Blizzard's Rob Pardo

Yes, ultimately I think it's a great way to get games. Speaking to me as a gamer and not even a Blizzard person, it's my preferred way too get games nowadays. Even though I'm confused by Valve with the DotA stuff I love Steam. That's how I get a lot of my PC games, I feel like there's so many advantages for a gamer.

I absolutely do. The PC games industry and the gaming industry is super healthy. It's always been tough to do metrics in any industry and especially once you start having a lot of digital distribution it's hard to capture the real metrics of the health of the industry. Even if you look at something like NPD there's still an estimation involved there, they don't really have real-time data from every retail chain. By necessity they're guessing. But I think the industry is as healthy as ever. From our experience our games continue to sell better than the last ones. I always laugh because as long as I've been in the games industry, every year I'm asked "is PC gaming dead?" But it keeps on growing despite the fact it's been pronounced dead 20 times.

It's going really well, and one of the best tests is how stable it was at launch. Despite the fact that we don't have all the features there that we want, with every online release we've had going to back to launch we never get everything in that we want in, but the things that are there are really awesome and it's a really stable platform. You're going to see us really quickly get those other things in. A good example is the community really had an outcry over chat channels, that wasn't something that surprised us, we made a conscious decision to get the game out before chat channels were ready to launch, but that's something the game will be getting shortly.

I don't know if we changed them so much but we have a lot of really passionate fans now. It's was one thing that back in the day, no one expected things from us. Now we live in a world where people have very high expectations for our games and services and that's fine, we don't have a problem with that. We just try to be as honest as we can with our fans on where we're at with development and where we're at with features and if it's something that isn't great and the fans point that out then we'll iterate on it and get it right.

There's a lot of things. I don't know if there's a monolithic 'next' but I'd say the next big goal for it is Diablo III. We have lots of ideas that we want to do with Diablo III on the platform. Once we do that, we really have a Blizzard community on Battle.net which has been a big driving factor for us. Previous to StarCraft II and the relaunch of Battle.net we were sitting here with one of our biggest game franchises that wasn't even on the platform - World of Warcraft. So that was a really big moment for us to get WoW on Battle.net, to be able to talk across Battle.net. Once we get Diablo III we'll get all three franchises and it becomes the online version of BlizzCon.

I don't know about a lot more, it's just the complexity level. We launched Battle.net with the original Diablo and its was a platform back then, it was just that Battle.net was a team of one person, and then it became a team of three people for a very long time. What's happened is the level of complexity with our online game service... all the regions we're in now, there's complexity in the amount of features and the games themselves, that's really blown that out a lot more. We probably didn't anticipate it as much as we did but we're catching up and it's pretty exciting too, to have your own online gaming platform for your games.

One of the other things we're able to do on our platform that you're not going to see on some of the others like Steam or Xbox is that we can integrate the games with the platform much more deeply. When you log on to StarCraft II you're on Battle.net and you're in StarCraft II - it's that fully integrated experience which is not something I think the other services are able to do.