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Rob Pardo talks about free WoW, Starcraft, Activision
Rob Pardo, SVP of game design at Blizzard, gave the keynote speech at the Game Developer's Conference held in Paris this week. Here are some WoW-related tidbits from his talk and the Q&A session held afterward.About WoW WoW was first conceived as free to play, being supported by advertising. However, the non-subscription business model couldn't support Blizzard's goals for the game. Pardo suggested that Blizzard approached the MMO genre "very naively, or else we might not have done it." He once hired a WoW player who sent him a 16-page diatribe about the game because, even though the guy was wrong, "he was passionate" about improving the game. About Starcraft 2 Blizzard has no problem putting intellectual properties on hold for a while, hence the wait for a Starcraft game. Pardo says that they wanted to make a real-time strategy game but were "tired of green-skinned orcs" so they moved away from Warcraft to Starcraft. Starcraft 2 is at a playable stage in its development and he's having a lot of fun with it. Read more about Rob Pardo's keynote speech.
