Irvine-based video game maker Blizzard Entertainment Inc. will break new ground next year with the release of three games.
Blizzard is the largest software maker in Orange County, and employs about 1,700 here. It had $1.65 billion in revenue last year, with its World of Warcraft and StarCraft games leading the way.
The company plans to release new versions of both of those games, and a new entry called Diablo 3, next year.
“We have not done that before,” Rob Pardo, Bliz-zard’s executive vice president of game design, said at the company’s BlizzCon fanfest at the Anaheim Convention Cen-ter earlier this month.
Diablo 3 is expected to hit the market first, ac-cording to Pardo.
The game, which has been in development since 2006, was slated for release this year but delayed to extend testing, Chief Executive Michael Morhaime said at the time.
“We’re really focused on getting that game-play right,” Pardo said.
BlizzCon
Blizzard announced plans to release its second game of next year—the fourth expansion of World of Warcraft—during the opening ceremony at BlizzCon, which drew more than 25,000 fans on Oct. 22 and 23.
World of Warcraft counts more than 12 million users. Blizzard’s customers pay about $40 for the game and $15 a month to play it online. The game features two fictional races fighting for control of a fantasy world.
Blizzard plans to follow with the latest in its StarCraft II series, subtitled Heart of the Swarm. The storyline will focus on Kerrigan, the former queen of Blades.
StarCraft II sells for about $60 and is free to play online once the software is purchased.
The three new releases slated for 2012 hold the potential to bring a big lift in sales, based on recent history.
2010 marked the first time in more than a decade that the company had two major game releases. The new releases quickly contributed to a record year for sales.
World of Warcraft: Cataclysm was released in December 2010 and broke records for the company, selling more than 3 million copies in the first 24 hours.
Blizzard sold more than 1.5 million copies of StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty in the first 48 hours of its July 2010 release, setting a record for games of its type.
China Sales
Blizzard didn’t release a new title or expansion set this year in the U.S. Instead, the company relied on sales of Cataclysm and Wings of Liberty to drive revenue, seeking growth in China between big releases.
China is one of the largest markets for StarCraft II, a real-time strategy game in which three races face off in a science-fiction world.
The game, played on computers with others over the Internet, was released in China in the first quarter, about six months behind other markets.
In mid-July, Blizzard released Cataclysm, the latest version of its flagship game, in China.
Blizzard, a unit of Santa Monica-based Ac-tivision Blizzard Inc., reported second-quarter sales of $313 million, up 14% from a year earlier. It posted an operating profit of $135 million, down 20% from a year earlier.
Activision is expected to report third-quarter earnings Nov. 8.
Blizzard is ultimately owned by France’s Vivendi SA. Vivendi bought Activision in 2008 and combined it with Blizzard in a deal valued at around $10 billion.
Gauntlet
Blizzard games go through a gauntlet of prototypes, testing, tweaking and more testing before release.
Programmers begin deliberation on the next expansion pack of a title during the latter stages of development of its predecessor, according to Pardo.
In some instances “the wish list ends up being the brainstorm list for future expansion sets,” he said.
Blizzard uses fewer programmers than its competitors on blockbuster titles, which tends to prolong development. In most cases, about 100 Blizzard programmers in Irvine develop a game, compared to upward of 300 for others in the industry, Pardo said.
Expansions typically take the company between 18 months and two years to develop, according to Pardo.
