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Summary: Late last week, employees
of the Red Rock Casino Resort Spa were taking down the signs and
stands from the three-day DICE video game summit. They were
packing up the framed art from the Into the Pixel exhibition.
They were dismantling the show.
The website of mtv released the details of WoW Mobile.
LAS VEGAS. Late last week, employees of the Red Rock Casino
Resort Spa were taking down the signs and stands from the
three-day DICE video game summit. They were packing up the
framed art from the Into the Pixel exhibition. They were
dismantling the show.
But sitting in one of the hallways amid this activity, Frank
Pearce, co-founder of Blizzard Entertainment, was revealing
hopes and plans for things his company might build. One of those
plans would, in a manner of speaking, put "World of Warcraft" on
cell phones. There were other bold notions too.
Pearce has a deep voice, shaved head and goatee, a video game
developer not unlike "Stone Cold" Steve Austin in look, if not
in as surly a demeanor. He's the executive vice president of
product development at Blizzard, where work has begun on some
major things, such as a "World of Warcraft" expansion; "StarCraft
II," a sequel to a game that has become a national pastime in
South Korea; and some new massively multiplayer games, which the
world first learned about when a job post for work on a next-gen
MMO was posted on Blizzard's Web site last year. About that job
post: "That was not by accident," Pearce told MTV News. "We have
to figure out what's next for Blizzard after 'World of Warcraft,'
and we have to get the best people in the industry that we can
get helping us figure that out."
In the biggest surprise of his conversation with MTV News,
mentioned right before the banging and clanging of the
conference's tear-down overwhelmed the interview and forced a
relocation outside, Pearce confirmed that a very small team in
Blizzard just might be creating a slice of "World of Warcraft"
for cell phones.
The Blizzard mobile team is new and not something Pearce had
discussed publicly before. "They just started that endeavor," he
said. "We've only got a couple of people right now. I don't
think we're looking at it as something like, 'We're going to
make mobile games.' We want to look at the mobile devices as
something we can use to enhance the experience of our existing
games. So we're going to have to look at ways to use the mobile
device to enhance their 'World of Warcraft' experience. We'll
see what kind of applications we can come up with."
Pearce said he was excited and then cut himself off. Maybe it
was too soon to say more? But he couldn't resist and reached
into his pocket for his BlackBerry. He produced it, looked at
the screen and started dreaming out loud: "I have an application
on my BlackBerry. It's a Google app called Google Chat. It's an
IM client, and it's really cool. So as an example, one thing I
think would be really cool and whether we're going to be able to
do this, I don't know, but it would be really cool is if we
could have a client on your mobile device like that that hooks
you into your guild chat in the game. That would be really cool.
Or the ability to view your in-game mail or view your in-game
auctions. We probably wouldn't allow you to actually buy or sell
via the mobile device, but you could certainly monitor."
So he didn't mean the current 10 million subscribers to "WoW"
would be able to play their favorite game on their cell phones.
But why couldn't they buy and sell items through it? "We would
want you to be logged in for that," Pearce replied. "We would
have to look at our infrastructure and see if that would have a
notable impact on the experience. There's a lot of
considerations we'd have to look at."
Dreaming up things and building things and then maybe releasing
them that's what every game developer does, or at least wants to
do. Few studios can spend the money and take the time that
Blizzard can. Blizzard has cachet and leverage. When games
publisher Activision announced plans last year to merge with
Blizzard parent company Vivendi Games, the new company name was
declared to be not Activision-Vivendi, but Activision Blizzard.
That's sway.!
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