Another day, another billion-dollar Blizzard franchise

Blizzard Entertainment had a lot of buzz about its newest game leading up to its European event at the Porte de Versailles event center in Paris. And fans weren’t disappointed with the announcement of its new Diablo III computer game.

That might make a lot of others snore. But with the pending merger of Activision and Vivendi Games (of which Blizzard is a division) about to close, the unveiling of another chapter in another huge franchise shows yet again that Blizzard is the powerhouse of video games.

The company told fans it would ship the game “when it’s ready” and only described the art style of the upcoming game.  As usual, it’s taking forever to get the game done. Blizzard has a team of 50 to 55 people working on it and it has been in production for about four years. That’s the norm for Blizzard, which relentlessly iterates on its games until it feels they’re just right. You can’t argue with such perfectionism. The World of Warcraft online multiplayer game has more than 10 million subscribers.

Blizzard’s Diablo III will be a fantasy real-time role-playing game for the PC and the Mac. The game play? You basically crush as many demons from hell as possible. There is only one strategy to compete with a Blizzard game these days: stay out of the way.