Blizzard Entertainment's First Billion-Dollar Year!

[Nehkara]

Vivendi reports Blizzard's first billion-dollar year (http://www.gamespot.com/news/6185347.html?action=convert&om_clk=latestnews&tag=latestnews;title;0)

To the surprise of no one who read NPD's 2007 PC game-sales report, Vivendi Games said its success was "driven by the continued momentum of World of Warcraft, its award-winning subscription-based massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG)." The company reported that sustained interest in WOW and the release of its first expansion, the Burning Crusade, added 2 million subscribers to the game, bringing its user base to over 10 million (http://www.gamespot.com/news/6184987.html).

As a result, the revenues of WOW's developer and publisher, Blizzard Entertainment, shot up 58 percent to reach €814 million ($1.2 billion), putting it over the billion-dollar mark for the first time in its corporate history.


Congratulations to the best gaming company on the planet (IMHO)!

[Bobblehead]

Yeah, I got sucked into WoW a couple weeks before Christmas.

Now my Lvl 54 Mage is grinding along...

[Nehkara]

Yeah, I got sucked into WoW a couple weeks before Christmas.

Now my Lvl 54 Mage is grinding along...

I've been playing WoW off and on since the day of release. It is a lot of fun.

I am really really looking forward to Starcraft 2 as well!

[Hack&Lube]

It's unhealthy for all the money in the PC gaming industry going to one company for one game.

More and more developers are dropping out of the PC completely and focusing on console since PC games are losing so much money. Pretty much the only games that sell over a million copies on PC are WoW and the Sims. Everything else is doing quite poorly in sales whereas dozens of console titles are doing over a million copies in sale.

[Ozy_Flame]

PC's are still my preferred choice for gaming, simply because of the mods / patches / ease of use for game control.

It's too bad really; PC's looked to be taking off at the turn of the century, but seem to be fizziling out. Alot of that has to do with a resurging Nintendo and an emerging XBOX.

[TurnedTheCorner]

Don't these cycles happen consistently, though? When new consoles hit, they offer an experience that is technologically very similar to PC gaming. Then PC gaming pulls ahead as the technology improves and the consoles are maturing. Rinse and repeat.

Good on Blizzard, I guess.

[llama64]

Well, the Xbox360 and the PS3 are more or less direct replacements for PC's. They have similar architectures, the same development libraries and can use most of the same peripherals. They are cheaper while providing more innovative game-play. Consoles also provide more capability for multi-player games in one room. PC's are notoriously single player only.

The next generation of consoles will likely all but remove the distinction between a PC and console. All vectors lead to integrated systems where games, media and online connectivity converge into one unit connected to multiple outputs. The Xbox1080 becomes self aware Jan 15, 2012.

[psicodude]

I love the PC for gaming as well, but until we see the day where a 5 year old can take a game out of a box and be playing it 20 seconds later, consoles will always be the preffered platform.

The only real concern I have about the gaming industry as a whole is the "dumbing down" of games I have noticed lately. Most games these days lack any real complexity and are seemingly designed around multiplayer first, with sngle player being an after thought.

[Hack&Lube]

Don't these cycles happen consistently, though? When new consoles hit, they offer an experience that is technologically very similar to PC gaming. Then PC gaming pulls ahead as the technology improves and the consoles are maturing. Rinse and repeat.

Good on Blizzard, I guess.

Nope, since consoles are effectively PCs now and use the same basic hardware. Consoles are just taking over completely and developers are all leaving the PC (largely attributed to ease of pirating). In this day and age, average joe's console is going to be much more powerful than his PC.

[Bobblehead]

Nope, since consoles are effectively PCs now and use the same basic hardware. Consoles are just taking over completely and developers are all leaving the PC (largely attributed to ease of pirating). In this day and age, average joe's console is going to be much more powerful than his PC.

While I kind of agree with what you are saying, the XBox was like a PC, but XBox 360 uses a PowerPC RISC based processor(Xenon), and the PS3 uses the Cell processor, so they are different than the CISC processors common in most desktops. So while consoles are starting to do more of what used to be in the PC domain, the architecture (cpu-wise) is more different than it was in the original X-Box days.

[llama64]

While I kind of agree with what you are saying, the XBox was like a PC, but XBox 360 uses a PowerPC RISC based processor(Xenon), and the PS3 uses the Cell processor, so they are different than the CISC processors common in most desktops. So while consoles are starting to do more of what used to be in the PC domain, the architecture (cpu-wise) is more different than it was in the original X-Box days.

Most game developers now work with standardized API's such as the XNA/Direct-X library provided by Microsoft. I don't know if they do any system level programming anymore that would lock games directly to a specific platform. I'm guessing it's getting more and more uncommon as multi platform releases are becoming the norm.

This is why the PS3 didn't have a great launch/first year. No one knows how the hell to program the thing. 8 cores are great... if you're a PhD specializing in multi-threaded and parallel programming.

