GAMING BLEND

If you're planning to become a professional Diablo 3 player, you may want to revise your career plans. Blizzard president Michael Morhaime says that the company doesn't intend to turn the action RPG into an eSport.

"We don't have plans to make Diablo 3 an eSport. Diablo 3 was never really designed to be an eSport, and not every game necessarily needs to be an eSport," Morhaime said during a press conference at the Battle.net World Championship in Shanghai (via TeamLiquid).

Blizzard's other two current games, StarCraft 2 and World of Warcraft, both have a major presence on the eSports scene. Interestingly, while SC2 was designed for eSports, WoW wasn't. The Arena PvP that now fuels intense global competition in the latter was added to the game years after its launch.

Diablo 3 will be adding PvP arenas in Patch 1.1. This would've presumably been the basis of eSports for that game. Morhaime says that they may do competitive events for D3 at future BlizzCons, but that professional tournaments are unlikely.

"In order to do that, you really need to get everything right and you have to have the depth of strategy, you have to look at making sure that the strategies that are successful are balanced, and fun, and entertaining to watch, and all those things."

It's tough to judge how suitable D3 would be for eSports with PvP not even in the game yet. However, one potential problem might be match length. D2 PvP duels are typically very quick. That's not really a viewer-friendly competition.

Patch 1.1 hasn't been dated by Blizzard. The most recent update for the game was Patch 1.05, so it's possible that PvP is still months away.