Opinion: Why we will not see Diablo III this year

[Tinman]

I disagree with the analysis of the situation.

I think that we are likely to see the first of the Starcraft trilogy in the next few months. This would mean that Blizzard gets it out before the US summer holidays and gives the kids something to play while school is out.

I think that Diablo III is likely to be released for Christmas this year. They need a killer game for the holidays and Diablo is likely to be it.

I suspect we will see one more WoW expansion and this will drop for Christmas or maybe even earlier, I doubt that they can keep WoTLK going for 2 more years.

The key here is customer retention, they want every WoW player to move across to the new MMO. In your timeline WoW would be 8 to 10 years old before the new MMO was released. This would leave a massive gap for competitors to exploit.
I suspect that the new MMO will be announced at Blizzcon this year and it will be pretty close to shipping. Blizzard are already moving staff across from WoW to the new title and this would indicate that it is now their primary focus in terms of their development efforts.

They have already notified all WoW players that they are going to have to migrate their WoW account to a unified Blizzard account system which will go live, I guess, at the launch of Starcraft II.

This would allow them to give people the option of migrating their WoW accounts to the new MMO with a minimum of trouble.

I think, even given Blizzard's "When its done" attitude your predictions are too conservative especially given the trying economic times. Combine that with additional pressure from Activision to ship products I think they are probably pushing quite hard to get everything up to scratch in the shortest possible time.

Very good points made here. However, I still don't think Blizzard will want to release their two biggest single player titles within 6 months of each other.

If we look at Blizzard's previous release schedule, we see that they have never released 2 front line titles in the same year.

I think it will be interesting to come back to this thread in 10 months time

[Magnarmalok]

lol or maybe even as little as 3

[goldendeath]

I doubt whether this disagreement will be resolved in as little as three months.

That would require both D3 and SC II to be released at the end of may.

But as for the debate, I can see D3 dropping for Xmas, but I can also see Bliz holding onto it until the dust settles from SC2.

It could really go either way

[Voicy]

Are you guys not afraid that Diablo3 will be the great white hope? Too much hype made about it for it to actually successfully deliver to:

a) It's expectations
and
b) It's fans
and
c) still make money off the commercial kidlets who want a new game and have no idea what Diablo is.

I'm a little worried, that's all.

[Shamrock]

Honestly, I never believed Diablo III would be out this year. I love Blizzard because they're patient and will only release games once they've got it down, which is why I trust the brand name so much. Because of that I've always thought it likely to come out later than expected.

[Magnarmalok]

Noticed I said MAYBE also for this argument to be resolved either one of them can be released 1st it doesnt matter since there is little hope of the other one coming out same year then

[lilDeath]

Methinks not this year. Too much other things happening on their calendar. I reckon Starcraft2 will be first.

I am pretty sure they are very far with the dev and design parts, since the 600MB game trailer I saw was very damn cool and detailed and most of the mechanics were working, but they released it for a reason, to keep the players on their toes and have them chomping at the bit, drool on their keyboards, etc.

CMON MAN, RELEASE IT ALREADY!!! *drool drool*

Anything can happen, *timelines* are there to be missed. lol

[Jeff]

They are making 5 games at the moment the three starcraft games Diablo3and a new ip so I don’t think it will come out this year maybe the first half of next year. But that my personal opinion

Remember Diablo3 is so big it properly won’t need a huge Christmas launch for it to be a huge success. Look at MGS4