Lol I remember that 09.09.09 article xD was some super fan-boi that wroter that.
I am not overly worried if D3-Day does not happen in 2009, as I would prefer
to see a highly polished v1.0 being released than a buggy, rushed one followed by a huge patch
As it is, 2009 should see the release of Dragon Age, which should keep us RPG enthusiasts amused for a while.![]()
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.
etc...
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.