[Bobblehead]

Most game developers now work with standardized API's such as the XNA/Direct-X library provided by Microsoft. I don't know if they do any system level programming anymore that would lock games directly to a specific platform. I'm guessing it's getting more and more uncommon as multi platform releases are becoming the norm.

This is why the PS3 didn't have a great launch/first year. No one knows how the hell to program the thing. 8 cores are great... if you're a PhD specializing in multi-threaded and parallel programming.

Actually, I have a friend I grew up with who works for Rapidmind (http://www.rapidmind.net/). They're trying to tap this market by developing an adaptable layer to handle all the multicore complexity. You program as if it was a single core, this layer will act as a scheduler for all the cores at the hardware level. Pretty hot emerging segment - unfortunately I'm short the few hundred thousand required to invest.

RISC has been around for a long time - Macs were PPC until the Intel switch to CISC (as I'me sure most techie people know). Now the 360s are PPC. It is just a different architecture and requires different considerations in your software architecture.

Isn't Photon a mobile app programmer - aren't many cell or smartphone apps run on RISC systems?

[Teh_Bandwagoner]

Blizzard is awesome. Who else can boast that a game they created birthed a professional Korean gaming phenomenon?

I'm deliberately timing the purchase of a new PC in line with Starcraft 2. I'm REALLY looking forward to that game.

[Regorium]

Ugh, I just got re-hooked on wow a couple months ago. *sigh*

Lots of concurrent players is still in the PC domain for now. I hear that the console version of TF2 couldn't handle more than 12 players, whereas you'll see 32vs32 on PC with 100ms or less depending on the server.

Wouldn't doubt that within the next generation of consoles though they'll have made the netcode a bit better.

[photon]

Actually, I have a friend I grew up with who works for Rapidmind (http://www.rapidmind.net/). They're trying to tap this market by developing an adaptable layer to handle all the multicore complexity. You program as if it was a single core, this layer will act as a scheduler for all the cores at the hardware level. Pretty hot emerging segment - unfortunately I'm short the few hundred thousand required to invest.

RISC has been around for a long time - Macs were PPC until the Intel switch to CISC (as I'me sure most techie people know). Now the 360s are PPC. It is just a different architecture and requires different considerations in your software architecture.

Isn't Photon a mobile app programmer - aren't many cell or smartphone apps run on RISC systems?

Yeah, all our work is done in Java though, so we don't see anything close to the bare metal; it's all in the Java Virtual Machine. (As an aside, that's one of the reasons I'm pumped about Google's Android, a common platform with a good VM with standard features, as opposed to the whatever-the-device-maker-decides-to-give-you that we have today).

But I totally agree with your assessment of the architecture of the current gen consoles compared with PC's. The architecture is very different, the 360 has 6 "processors" and the PS3 Cell has 8. The architectures are very good at processing raw data and straight line things (i.e. graphics, media, encoding, decoding, etc), but very poor at any kind of branching (i.e. AI, decision trees, etc), partially because of the multi-core architecture.

What llama64 says about the cross-platform libraries is true, though I suspect that's more a function of the kind of abstraction you're talking about with Rapidmind than a function of commonality of the platforms. While much of the games across platforms share a common code base, the libraries included are probably tuned for each platform and just maintain a common interface. There's probably code unique to each platform in each cross platform game, but keeping that to a minimum is important for the cross platform slat of the industry right now.

Ars Technica has some great articles on the architectures, though they get really technical and way beyond my level.

Assassin's Creed is a good example of the difference in architecture, plays fine on the 360 and PS3, neither of which would be considered up to even current top end PC standards, but they obviously didn't optimize it much for the PC as the PC version's requirements are astronomical: 3GB RAM recommended, 512MB video card recommended, 2.2GHz dual core processor recommended. The consoles can do more with less because of their architecture.

[Bobblehead]

Ars Technica has some great articles on the architectures, though they get really technical and way beyond my level.

I agree, many of the articles are way over my head, but it does give you an idea of what is happening, even if the significance of some of the material is beyond me.

I was actually talking about this with the friend I mentioned. I noted how Ars had an article on one of their competitors being bought out last fall; that is how the conversation started.

[Flames0910]

The electronic gaming industry is bigger than Hollywood (10 billion) and the music industry (15 billion) combined at over 25 billion. and its growing fast

[ZDogg]

Blizzard is awesome. Who else can boast that a game they created birthed a professional Korean gaming phenomenon?

I'm deliberately timing the purchase of a new PC in line with Starcraft 2. I'm REALLY looking forward to that game.
I'm super excited for Stacraft II as well and plan to do the same thing. I got my last computer at the same time as Warcraft III and it made my experience even better. Infact, I am still using the same machine and still playing Warcraft III six years later....:bag:

I love Blizzard Real Time Strategy games, its basically Chess for the 21st century. Lets just hope Starcraft II comes out within the next year.