Battlenet 2.0 to have Social Networking Features

Over the past few months, we’ve made a number of strategic decisions that reflect our commitment to product quality and the investments required to capture large new market opportunities. With this in mind, we are repositioning the release of Blizzard Entertainment’s Starcraft 2 into the first half of 2010 to coincide with the launch of our new Battlenet game service which will be ready early next year.

A true online destination platform, Battlenet will become the foundation for connecting the tens of millions of members of the Blizzard community in a social gaming network across all Blizzard’s future games. This will begin with World of Warcraft and Starcraft 2.

To put Battlenet into context, it will be a service similar to Xbox Live and it will leverage the technologies, infrastructure, and expertise that Blizzard has developed over the last decade in multi-player play and social networking. And as Mike Morhaime will discuss later in the call, there is no better opportunity to launch this strategic initiative than through the launch of Starcraft 2.

The title is likely to be the most anticipated groundbreaking realtime strategy game of all time and the Battlenet platform is an investment in the future of gaming and an opportunity that we are uniquely positioned to capitalize on.

Today we have more people in more countries playing online games than any other company and we intend to continue our leadership position through franchises like Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft and Starcraft 2, as well as Activision Publishing’s Call of Duty franchise.

Another great area of opportunity for us is China. We continue to strengthen our position there with Blizzard Entertainment’s partnership with Netease, the premier China based videogame company. This is a long-term investment with a very capable and committed partner. Netease has already made significant investments in upgrading the technical infrastructure of the World of Warcraft service. In fact, from a quality of hardware and network perspective, China is our most advanced geography in technical capability. Mike will also give you more details about our progress in China later in the call.

- Blizzard

Source Activision Blizzard Q2 2009 Earnings Call Transcript Via SCSource

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blizzard, StarCraft 2

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