Diablo 3

Recently, I posted an IGN interview with Paul Sams, Blizzard’s COO.

Now comes another – Mike Morhaime, Blizzard’s President answers a few questions about upcoming games (and possibly Diablo 3).

Q: Do you have a war chest now that you can use to do other things?
A: We have a number of other projects in the works. We can’t talk about them yet. They haven’t been announced.

Q: In the MMO space?
A: In general, broadly.

A few questions later, we get a console question.

Q: Starcraft Ghost?
A: Starcraft Ghost is on ice.
Q: Why?
A: It became pretty clear to us that we were late in the platform transition. We were on the wrong platform and were quickly running out of time to iterate and polish the game. We decided to pull the plug on working on old generation and we shifted all of our resources to working on next-generation platforms. There were a lot of things that we learned working on it. We’ll hopefully be able to leverage a lot of that with our next-generation games.

Q: Do you have a chance to do something like Microsoft did with Kameo, which started on the GameCube and moved to the Xbox before it was published on the Xbox 360?
A: At this point, we’re evaluating all of our options.

I think the key phrase here is “we shifted all of our resources to working on next-generation platforms”. As with everything Blizzard, you’ll find little more than a few vague statements but it seems like two things stand out:

1) There’s still a pretty good chance for Diablo 3 to be a MMO
2) Games are still being developed for the new gen of consoles (like Xbox 360 and PS3).

I really hope they don’t go after cheap video game movies like Doom.

When Paul Sams discussed extensions to the Diablo and Starcraft universes, he said that:

Some other companies get into the role of making just MMOs, but Blizzard lets the developers pick what they want to work on, and it’s not all MMOs…

This has fueled hopes that Diablo 3 might not be a MMO after all.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that World of Diablo is already registered as a trademark! I did a trademark search and here’s the result:

IC 009. US 021 023 026 036 038. G & S: Computer game software. FIRST USE: 20060715. FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: 20060715 IC 041. US 100 101 107. G & S: Entertainment services, namely, providing an on-line computer game. FIRST USE: 20060715. FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: 20060715″ as the use and “(APPLICANT) GENERAL COMPUTERS, INC. CORPORATION NEVADA 606 JOHNSON AVENUE, SUITE 18 BOHEMIA NEW YORK 11716

From what I can tell General Computers are a Chinese company with offices in the US (or it’s the other way around). They are coming out with a MMO called Twilight War : After the Fall.

I’m not sure HOW they have secured World of Diablo but it seems pretty obvious they plan to use it for a MMO. It could explain why Blizzard started buying all the Diablo 3 domains they could find!