With the insane monetary success of Blizzard PC and Mac MMO gem “World of Warcraft”, you’d think it’d one day show up, in one form or another, on consoles, but that’s unlikely to happen, says Blizzard.

In an interview with G4, WoW Lead Producer J. Allen Brack spoke about the prospects of a console MMO and why it’d be no simple task.

“I think there’s a lot of reasons,” said Brack. “There’s not one thing. One is, it takes a long time to develop an MMO. The lifecycle of consoles being what they are, you have to really time when your console’s going to come out, what its projected lifecycle is going to be with when your game is going to be, which is challenging.”

But what about World of Warcraft specifically?

“In the case of WoW, we talk about it all the time,” he said. “How would we bring WoW to the console?”

He also expressed the various technical barriers keeping WoW from consoles, namely the massive hard drive space such a game, with its patches and all, would require.

“There’s those technical challenges,” he explained, “there’s patching challenges, there’s the quality controls that we have vs. the quality controls that say, a Microsoft or Sony or Nintendo has. All those things sort of raise the bar in terms of the challenges and then specifically in the case of WoW, WoW was designed to be a keyboard game and its control scheme and its camera controls and the number of abilities that you have and the spells and how things work are very keyboard-centric. The idea of translating that to a gamepad is a very, very challenging proposition.”

“I think it’s unlikely that WoW comes to the consoles,” he said. “It is something that we talk about on a pretty regular basis, but someone is going to figure out how to make an MMO on a console and they’re going to be wildly successful. I have no doubt about that.”
Blizzard currently has a “mystery MMO” in development and I wouldn’t be surprised if it showed up on consoles. If so, would you play it?
Source: G4

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Eddie Makuch is a Blast staff writer. Reach him at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @EddieMakuch.

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