Blizzard: Achievements in the online space taken for granted

Working in the online space is "a huge, difficult undertaking", according to Frank Pearce, senior vice president at Blizzard, who said that achievements in that space are taken for granted.

Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, Pearce talked about the difficulty of launching an MMO like World of Warcraft by highlighting the difficulty in all online ventures.

"Launching an MMO is a huge, difficult undertaking so no it doesn't surprise me when companies face challenges launching an MMO," Pearce explained. "We faced similar challenges ourselves, we had challenges when with our website when we sold BlizzCon tickets."

"We've got e-commerce set up for our store and we've got World of Warcraft billing but we still had challenges with BlizzCon tickets," he continued. "None of the things that industry is doing in this space is easy to do and I think sometimes people take that for granted."

Pearce went on to talk about the Blizzard's ambition to produce expansion for World of Warcraft every 12 months and why they haven't hit that target.

"Ideally our goal would be to ship one with the regularity of 12 months or so, but we're so ambitious with the type of content that we want to put it makes a difficult challenge," Pearce commented.

"We'd like to be able to deliver them on a tighter schedule but ultimately we want to make sure the content is right."

The full GamesIndustry.biz interview with Frank Pearce is avaliable here.