The games industry hasn't had much luck getting MMOs off the ground on consoles, with Square Enix's Final Fantasy XI proving a rare exception to the rule. At DICE last month, I asked World of Warcraft lead producer J. Allen Brack what was stopping the genre from transitioning over.
"I think there's a lot of reasons," said Brack. "There's not one thing. One is, it takes a long time to develop an MMO. The lifecycle of consoles being what they are, you have to really time when your console's going to come out, what its projected lifecycle is going to be with when your game is going to be, which is challenging."
"In the case of WoW, we talk about it all the time," he said. "How would we bring WoW to the console?"
Brack immediately pointed to one huge problem: World of Warcraft's "footprint" (the total hard drive size for the game, patches and all) is around 15GBs. That's a pretty big memory commitment. Some Xbox 360s, for example, don't even have a hard drive and many of them are limited to just 20GB.