Blizzard is spear-heading its approach to Community Fansites and fans in 2008. It’s going full-throttle with a internal Developer video podcast which will bring you interviews with Starcraft 2 and Wrath of the Lich King developers, fansite community interaction with developers, as well as fansite Q&A on video.
The first BlizzCast episode will air online through Blizzard’s website the first week of January. Fans will be able to submit questions to the developers through the fansites, who will forward the feedback to community managers: Karune and Nethaera. Fans may win some juicy Swag at the end of each BlizzCast episode. Again, this ongoing video podcast series is produced by Blizzard.
This is an amazing effort that will bring the developers and the community closer. The best of it all is that each BlizzCast (video podcast) transcript will be fully localized to many supported languages reaching hundreds of thousands of Blizzard fans across the globe. This is basically a monthly BlizzCon presentation broadcasted directly to you via hot-download. The audience of BlizzCast Episode 1 and upcoming episodes will be monitored. This is an experimental in-house project. The more fan audience supporting these BlizzCast episodes, the better it will get, as more resources will be put to produce future episodes with full coverage of the development cycles of Starcraft 2, future World of Warcraft expansions and content patches, as well as the two unannounced games. Spread the word across forums online, and share the hype to encourage production of BlizzCast episodes for years to come. Tell all your friends online, at work or school to download episode one the first week of January.
BlizzCast Episode 1
- Interview with Sam Didier (Art Director SCII): Concepting Art for the StarCraft and Warcraft Franchises
- Interview with Jeff Kaplan (Lead Designer WoW): Highlights of Sunwell Plateau and Patch 2.4
(At the end)Sweepstakes/Giveaway: Lots of SWAG
UPDATE 12-27: Karune pointed out the first episode will only be audio podcast.