Jay Wilson, game director of Diablo 3 loves the PC. Honest. I interviewed him at Gamescom a few weeks ago and asked why PC still matters in such a changing industry.
"The install base of PCs outnumbers all the consoles combined together hands down." said Jay. "There's a lot of people out there with PCs and Macs, and they like games too."
Read on for more unbridled honesty from the Blizzard developer.
Jay seemed frustrated by a lack of confidence in our games platform of choice, but admitted that Blizzard might have benefited from a less crowded marketplace: "It's unfortunate that the illusion that the PC is dying has been propagating for so long and that people have bought into it. On the other hand I'd say Blizzard has done quite well off of that – the fact that people have the illusion that PC is not a place where you can make money. It's made it even easier for us to do really well."
The game director also implied that the fruitful relationship between Blizzard and PC might be one of superior functionality, not platform loyalty: "I would add – we don't see ourselves as a PC developer – we see ourselves as a game developer. It's just that the games that we wanted to make suit the PC platform. And one of the things that we're not willing to ever do is go to a platform just to cash in on it.
"We don't believe you can make a Starcraft style RTS and make it great - Blizzard great - on console." He's got a point. I played an RTS on a pad once. I felt like a massive-hooved cow trying to do crochet.
Jay is obviously proud of Blizzard's successes, and even recommends Blizzard's rivals look to them for direction: "If people think that you can't make money from the PC they should really look at us as a symbol and they should really be asking why we're so successful. It's primarily because of the quality of the games, but when you have a high quality product, very little competition and a high install base..."
Jay also mentioned Diablo 3's lack of an offline mode and absence of mod support during our interview. We'll have more on Diablo 3 soon.
