Tag Archives: paul sams

Warren Spector and Blizzard COO Paul Sams are collaborating with The University of Texas at Austin to found the school’s first academic video game program led by industry veterans. The Denius-Sams Gaming Academy will open its doors Fall 2014.

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Diablo III on consoles will feature “a true Blizzard-level experience,” company COO Paul Sams has told CVG.

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Blizzard COO Paul Sams has tikd CVG he already knows what the next World of Warcraft expansion entails, and that SVP of creative development Chris Metzen and his team already “know what they’re going to be doing for multiple expansions ahead.”

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Blizzard COO Paul Sams has said the firm is offering Diablo III free to World of Warcraft Annual Pass subscribers as a way to “show an amount of gratitude,” to the player base.

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Blizzard COO Paul Sams had said the company’s next-gen MMO, codenamed Titan, will be its “next big thing” following the release of Diablo III.

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Blizzard COO Paul Sams has said the company’s next MMO will be “more complementary than competitive.”

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Blizzard CEO Paul Sams has said that rushing products to retail to meet financial milestones can undermine a development team’s work.

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When we cash our paycheques, we usually go out and buy a new game. When Blizzard COO Paul Sams cashes his paycheque, he buys a team to play a game for him. And not just any game, either. Professional frikkin’ football.

Sams, according to a post on the Steelers’ official website, is one of ten new shareholders for the popular NFL team. Apparently, Sams has “coached youth athletics for the past decade,” so he’s not a total fish out of water here, either.

Is this ActiBlizz’s sneak attack on EA’s Madden franchise? Crafty, Sams. Very crafty.

More through the link.

Thanks, Joystiq.

During BlizzCon, Paul Sams, chief operating officer for Blizzard, sat down with IncGamers and talked a bit about how the company has changed over the years, especially with marketing.

“When I think about what we have in store, what we have done, and how big BlizzCon has become, let alone our products – I mean, World of Warcraft has over 11 million subscribers so the marketing and the types of marketing we do have expanded to try and support that.

“With licensing, I always joke with our team that it’s the snacking in between the meals. We don’t put out our videogames that often, we are very focused on making sure that they’re great when they come out so it takes a long time. Because we only put out one or so a year, those licensed products are the snack between the meals so that people who are really geeked up about Blizzard and these franchises have a way to kind of feed that hunger.”

The full interview is posted below the break.

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During last night’s Acti Blizz Q4 earnings call, Blizzard COO Paul Sams said that, “Blizzard intends on delivering one frontline release per year. I think you can see in our numbers that that is contemplated.”

Everyone knows that Blizzard is hard at work on Diablo III and StarCraft II along with the oft-teased “unannounced MMO”. Everyone also knows that time constraints are not an issue with the firm, as it’ll only release a game “when it is done”. So what’s coming out from Blizzard in 2009?

“As it relates to what title we’re releasing this year, we’re not prepared to say,” said Sams.

It’s StarCraft II, Paul.

Blizzard COO Paul Sams has told VG247 that the prospect of a Star Wars BioWare MMO in the shape of The Old Republic isn’t threatening to his firm.

“No, we don’t feel threatened by them,” he said. “We actually think that having additional players in the market is positive, because it’s going to introduce a broader group of people than maybe are available right now.”

Sams also said that, despite the fact EA has a “spectacular” developer-license pairing in BioWare and Star Wars, the logistics of bringing a large MMO to market are “easy to underestimate”.

“The good news that they have going for them is that they have a great development team, and they have a great license that they get to build their game around, so i think that’s spectacular,” he said.

“But, I think it’s really easy to underestimate how difficult the rest of it is. We went into this being the world leader in online games, and we still got our ass handed to us countless times.

“I think they’ve got a couple of the key foundational elements there, which is spectacular developer, spectacular franchise, and they should not underestimate the other items. I don’t think there’s anyone better at those other things than Blizzard. It’s going to be hard to do the catch up work on that.”

