Brave New World

I think it is a very difficult market to compete in, I think it's very expensive to make these games, especially if you're expecting people to pay a monthly fee just to play the game. And so there are very few companies that can compete at that high level with those types of budgets.

Definitely if you're not charging anybody, they're going to be a lot more forgiving about the experience they have. They haven't paid anything. So in terms of developers entering the market, I can understand why a lot of games might choose to go free-to-play.

For us, and even for EA with the Star Wars game, I think that the value that you get for the $15 a month is just unmatched. I don't think you can get that amount of entertainment value anywhere. I'd put the $15 up against anything.

It absolutely does, yeah.

I don't think that there is at all. I think that there's an underlying, a fundamental assumption right now, that the less you charge, the more money you make. Which isn't true. And it doesn't necessarily make for a better game. I mean, everybody likes free... I think that definitely, players have seen a lot of really great quality free-to-play experiences, but I'm not sure it's the best model for us right now.

Well of course, I would be lying if I said that it wasn't. But I think from our perspective, we don't need people to buy everything. You know, if somebody is subscribing to World of Warcraft, we're totally happy, and I can sleep very well at night that they're playing Diablo 3 and World of Warcraft and that was just included as part of their subscription. I think it's a great deal.

Yes, I do. We are really trying to integrate... Well, those are very different things, even though there's some technology we can share between the two. But when you look at Diablo 3, it's really all about what does this game need to achieve its potential? And a big part of Diablo 3 is item trading, finding valuable items and being able to trade them for items that are valuable to you... We'll see how it goes, it's definitely a new thing for us, I think a new thing that nobody's ever really done in this way before. But we're very excited about and we've received very positive feedback, by and large, from the players.

The Arcade really grew out of the idea that we have this awesome map and mod making community... The same tools that we use to create the campaign in the game, we put in the hands of our community, and they do some amazing stuff with these things. But imagine the kind of work they would do if there was a marketplace where they actually had the opportunity to sell their creation to other players. Imagine how that might incentivise them to do better things with that engine and devote additional resources...

We look at things like the iTunes App Store, and how that has just become so fundamental to changing the way we interact with this device, something that Apple could never have achieved on their own. And, you know, our vision is that we'd like to see that type of effort with StarCraft.

Well, that's a great question. We don't have another platform right now with an engine and tools that are as polished and advanced as the tools that we create for StarCraft 2. So for instance, World of Warcraft, we have our own internal tools but they're not commercial-grade tools that we're comfortable putting in the hands of the public. Interesting question. No, hadn't thought of it. [Laughs]

We're very friendly with Valve. So yeah, we do talk to Valve. I can't really comment on that particular topic.

But I can share that our opinion about the situation is that the DOTA name really should belong to the community. I think that it's been part of the Warcraft 3 community for a very long time, and we would like to see the community continue being able to use that name, and having an exclusive mark owned by a competitor doesn't feel right to us.