An discussion with Itzik Ben Bassat, Blizzard Entertainment’s vice president of business development and international, earlier this year established that World of Warcraft won’t be coming to the PSP or the Xbox 360 anytime soon. Bassat elaborated that, “when we come to consider the new game we’re developing, we’d have to take that into consideration and ask ourselves if we want to develop the games for consoles and PC or keep it PC only. Online PC gaming is still in its very early stages, and it needs to be developed further to provide opportunities of a scale which will be interesting to us.”



Gossip flourished back in 2005 when WoW’s population was blowing minds at just one half of its present levels, that a console version of Blizzard’s massively multiplayer online game was all but inevitable. The prospect of a Blizzard-produced console game was seemingly once and for all dispelled with the mysterious declaration that all console development had stopped and those working on console projects had been “redeployed.”



Blizzard went on the record following the recent merger of their parent company, Vivendi Games, with Activision, to note that it will not be changing its focus to include console titles. Mike Morhaime, president of Blizzard, said in a conference call on Monday, “we currently don’t have any plans right now on the console side.” He went on to explain that the company might think about console development in the future if it “made sense.”



If the merger is approved, the new unit is expected to leapfrog over Electronic Arts to become the leading independent third-party publisher on the planet, with estimated joint revenues in excess of $3.8 billion. That sizeable sum is dwarfed by the estimated combined value of Activision Blizzard’s assets – a colossal $18.9 billion. The union makes perfect sense, although it’s unexpected.



So you can stop harassing Blizzard about a console version of WoW, the poor guys must be sick of it by now. A Blizzard rep has posted this response to what has to be about the millionth time someone has asked them this:



We’re madly in love with the PC and Mac platforms, and there are no plans at this time to bring World of Warcraft to any other platform.



Based on that announcement, it looks like we’re going to have to continue our normal arrangement of playing the game on our home computers. This is gloomy news for those who had been planning on playing the game from their sofas. If you’re really set on playing WoW in your living room, you could always hook up your PC there. It might not be the easiest thing to do, but at least you’ll be on the sofa.



WoW has always been a bestseller – in an industry where selling 1 million copies of a title is a rare feat, Blizzard shipped 4.5 million copies of Warcraft III to retailers for its launch date of July 3, 2002, each with a retail price of $59.99 or $74.99 (for the collectors’ edition). Diablo II, another effort by the same company, once held the world record for the quickest game to sell 1 million copies.