No WoW for consoles

World of Warcraft is a cow with golden milk, but despite its obvious grazing success, it definitely won't be seeing the light of day on Xbox 360 or PS3.

Blizzard's vice president of business development, Itzik Ben Bassat, told our sister site GamesIndustry.biz that consoles still lacked the accomplishments of PC, specifically in the online department, which would have to develop further before it would appeal to the developer.

"We are not going to develop WoW for consoles. WoW was designed for PC and I think it will stay that way," he said. "Online console 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. "

However, he was far from rejecting the merits of next-generation consoles, heaping tankards of praise on Microsoft's Live Arcade offering - though he admits he hasn't seen as much of the PS3.

"We have been talking to Microsoft and Sony," he added. "Personally I love XBLA - I think Microsoft has done an excellent job developing it and there are lots of exciting things there."

"With my colleagues at Microsoft I can give my opinion on what I've seen. I'm very impressed, I'm impressed by the people who do it, and the service is very easy, very intuitive. I love it."

High praise, enough to get us pondering a downloadable offering from Blizzard, but we won't get our hopes up.

He also confirmed that World of Warcraft will continue to grow by an expansion a year, as Blizzard has a list of features it wants to include that was much too extensive to fit into The Burning Crusade.

And, as for what Blizzard do with all those chests full of gold, well, it uses it to fuel its creativity (as if we believe that).

"It's not like we're sitting around collecting the cash. Blizzard is a gamers' company; we do what we do out of love for the games. We want to be proud, and creativity is what drives us," he declared.

You can read the first part of the interview on GamesIndustry.biz now, and the second part will be available tomorrow.

Alternatively you can immerse yourself in our review of The Burning Crusade, Blizzard's first expansion pack for World of Warcraft.