Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime had a few words to say about the challenges of launching an MMO video game.

“I think everyone who hasn’t done it will probably underestimate the logistics behind it - we certainly did,” he tells Gamesindustry.biz.  “You focus on the things you are used to but you don’t necessarily realise how difficult it is to scale up quickly and with an MMO you have to factor in providing 24/7 customer service, multiple languages… and that’s not just hiring all those people to do customer service because internally within the organisation you still have to support your employees and that’s a whole lot of management infrastructure that doesn’t exist before the launch.”

He went on to say that the company still plans to release expansions to World of Warcraft annually, but that the development cycle is taking a little longer than a year.  The next expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, will be released on November 13.  “I think you guys are going to find with Wrath of the Lich King that it’s going to be worth the wait,” says Morhaime.

The company isn’t rushing to move into the console market, either.  Although they do have plans to approach console gaming, Morhaime insists that their merger with Activision is enabling them to enter that market when they’re ready.  They’re not particularly worried about other MMO games getting there first: “Actually Blizzard has rarely been the first to create a genre, unless you consider Diablo a new genre, nobody said that at the time, they all said it wasn’t new.”

Blizzard is known to be developing another MMO title in addition to its ongoing work on World of Warcraft.  The nature of this title is not yet known, as the company is obviously being very secretive about the project.

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