Ryan Winzen’s rise to virtual folk hero status is proof that a lot can happen in just three days. It all started with a pre-alpha YouTube trailer for his pet project: a Starcraft II mod called World of Starcraft. You can already see where this is going. The pre-alpha video demoed a suite of selectable [...]

News item If you doubt the viability of cosmetic fob microtransactions, Blizzard has 220,000 reasons why you’re wrong. That’s how many people bought a Pandaren Monk pet from the Blizzard store. The MTV Multiplayer blog crunched the numbers from Blizzard’s Make-a-Wish charity drive, which announced a $1.1 million take for sick kids. At $5 a [...]

Kiss your loved ones goodbye, because Activision-Blizzard is about to steal them away. In a conference call to discuss its fourth quarter 2009 results, the development/publishing giant mentioned that the Starcraft 2 beta would open this month. The long-awaited sequel to Blizzard’s seminal real-time strategy game has been about a decade in the making, so [...]

Jeez, it’s been a heck of a week for merged publisher/developer Activision Blizzard. First, the company announced it would be delaying Starcraft II into next year. They tried to ease investor fears by pointing out that the rest of the 2010 schedule is still on track, but it doesn’t seem to have helped. Between the [...]