Both LucasArts and EA were very clear about the fact that they believe The Old Republic can have a userbase larger than World of Warcraft’s, speaking at the recent announcement event in California.

No date has been put on the launch of The Old Republic as yet.

Charges to make post-roll changes to World of Warcraft characters are supposed to be a “deterrent” to constant use, Blizzard told Eurogamer yesterday, similar to the existing name change and server transfer services.

“When you create your character, often times you wish you’d done things differently. You wish you were on a different realm, you wish you’d had a different name or you wish you’d chosen a different look and feel to your character,” said Blizzard COO Paul Sams.

“This is a way for [players] to be able to do that, but it’s something that’s taking a lot of time and energy for us to be able to put in place. We also think that it’s important to have some consistency in the game, we don’t want people changing their look and feel every day.”

The functionality has been added along with the launch of Wrath of the Lich King.

More through the link.

World of Warcraft expansion Wrath of the Lich King has launched in London to a heaving crowd at Oxford Street’s HMV.

Thousands queued outside the store to welcome in the second add-on to the world’s favourite MMO – find our gallery from the night here – with the usual assortment of cosplayers, children, grey gamers and the core in heavy attendance.

Full article and loads more photos after the break.

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Speaking to Videogamer in London today ahead of the launch of Wrath of the Lich King tonight, Blizzard COO Paul Sams categorially denied the firm was looking to exploit StarCraft II will it’s three-pronged release strategy.

“The fact of the matter is, it’s absolutely, positively untrue about us trying to stretch it out and milk it,” he said.

“People think that it was a monetary driven decision. I can absolutely, positively tell you, with 100 percent certainty, that that was not part of the conversation.

“I guarantee it. I give my word. There was never, ever a conversation where we said, ‘let’s do this because we’re going to make more money’. I guarantee it. As a matter of fact the sole reason we did it was because we thought it was going to be a better experience. Anybody that says otherwise is not correct. It is absolutely not what we did it for.”

Clear enough? More through there.

Blizzard COO Paul Sams said today that growth was still important to World of Warcraft, and that the game is still seeing “meaningful” increases in subscriber numbers.

“I think growing the subscribership is important,” he told VG247, speaking in London ahead of tonight’s launch of Wrath of the Lich King.

“People leave. Taking a moment to talk about things from a company business perspective, continuing to grow is important if we want to maintain our subscribership.”

Lich King would mean higher figures, the exec said, but he refused to predict how many would be added to the game’s current 11 million players.

“I don’t know where we’ll land, but I do think the subscribership will go up,” he said.

Sams went on to say that Blizzard is working on a number on plans to make WoW more attractive to new subs and those considering leaving, including major upgrades to the game’s customer services.

“Ultimately we’re trying to do a lot of different things to refine the experience.

“We have a variety of other initiatives that we’re working on, trying to evolve the service to hopefully cause people to want to stay.

“We have some big initiatives that we’re working on with customer service, to try to deliver best of class customer service as well, which I think we do pretty good today, but not anywhere near where we want to.”

The boss conceded that WoW’s growth had slowed, but was still going North. Expansion releases, he said, provided a big boost.

“We have a variety of things that we desire to do, and as it relates to growth, yeah, it isn’t growing today as fast as it was in the first year, or something, but we’re still continuing to see meaningful growth,” he said.

“When we launched Burning Crusade we saw some pretty significant amount of growth because a lot of people returned and we found that a lot of new players came as well, interestingly enough, so we continue to see growth product by product.”

Wrath of the Lich King, World of Warcraft’s second major expansion, launches globally tonight. Keep watching for updates from the flagship London release on Britain’s happening Oxford Street.

Speaking ahead of tonight’s launch of WoW expansion Wrath of the Lich King, Blizzard COO Paul Sams has told VG247 that its second major MMO – already in development – is going to be a “next generation” title that sounds like a substantial departure from World of Warcraft.

“We want to create a great game,” he said. “Something that’s cool, and new, and different, and kind of next generation in terms of look and feel and gameplay. That’s a challenging endeavour.”

Sams indicated that the project is in the very early stages of development.

