Bill Roper

GS: One the GameSpy message boards, as well as the Blizzard message boards, you’ve been getting strong reactions from PC gamers about Ghost. Many are screaming things like, "Why are you abandoning us?!?" What’s your response to this? Is there anything you want to say to PC gamers to try and assuage them?

BR: We’ve definitely seen a lot of comments from PC gamers concerned that we’re abandoning PC gaming. I think that the important thing to remember is that even though we are a relatively small company, we do have enough teams to work on more than one product at a time. We were working on World of Warcraft at the same time we were working on Warcraft III. One of the reasons we wanted to do a joint development with Nihilistic is that we didn’t have enough people on our own to do a big console game. I guess the important thing to remember is that one project doesn’t necessarily impact another.

So the work on StarCraft: Ghost doesn’t impact the World of Warcraft team. It doesn’t impact what the Warcraft III team is doing next. It doesn’t preclude us from doing anything else in the StarCraft universe. We certainly don’t see StarCraft: Ghost as being something that replaced StarCraft II. It’s just as likely that StarCraft II will be released at the same time as Ghost. We had two Warcraft teams working at the same time. I think it’s a difficult thing to look at. We even see big assumptions based on our web site. We’ll pull something off and people will go, "Oh my God, they pulled material from the web site. Now the game is being delayed!"