In response to recent reports that Diablo III would be released ‘in the next few years’ the company has come forward to reveal that it is inclined to announce games too early.
“We always announce all of our games too early,” Blizzard’s vice president of game design Rob Pardo recently told Techland.
“We realize that and go, ‘You know what? Next time we’re not going to do that.’ And then we always fail at that. But I’d rather fail at that than fail at making the game great. I think it’s safe to say that, yeah, (Diablo III) is not going to be out next year”
When asked if Diablo III’s delayed release could be attributed to other company commitments such as Star Craft and World of Warcraft Pardo revealed that this was not the case.
“Each game has individual development teams; it’s just that the way that we develop games, we develop them very iteratively,” he explained. “We just have a different process and approach than a lot of other studios, and it makes it a very difficult process for us to predict street dates when we’re multiple years out.”
Pardo also added that game releases aren’t necessarily tied into retail calendars, despite what market commentators might suggest.
“We’re definitely not fiscal calendar-driven and we know that our fanbase is not going to hold us to a fiscal calendar. With Burning Crusade, we missed Christmas by about three weeks. We could’ve shoved it out the door, but we decided we didn’t need to get it into stores for Christmas. We just needed it to be great and our playerbase is going to buy it whenever it hits the shelves.”
Instead Pardo added that Blizzard’s strategy surrounding game releases has and will continue to be “here’s the game we’re working on, we’re going to start talking about it and who knows when it ships.”
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