“We’re definitely at the beginning, in the first half of development,” said the exec, explaining that Blizzard tends to work to a two-half process when creating new games.

“When we’re building a new game from the ground up, what happens is that it’s slow going for the first bit, while the team goes round and round and round figuring out how it’s going to look and feel, what the player experience is and what the differentiators are, and then the speed at which we then bring in the contet and polish and actually get to the finish line… I think the second half of the process is always substantially faster than the first half of product development,” he said.

Sams said when we’re going to see first mention of the game.

“I don’t know yet,” he answered when asked for an announcement date.

“For us, we want to make sure that the gameplay and the experience that the players are going to have is fleshed out quite a bit.

“The last thing we want to do is say, ‘Hey we’re doing this,’ and everyone says, ‘Oh cool,’ and then we change things completely. We want to have a level of confidence that the direction we’re going in the right one, and that it’s polished enough to be able to show something, also. And we’re not in either of those places yet.”

Sams said he expected the process of getting the new MMO into the public domain would be challenging one, but growing WoW has taught the company a huge amount.

“I think we’re going to get a lot of bumps and bruises along the way,” he said.

“The good news is that we’re been able to do this with World of Warcraft, and so we have a lot of experience, so hopefully we’ve learnt a tremendous amount.

“Not to mention that before WoW launching we were the world leader in online gaming with Battle.net. We have a lot of experience, and so hopefully that’s going to benefit us as [we bring the game to market].”

Wrath of the Lich King is released at midnight tonight. Watch this space from the flagship London launch event.

Wrath of the Lich King launches in the US and Europe tonight, and Blizzard’s shipping in COO Paul Sams for interviews and crowd-pleasing at the London HMV event.

Associate producer Lee Sparks will also be “in the house,” as will thousands of people dressed as blood elves and warlocks.

We’ll be there too. Start looking for updates in the early evening: it sounds as though it’s going to be a bit bonkers, to be honest.

Speaking to GI, Blizzard’s Paul Sams has said that more than half of the people that cited leaving World of Warcraft to try Warhammer Online have no returned.

“We’ve seen a significant number of people, well over half, that cited Warhammer as their reason for leaving – they’ve already returned,” said Sams.

“It surprises me because Mythic is a very good company and it doesn’t surprise me at the same time because it’s really hard [in the MMO space].”

Sams added, however, that WAR was, in his opinion, the most likely to succeed in the fantasy online market in the face of WoW.

“I think Warhammer is best positioned to succeed out of the various products that have come out thus far since World of Warcraft has come out,” he said.

“It seems to be a good game, certainly a great company, Mythic and Mark [Jacobs] over there and his team, they’re very, very talented.”

More through the link.

Speaking to Gamasutra, Blizzard COO Paul Sams has hit out at Microsoft for not focusing enough on PC gaming.

“Well, their gaming focus is very much on the 360,” he said. “And that makes sense, cause they’re a hardware manufacturer as well as a software developer. And so they’ve got a lot of money and investment tied up in that system.

“Certainly they have a lot in Windows. And Windows is a system that supports all the business applications as well as games.

“And I kind of look at it and say to myself, and I think similarly to Rob, is that it would be great if they put more emphasis on the Windows operating system, certainly probably the most prominent operating system in the world. Even more so than console boxes.”

More through the link. The full interview’s going to be published soon.

Blizzard’s COO Paul Sams, speaking to GI at the company’s Worldwide Invitational in Paris last weekend, said that the reason Blizzard games don’t appear on consoles is because Blizzard games aren’t appropriate for consoles. The man has a point.

“It’s really an issue of the games that we’re making,” he said. “I think a lot of companies and a lot of management teams sit down and look at the Wii as being popular, or that the Xbox 360 is doing well, and try to figure out what their product plans will be for that platform.

“We don’t care. Our attitude is, what game will we make? This is the game we want to make, so what is the appropriate platform for that game? And if the answer is PC only, then we’ve proven that we’re comfortable with that.”

Lots more through the link.