Blizzard's Mike Ryder

As StarCraft II launches globally, the VP of International talks social gaming, Activision, audience expectancies and digital vs retail

Feature by Alec Meer Contributor

Published on July 26, 2010

8 comments

GamesIndustry.bizOkay. Well, hopefully the launch tonight is going to do that. Are you confident that you're prepared for it, on a technical level? It's traditionally been very hard to launch enormous games that require online access without hitting some problems. Are you braced for it this time – is it even humanly possible to provide all the servers and tech support you'll need for the initial surge?

Michael Ryder

I hope we are. I think we are. We put a lot of work in. We tried to plan for success, so hopefully we'll be ready when the time comes.

GamesIndustry.bizHow does it work? Do you need to lay on extra servers for the first few days then slim it down later, or are you hoping to maintain the initial tech investment here? Is there a timeline for how you support this thing?

Michael Ryder

I can't say too much about that but I can tell you that it's something we put quite a bit of planning into to estimate how we think things are going to go, and plan for contingencies and redundancies and things like that just to give ourselves some flexibility. At the end of the day we want to provide as great an experience for everybody as we can so hopefully we're ready for whatever the next few months have in store for us.

GamesIndustry.bizIn terms of Battle.net, how much of your ultimate intention for it is about laying down a social networking infrastructure, not just a support service for the game?

Michael Ryder

Do you want to handle this?

Carl Chimes

I dunno. It was definitely something that we wanted to do, because we think our players really want a way to connect to their friends and to keep their friends…I'm not sure if you're familiar with RealID as opposed to real names on the forum.

GamesIndustry.bizI am, yes.

Carl Chimes

They're completely different things. So with RealID two people can agree to be friends and then they share information, they can chat to each other no matter which game they're in. So you can be in World of WarCraft and chat to a StarCraft 2 player. There's a rich presence, so you can see what they're up to so you have something to talk about. There's a little broadcast system so you can say what you're doing at that particular time, so yeah it's important to us to cater to our community, to listen to what they want and to provide functionality we can fill.

GamesIndustry.bizHow much of it is about being a social service specifically for Blizzard games versus being part of the general trend that's going on at the moment to social networking games, to keeping people as part of a system, with constant interchange and possibilities for revenue?

Carl Chimes

I think when we were designing it, all we had in mind was uniting the Blizzard community together and providing the kind of social interaction our players want.

GamesIndustry.bizAre we going to see Facebook plugins and games that extend the experience beyond the core games? Do you subscribe to the idea that that's the future of gaming?

Carl Chimes

I don't think we have any specific plans in that area. It's not necessarily something we would rule out. We make the games that we want to play at Blizzard, so if it was interesting to a development team at Blizzard that might be something that we might pursue.

Michael Ryder

We do have an iterative culture, so if we felt like it was something the players wanted that was an enhancement to the experience we've shown over time that we incorporate new things when we that there's an opportunity to make something that the players want, so it changes over time.