Blizzcast is riveting but like everything Blizzard, staggeringly late

By Stephen Munn | August 14, 2008

Blizzard’s been putting out their own podcast now since January, and the fourth episode just hit the RSS feed a couple of days ago. The production values in the podcast are astounding, featuring lots of music from the various Blizzard games and interviews with multiple Blizzard staffers in every episode. Their podcasts are hitting about two months apart at this point, which would be fine considering Blizzard’s legendary ethic of “it’s released when it’s ready” save for the fact that episode four ended with the statement that next episode they’d talk about “the newly announced Diablo III.” Newly announced? It was announced on June 28th.

I realize now that only Episode 4 appeared after that announcement, but with that kind of a time delay between that announcement and the release of Episode 4, it’s kind of stunning. Do we have to wait until October to hear content on the podcast about Diablo III?

I’m going to take a step back momentarily because I’m not a World of Warcraft fan and the podcast has been almost exclusively about that so far, save for some talk of Starcraft II. I’m not giving Blizzard a fair shake here. When I first started mixing our podcasts, it took me hours to put one out and they sounded pretty poor. Things have improved quite a bit here but I’m still far beneath what they’re accomplishing in a podcast, and that may be the issue. Podcast throughput really starts to happen when you realize you need to let some stuff slide, and that may be beneath a team like Blizzard.

I mean, let’s look at the show notes for example. They’ve completely transcribed the entire podcast, word for word, complete with time signatures. Everything’s color coded.