Play.tm interviews Shane Dabiri
by Eliah Hecht 
Mar 20th 2007 at 6:29PM
Blizzard people always give fairly good interviews, and this one is no exception (even if it is a week old or so). Play.tm caught up with WoW lead producer Shane Dabiri about the success of WoW and BC, and what the future holds. I'd agree with one of the commentors on the blog that most of the questions were softies, but there's still some good stuff. There's a lot of congratulations all around; WoW, as we know, has posted up pretty big numbers in terms of sales and subscriptions. Unfortunately, this does not mean prices will be lowering any time soon:Is there any chance of a drop in the subscription costs in the future?
With the massive amount of content in the game, as well as our regular content updates, 24/7 support offerings, and network infrastructure, we believe we're providing great entertainment value for players at the current price. The continued growth of the game is a positive indicator of this value as well.
That's too bad, although of course I can understand the financial sense behind it. Blizz continues to be confident that WoW can keep going for a long time: "we're confident that World of Warcraft has many years ahead of it. We all love working with the Warcraft mythology, and we have no shortage of ideas and plans for the future."What surprised me in this interview was the amount of questions that were dodged, even soft as they are. The interviewer asked what Shane's personal favorite part of BC was, and he replied with some back-of-the-box copy about how flying mounts let us see the world in a new way, and there are a million dungeons, and we've got this Arena system; that bit felt very canned. Also, apparently they "haven't discussed specifics about future expansions" -- really? Players are constantly talking about it; I have trouble believing that the devs haven't tossed any specific ideas back and forth. Maybe they're too busy refusing to make any major changes to the classes. At any rate, click the Read link to check out the interview, and come back here to talk about it.
Filed under: Blizzard, The Burning Crusade
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
gloomy Mar 20th 2007 9:09PM
now that I know what he looks like im ganna knock that faggot out for all the priests
Numbinglyhot Mar 20th 2007 9:07PM
I think Blizz is just really greedy. For example, LotR online offers a price of like $10 a month or $200 for a lifetime subscription (I have already spent $200 for subscription fees). I think doing this or giving players a discount after playing for a certain amount of time would be awsome.
Jason Mar 20th 2007 11:49PM
While I can certainly understand your thinking that some of the answers were canned/dodged, the one I don't get is the one on his favorite BC stuff. While I haven't done Arenas yet, the idea of them seems really cool to me. Beyond that, I can pretty much echo everything he said; Flying mounts own and all the new instances pretty much rock in general.
As to not believing that the Devs haven't looked towards the next expansion, being a software developer myself I can totally believe that. First off, actual developers have little to nothing to do with requirements. All we do is write the code that makes the magic happen. Other people tell us what to make. As for the folks who are in charge of that, there's still several more content patches to release for the current expansion; design for those will take precedence for a good while to come. I know the figure of an expansion per year has been thrown out there; I personally believe that 18-24 months per expansion is a far more accurate, and better number. I had no issue at all waiting as long as I did for the expansion; there was plenty to do, IMO. I enjoy raiding and rolling alts, so that explains a lot of it, but even so, I don't see it as a bad thing. Too many games have gone downhill due to frequent expansion releases (SWG, I'm looking at you!), so a little extra time isn't a big deal.
daniel Mar 21st 2007 7:42AM
why are the fees considered too high? the argument that they're already making sick amounts of money isn't really viable since none of us actually knows what the operational and development costs are.
Anroth Mar 21st 2007 8:32AM
well, operational costs must be irrelevant... at lease here in europe.
blizz's isp sucks so much that the average ping in some countries is 350ms...
Zuuler Mar 21st 2007 9:39AM
@5
That probably has more to do with the telecomunnications infrastructure than it has to do with bliz's ISP.
I tink their current pricing is good compared to the number of servers they have to maintain in addition to code they have to maintain, and then still have money left over for new developement.
As for developers having nothing to do with requirements, that really depends on where you work. Where I work, the engineers take a system specification and write a software requirements specification from it, which then has to be reviewed by all engineers working on the project and approved by a manager.