Issues face move to consoles for Blizzard

Blizzard is best known for making RPGs and MMOs designed for PCs, but similar to other companies in the industry, there may be a forthcoming transition to console gaming.  There are several major issues that must be tackled before the transition takes place, but the gaming industry has seen a larger prominence  on console gaming.

The current gaming industry allowing MMOs and similar games to Blizzard’s World of Warcraft to be ported to console is rather poor at the moment, but the next-generation of game consoles will greatly help, according to Rob Pardo, Blizzard Vice President of Game Design.

The main problems facing an MMO transition from PC to game consoles all seem to be hardware-related, and must be dealt with: 

"Do you ship a keyboard and a mouse?  Do you try to make a game that [adapts] to all the different controls and buttons?  You’d have to eat almost the entire hard drive, and there are Xbox consoles… that don’t have hard drives.  So that’s a big issue."

Furthermore, each WoW patch that fixes bugs and adds additional content tend to be large upgrades that are possible on the PC, but it’s unsure if those same updates could happen on any of the three next-generation consoles.

Blizzard’s StarCraft: Ghost video game, which has been in development for many years, was supposed to be the company’s first gaming experience for the console.  The game is still reportedly in development, but it’s most likely that the company’s next console offering will either be a port of WoW — which I find rather unlikely — or a game designed specifically for the console.

As a long-time Blizzard gaming fan, I’d obviously like the company to continue its focus on PC gaming, but understand Blizzard can’t shy away from the money to be made in the console market.  The video games normally help game makers earn additional revenue, and there is less risk of game piracy hurting the bottom dollar.