At the Game Developers Conference, Rob Pardo admitted that there were talks with Microsoft about the Xbox 360 implementation of Blizzard games. ( as reported ) Other Sources: [1]

Now Pardo gave his colleagues from Industry Gamers an interview in which he went down a little on the console version of Blizzard titles.

Rob Pardo

Currently there were some problems with the controls accordingly. In order to bring PC games on a console, you need suitable input devices. In addition, there were problems with the hard drive size, and the updates in the case of fee-based MMOs like World of Warcraft very well with the payment system, where Microsoft and Sony, of course, want to get a piece of the pie.

It remains an open question whether we still see a Diablo 3 Implementation on the XBox 360.

Industry Gamers: We've yet to see a blockbuster MMO take off in the console space. Sony Online Entertainment is going to be bringing its MMOs to the PS3. What about Blizzard? You said you talked with Microsoft?

Rob Pardo: Microsoft has shown us some stuff they have in development and they asked us our opinion about it - that's all that was. But as far as MMOs on consoles, there's a lot of challenges. I'd say challenge # 1 is the input device. So if you're going to port a game like WoW how does that work? Do you ship a keyboard and a mouse? Do you try to make a game that [ADAPTS] to all the different controls and buttons? That's a porting issue. The bigger issue would be things like hard drives. I think WoW now is about 10 gigs and we're always pushing out more content. That's something cloud computing could eventually solve, but in the current generation of consoles that's a lot to deal with. You'd have to eat almost the entire hard drive, and there are Xbox consoles [sold to consumers] that do not have hard drives. So that's a big issue.

Another big issue is how to actually do patches because the certification process is pretty arduous to do that. I know that's something Microsoft is trying to work out so you can do more updates and the certification process is faster, but it's not going to be nearly as fast as we can do it. We just put it through our QA department and upload to our servers. Then ..., the other big issue is the business model. Right now, Microsoft and Sony charge platform fees for retail, but if you do an MMO there and it's subscription-based, they're going to want a cut of the subscription revenue too, and so that becomes a hurdle. So there's definitely a lot of hurdles right now for doing MMOs on a console, but it all can be overcome and I think in the next generation of consoles it'll be much easier.

Of course, the PS3 version of Diablo would be interesting. Activision Blizzard CEO Bob Kotick announced but now read that one at the price policy of Sony about it, to pull back from the PS3 business. ( source ) It remains to be seen how Sony responds to such announcements.

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