Posted on Tuesday, October 21 2008 @ 8:30 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Blizzard's Executive Vice President of Game Design Rob Pardo
said his firm is unaffected by recession, and he added the rest of the games industry will do fine as well:
"Historically for us, the game industry hasn’t been affected by recessions like a lot of other businesses. I think the reason for that is [that] games really offer some of the best entertainment value on the market," said Pardo.
"People might not want to go out to the movies and spend $100 for a couple of hours and then go to a restaurant. You can go home and pay $15 a month for 100 hours of entertainment if you’re staying at home more — and I think that’s one of the reasons why you don’t see games really go in the same recession as the rest of the economy a lot of times."
Blizzard currently has in excess of 10 million subscribers to World of Warcraft alone, each of whom have to buy the game and pay a monthly fee. The company is also currently working on the massively anticipated Diablo 3 and has announced plans to split the equally exciting new Starcraft game into three separate titles.
