No WoW on consoles

From Industrygamers

Massively multiplayer games continue to thrive on PCs, but the industry has yet to truly see an MMO take off on a console. There may be some attempts soon with games like APB or Champions Online (or Sony Online Entertainment's games coming to PS3), but there's a reason that MMOs are not really at home on consoles, Rob Pardo, Blizzard's executive vp of game design, recently explained as part of a larger exclusive interview with IndustryGamers.


Might we see WoW on a console one of these days?

"...there's a lot of challenges. I'd say challenge #1 is the input device. So if you're going to port a game like WoW how does that work? Do you ship a keyboard and a mouse? Do you try to make a game that [adapts] to all the different controls and buttons? That's a porting issue. The bigger issue would be things like hard drives. I think WoW now is about 10 gigs and we're always pushing out more content. That's something cloud computing could eventually solve, but in the current generation of consoles that's a lot to deal with. You'd have to eat almost the entire hard drive, and there are Xbox consoles [sold to consumers] that don't have hard drives. So that's a big issue," Pardo commented.

He continued, "Another big issue is how to actually do patches because the certification process is pretty arduous to do that. I know that's something Microsoft is trying to work out so you can do more updates and the certification process is faster, but it's not going to be nearly as fast as we can do it. We just put it through our QA department and upload to our servers. ... Then, the other big issue is the business model. Right now, Microsoft and Sony charge platform fees for retail, but if you do an MMO there and it's subscription-based, they're going to want a cut of the subscription revenue too, and so that becomes a hurdle. So there's definitely a lot of hurdles right now for doing MMOs on a console, but it all can be overcome and I think in the next generation of consoles it'll be much easier."

Pardo also did confirm with us that Microsoft has been asking Blizzard for advice in the MMO area, but for what project (if it's even one that's been announced yet) we don't know. "Microsoft has shown us some stuff they have in development and they asked us our opinion," he noted.

Ultimately, we feel that MMOs will start to become commonplace on consoles. The online networks are already there with Xbox Live and PlayStation Network. It's just a matter of designing with consoles in mind and giving the audience what it wants.