Morhaime: "I stopped predicting subscriber numbers a long time ago"

That's something we still talk a lot about at Blizzard - how do we make content faster? But we have to balance that with the quality side of the equation. We would have liked to have released Mists of Pandaria a little bit earlier but there were certain things about it that we wanted to spend some more time on. So we'll try again next time.

One of the things with Cataclysm that I don't think we got right was the difficulty curve. A lot of people hit a wall and found it frustrating. We made some adjustments over time but probably not quickly enough. There's a lot more variety of things to do with Mists of Pandaria. We spent a lot of our development time in Cataclysm overhauling the old world of the game and a lot of people didn't even experience some of the changes we made going right to the end game.

Yes, actually. We think there's a lot in this expansion. And we've been evolving World of Warcraft over time to make it more accessible to new players. The most important thing for us is to make something that's appealing to our current players. Hopefully we'll win back some players that may have left. And if people enjoy it enough I think they'll tell their friends.

I stopped predicting subscriber numbers a long time ago, especially publicly. I think we've got a very solid expansion here and looking forward to hearing what our players think.

It's something that a lot of MMOs struggle with. Probably if they had to do it over again they might have held the game over and worked on the end game content a bit more. One of the things people will notice with Mists of Pandaria in comparison to our other expansions is the variety of things there are to do; it will feel like a bigger, meatier expansion compared to Cataclysm.

Oh, there are definitely things we would do differently. It would be so helpful in advance to know how many people are going to want to play a game. Because we could plan things out a lot better: we can make sure we have enough capacity, we can buy the hardware that we need. The Diablo III launch exceeded out forecasts by an order of magnitude; we were very far off. We outsold our full-year forecast in the matter of a week.

"If they had to do it over again they might have held the game over and worked on the end game content a bit more"

Morhaime on SWTOR

I have to give our team some credit because they scrambled really quickly and they were able to increase capacity everywhere within a couple of weeks. But the first couple of weeks were a little bit painful and so I would love to do that over again.

I felt like we gave ourselves enough time in terms of the things we could test and the things that were feasible to test. We can't know how many people are going to come out and want to play. We ran an open beta where we let anyone in the world in who wanted to play the game for free for a weekend. But a lot of people were waiting for the release of the game so we really didn't have the indication that our forecasts would be off by so much.

I don't think the ratio has changed all that much in the past couple of months.

We think the social aspects of gaming are really important, being able to share your experience with someone else. Even if you're soloing and not actually going through a dungeon with your friends, to be able to share that experience, to be online, to chat together, I think it adds dimension to the game. And that's important.

We're big fans of tablets as a gaming platform so I'm really excited about tablets; they're going to become more and more popular. For us it's just a matter of when we make a game, looking at what are the most appropriate platforms for that game. We'll have to play it by ear but we're definitely looking at that as a viable gaming platform for the future.

We need a lot of stuff. We need screen real estate, we need storage, we need memory, we need bandwidth.

It depends on the title. When it comes to e-sports Starcraft is in a category of its own. The game is so fun to watch, it's so well balanced and the strategies are so deep. There are other opportunities - we're working on Blizzard All-Stars which has the potential to be a fun spectator sport and fun to play. We're ready to support it as an e-sport.

I'm a big fan of Starcraft as an e-sport so I can't say it's surprised me so much. When we designed it we made sure the races were well balanced, we added in features to the observer mode to make it more watchable.

We always have to manage multiple projects and various resources; it's just something we've always had to do. We've been able to scale up our development capacity over the years to the point where we have multiple teams that are strong and independent and working on multiple projects. This year is a great example with multiple games coming out. People will see with Mists of Pandaria that the World of Warcraft team is doing some of the best work it's ever done.