While our meeting with Blizzard Chief Operating Officer Paul Sams today at the German Games Convention mainly focused on The Burning Crusade, the upcoming expansion for World of Warcraft, we did ask him about what the future holds in store for Blizzard, and specifically about StarCraft 2.
"StarCraft is my absolutely favorite game of all time," Sams told us. "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."
While Sams wasn"t ready to spill the beans just yet, he did say Blizzard "will have a major product announcement in 2007," and that Blizzard was currently working on at least three other unannounced titles at the moment.
In terms of what these games could be, we asked if they would fall in line with the major success Blizzard has had with World of Warcraft. "I want to be clear that we"re not just content to be an MMO company," Sams explained. "Some other companies get into the role of making just MMOs, but Blizzard lets the developers pick what they want to work on, and it"s not all MMOs."
When asked about StarCraft: Ghost, Sams said that it was on indefinite hold, but that Blizzard wasn"t averse to exploring further console development in the future. "We"ve been up to MS and they"ve been at our office talking about Vista and 360," Sams said, "and we"re certainly excited about some of the tools they have to offer in the console world as well as with Vista and DirectX 10. However, with our own online gaming service, we"re going to pick and choose what we want to use; we"re going to protect Battle.net and make sure Battle.net ranks supreme."