ANAHEIM--Thanks to World of Warcraft and its stable of AAA blockbusters, Blizzard has become a dominant player in the gaming industry. Just witness the fact that when Vivendi Universal Games and Activision merged earlier this year to become the largest third-party video game publisher in the world, the new corporate entity named itself Activision Blizzard. So at Blizzcon, Blizzard’s big convention for its fans, we had a chance to sit down with Frank Pearce, one of the co-founders of the company and its executive vice president, to find out what’s next for the giant.

The last few years have been one of huge growth for the company, which now has approximately 3,000 employees worldwide now. Pearce noted that the vast majority of these employees are dedicated to supporting World of Warcraft, the MMORPG that has more than 10 million paying subscribers around the world.

"World of Warcraft requires constant care and feeding in terms of creating content," he said. "Historically, we’d have a development team that would roll from one game to the next and might switch franchises. So the development team that created Warcraft 3 is the development that’s working on StarCraft II. But with World of Warcraft, we can’t take that development team and really do anything else with them other than continue to create World of Warcraft content."

"This is also a situation where we’ve got publically announced games in development for all three of our franchises, which is really exciting because we’re really passionate about our franchises."

While some might take the fact that Blizzard, a company that in its history only worked on one or two games at a time, is now working on three major projects as sign that it’s working to please its Activision Blizzard shareholders, Pearce noted that the company began work on all the games before the merger. "A lot of it had to do with odd timing and coincidence; the Diablo III product was far enough along that we felt it was prudent to publically announce it; StarCraft II was already in development and announced." The merger itself has had some changes, mainly on the corporate side, such as finance and human resources.

We asked Pearce whether Blizzard will have an original IP coming down the pipe? "It’s always a possibility. One of the biggest factors is the product that the development teams want to make; the development teams play an integral role in determining the product that they’re going to be working on next. If a development team is available and freed up and they had a really compelling idea in the context of a new intellectual property, we would certainly be interested in exploring it. At the same time, there’s a lot of people who love the existing franchises."

What of World of Warcraft’s lifespan, especially considering a number of first-generation MMOs are still going a decade after a launch? "We’d be really excited if it could enjoy a lifespan of ten years of more." Is Blizzard thinking of its next MMO? "Well, the large majority of the developers are devoted to World of Warcraft."

Some waves were made when it was revealed that Blizzard had signed a movie deal with Legendary Pictures. "There’s not much to report on the movie. We signed with Legendary, and we’re iterating on the screenplay, but I don’t think we’ve settled on a final screenwriter and they haven’t settled on a director or anything… It’s definitely that something that we want to take the time to get right; it’s more important that we do it right than we do it under a specific timeline." He did say that they were talking with Legendary about whether the other franchises lend themselves to the big screen. "We certainly think all of them do."