Can Blizzard top itself with 'StarCraft II?'

What expansions are planned for Battle.net?

We have a lot of ideas. I’m really excited about the Battle.net stuff but we’re planning on releasing a lot of that information later down the line.

We’ve learned a lot from “Warcraft III,” about automated matchmaking and automated tournaments and ladder systems. We want to add to that. We want to make the game more exciting and enticing for spectators to watch so we have a lot of feature improvements planned there. We believe a lot in our user-made map and mod community and want to integrate that better into Battle.net.

How will you attempt to appeal to both the casual player versus the competitive player?

We’ve always tried to appeal to both. I’ve done talks on it, and I even have this funny way of putting it called “the doughnut theory:” The hole of the doughnut is your core market and the main donut itself is the casual market. We design for doughnut hole first. It’s more difficult to design for [the core market] in a lot of ways — you can’t make decisions that don’t hold up over 500 hours of gameplay.

In “StarCraft II,” we started on the multiplayer game first and a lot of that is really designed for that core market. Then we start making the game acceptable to the casual market. A lot of times, casual players do want to play a lot of the same stuff that the core players do, but the content is beyond them — there’s not an easy way for them to learn the game and slowly advance their skills. We really focus a lot on that.

Given the popularity of “WoW,” do you have any plans to go to subscription model with “StarCraft II” or any subsequent releases?

We’re going to do what’s right for the game. We made “WoW” to be a subscription game from the very beginning. With “StarCraft II” it’s probably going to follow more of a box model. But we’ll decide more of that stuff down the line.

Battle.net is pretty expensive to maintain, isn’t it?

It’s not as expensive as “WoW” to maintain! (Laughs)

Will any familiar characters from “StarCraft” and “Brood Wars” be returning to "StarCraft II?"

Yes. The storyline will follow the main story arc that we left off in “Brood Wars,” just a couple of years after that. You can certainly expect to see many of the returning characters.

But no fourth race?

No fourth race. We talked a lot about it. We ultimately decided we wanted to focus on the three races we had.

Will Blizzard remain a PC developer?

I don’t know. If you talk to our biz guys, they like the PC for a lot of reasons, but we don’t make our decisions based entirely on business or even primarily on business. We make our decisions based on the games we want to make. After that point, we make the decision on [what system] that game is going to live. And up to this point, the games we wanted to make worked best on the PC.

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