Heck, AGDC 2007 has brought up a lot of juicy details out of Mike Morhaime. He explained the reason Starcraft: Ghost didn’t launch. And it seems plans to return to console games is null. Some time ago, I heard from an ex-employee the console department had been closed and there were some lay offs. I couldn’t believe it, but this statement seems to support the heads up. There was never a official press release announcing the console department closing its doors, nor lay off scandals.
On with the Starcraft: Ghost discussion, based on Morhaime’s answers and Rob Pardo’s comments during the Hollywood & Games Summit back on May that Starcraft: Ghost could be brought to the table at some point … it makes you wonder if Starcraft: Ghost will make a return on the PC exclusively. That’s speculation. Judge for yourself:
Gamespot: What happened with Starcraft: Ghost?
Morhaime: We were late to market with a game that was not shaping up to be competitive to some of the other top games that were coming out. We looked at it and realized that there was an awful lot of work we needed to do. Our window was closing on the older generation platforms, so we had to make a decision whether we would basically take what we’d done onto the next generation of hardware and start from scratch. Ideally, we wanted to release Ghost on the older generation and have our sequel come out on next-gen systems. And then we looked at all the resource needs we had on the PC side of the business with World of Warcraft and our other titles, and we just decided that the resources were spent better on focusing our efforts on our PC titles, so we put Ghost on indefinite hold.
Gamespot: Is cracking back into the console market still on the company’s list of objectives?
Morhaime: It is not.
Gamespot: Why was the console market worth getting into in the last generation, but now you’re backing away from it?
Morhaime: We thought we would be able to do it without impacting our PC teams. We just had to make a priority call when it became clear that we were getting late to the market with these things and we were not creating something that would live up to the Blizzard quality I’ve been talking about without additional resources. Now it’s pretty clear that we really could use those resources helping us out on World of Warcraft and other things. Ideally, you try to do everything, but one of my points this morning was about not trying to do everything at the same time and focusing on what’s important. And that’s what we did.
