Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft already made it to the mobile gaming scene, achieving great success. This time around, Blizzard is looking into "reinventing" StarCraft and Overwatch on the platform, but there are still no plans for virtual reality in sight.
VentureBeat got ahold of Blizzard's president and co-founder Michael Morhaime, senior vice president and co-founder Frank Pearce and senior vice president Chris Metzen to talk about the future of the company.
Mobile Gaming
As mentioned earlier, Blizzard entered the foray of mobile gaming well with Hearthstone, where it has more than 40 million players.
Of course, the next step would be to continue pushing on the platform with even more games, and Blizzard has a ton of them in store, which the company believes to have the potential to top the charts.
"If you look at Overwatch, if you look at StarCraft, we have multiple franchises that would lend themselves to that concept," Pearce says.
On that note, the company has been keen of how the gaming world has been changing so far. Considering the success of its card game on mobile, Blizzard knows that players want something that's accessible anywhere.
"If we were going to continue to evaluate experiences in real-time strategy, I think we'd have to figure out what that means to the current player space. [StarCraft 2 expansion] Legacy of the Void is great. [But] I don't think that people want to sit down and play 45-minute missions any more. I think that space might need some reinventing," Pearce continues.
This could also be considered the reason why Heroes of the Storm is designed to be played in quick matches rather than the 40-minute average of other MOBA games such as League of Legends and Dota 2.
Needless to say, it would be interesting to see how Overwatch or StarCraft would turn out on the mobile platform. However, keep in mind that it might take a while before any of this materializes or whether it will happen at all, even though Morhaime agrees with Pearce's sentiment.
Virtual Reality
Speaking of stepping into other ventures, Blizzard is interested in virtual reality as well, but the company doesn't intend to jump into the bandwagon just yet, saying that it's still not "quite ready to conquer" on the platform.
"Culturally, we're interested, and we're watching. How rad would it be to run around in World of Warcraft and see it 1-to-1? That does appear to be the next horizon," Metzen says.
One quick word about that: how awesome would it be to travel through Lordaeron, Kalimdor and Azeroth and stand face-to-face with a Tauren or Orc? Yep, that's a no-brainer.
Bottom Line
Activision Blizzard currently sits as the fifth biggest company in the world when it comes to gaming revenue, not to mention that it acquired Candy Crush Saga-maker King Entertainment last year, which makes it in second place as a whole.
With that said, it's only natural for the company to explore other possibilities moving forward. It's also worth noting that Blizzard has plans to bring StarCraft, Diablo 2 and Warcraft 3 "back to glory." In other words, the company is stepping up to the plate across all platforms.
At any rate, there's a strong possibility that we'll soon be able to play Overwatch or StarCraft on mobile devices and, even better, see a Murloc strutting its bipedal and amphibious stuff in virtual reality.
