering what's happened in the past, I would wait to get excited until it actually does happen. In fact... that applies to pretty much all of these press releases.

-1, DMCA-wielding jackbooted thugs.

[base3]

Remember bnetd, boycott Blizzard/Vivendi.

Re:-1, DMCA-wielding jackbooted thugs.

[base3]

Just because you happened to use it to avoid paying for the game doesn't mean that the people who were getting together on their own servers using the software they paid for were all committing copyright infringement. Blizzard used an unconstitutional law to persecute an open source project, and they will never see another dime from me. Unfortunately, there are plenty of sheep unwilling to vote against their war on freedom with their wallets.

Wow churn

[BrookHarty]

I've been playing since beta, and checking the stats on my server, the number of total online players have been going down hill for the last year.

Many of the large guilds are gone, they dont play as much, and people just pop on to talk to friends.

I cant wait until the expansion when they disconnect honor/rank from pvp'ing and allow smaller groups for instances. Non-instance pvp, The casual player suffers from wow's (l33t guild) attitude.

I think many people are just paying but not playing, soon people will finally just cancel the accounts.

Ob. Futurama Quote

[Anonymous Coward]

Hermes: Sweet gorilla of Manila! A letter from the Central Bureaucracy!

[Hermes takes a piece of paper out of the red tube.] Attention, Hermes Conrad: You are about to receive a letter from the Central Bureaucracy.

[Another red tube appears and Hermes takes a piece of paper out of.] My God! It's from the Central Bureaucracy!

Re:If they don't release on the Wii, I won't play

[freshman_a]

Sorry, Blizzard, I loved Starcraft I and II, Diablo I and II, but ..

So... you loved their PC games, including one that never existed (perhaps you mean StarCraft: Brood Wars, not Starcraft II?), but you will only buy the game they have yet to announce if they release it on a system that has yet to be released and you have yet to actually play?

Please tell me there is some sort of sarcasm or humor that I'm missing...