Blizzard's Michael Ryder

I can't say for sure whether I think that's a vote of confidence, because I don't really know what's driving that number or why investors do what they do. I can say that, at least from where I sit, it's really a re-affirmation of Blizzard continuing to do business the way that it always has, and if that has meaning to people that that's the case then I would say that's a good thing.

It's true - we certainly knew there might have been some expectation in the market that the game was going to come out earlier, but as we always say, we're not going to ship something if it's not ready and there were clearly some things that we thought weren't going to be up to snuff if we pushed it out on an earlier date.

So I was happy to see us take the step that we did to make sure we get it right.

It's an interesting question. I don't get the sense when you're walking around within Blizzard that people have the weight of the world on their shoulders. I think that the atmosphere in the company is a very positive one, I think people are enabled to do what they want to do.

We have a lot of great development talent, a lot of people across the board in all the different functions of the company, and everybody is proud to be part of a company where the cultural norm is to try to achieve excellence in all the things that we do.

So I think it's the opposite - I think people are pretty happy working at Blizzard, and there's a confidence that we all work together and do the things we've done in the past, make sure we're focusing on the right things, and making sure we get it right.

Starcraft - it's a great tradition, there aren't too many games that shipped ten or eleven years ago that are still on the shelf. So it's time for Starcraft II, I think we'll build on the success of the first one.

Well, it's important to look at it globally, so for us we continue to have a game in Starcraft in Korea, for example, is still the most popular game for e-sports. It's a phenomenon in Korea, even today, and it has had continued success around the world even though it is over ten years old.

So I think that says something about the compelling content and a really well executed game will have appeal. Looking at the market globally, in the way that we do, and the fact that we want to be on the forefront of e-sports, we have a franchise in Starcraft that we want to continue to build on.

Again, for us, it's not something that I think we think too much about, because a lot of our products and decisions are driven by the fact we're a company of gamers, and we believe it's a fun experience and a great story. I really think people are going to really happy with it when it comes out. So we feel pretty confident about it.

We're working hard to complete the transition - we're working with the government to get the final approvals, and we've made a tremendous amount of progress in a short period of time in transitioning from one partner to another in going to NetEase.

Our servers are up-and-running now in a beta test phase, and concurrency is running quite high, so we know there's continued interest with the players. We've transitioned everyone over to the Battle.Net account management system, which has been a big success for us as well.

We've upgraded the technology and the server hardware across the board and everyone's very pleased with how that's performing. So we feel pretty good about the progress we've made, and hopefully we'll be getting the rest of the approvals we need in the near future and then we'll be back on track.