The true measure of StarCraft’s success isn’t the number of copies it sold in its tenure as, arguably, the supreme real-time strategy game – although 12 million units is enough to turn many a publisher green. The real achievement of StarCraft was its enduring relevance. In Korea, millions of viewers have packed out stadiums and tuned in to watch the best players compete. Professional teams have had annual operating budgets that exceed USD $20 million and the top players have been on annual retainers that would be the envy of any New Zealand sports person, six-digit figures that surpass Morhaime’s own base salary. Had Blizzard not released StarCraft II last year, there’s no doubt we’d still be talking about these figures in the present tense.

Like all Blizzard games, the decision to produce the original StarCraft was a team effort, although Morhaime confesses "it's actually decided at multiple levels. We really try not to mandate to a team what game they should make. We're certainly involved in the conversation, but we feel like the team really has to be excited and passionate about the games they're making.

"Generally there are some ideas percolating in the company that we're already starting to think about when a team becomes available. Sometimes it's really obvious what game we should make, and sometimes it's not quite so obvious."

Blizzard hasn't always hit on the right formula out of the box. Morhaime continues: "In the case of World of Warcraft, after we shipped StarCraft Brood War, we started up a new team and they actually were working on a game very different to World of Warcraft, but they were struggling with defining the genre and the lore of their game, and about a year into it we all kind of asked ourselves if we were going to start over.

"Was the game they were making what we all thought they should be making? And everybody said no. That they would rather make something different. We all arrived at the same conclusion, that we wanted to make a massively multiplayer game in the Warcraft universe. So it wasn't that controversial. It was just the right thing in that particular case."

Enter the title that made Blizzard a household name. With a subscriber base of over 12 million, World of Warcraft has been a runaway success for the massively multiplayer online RPG genre.

Despite the overwhelming critical and financial success Warcraft has provided Blizzard with, the company is still challenged by its extensive fanbase at every turn. A recent proposal to require World of Warcraft forum users to identify themselves with their real names sparked furious debate online. "The amount of backlash and the volume of the backlash was surprising to some of us" admits Morhaime. "We neglected to consider how important anonymity is to some of the people that like to post. I think that we wound up in the right spot, and we do listen to what our players think, it's very important to us, and I'm very happy and very comfortable with where we ended up on that topic.

"But yeah, they were very loud and made their opinions known very clearly!"

In 2007, Activision revealed its intent to merge with fellow publisher Vivendi Games. Blizzard Entertainment (through a number of acquisitions stretching back to Davidson & Associates in the '90s) was a subsidiary of Vivendi at the time, which allowed Activision to join the two gaming entities together under one label: Activision Blizzard. Despite the merger, Blizzard has maintained its own corporate leadership and independence in design - unlike the ill-fated Sierra which was quickly scrapped from Activision's portfolio.

In 2010, Blizzard celebrated the simultaneous release of two major additions to its gaming portfolio: StarCraft II and the World of Warcraft expansion Cataclysm. Although StarCraft II may have had a protracted development phase, Morhaime "couldn't be happier with how well that game came out. It both evolved the genre and stayed true to the spirit of StarCraft, something really difficult to do."

Although World of Warcraft continues to form the bulk of the Blizzard fan-base, with over 12 million subscribers and two-thirds of the revenue generated by Activision Blizzard, the company is firmly committed to future development. A return to the Diablo franchise with the release of Diablo III is expected either this year or next, and Blizzard's as-yet unnamed massively multiplayer title (codenamed Titan) is expected to follow the next StarCraft II instalment in a few years.

Blizzard has survived where many, many other development studios have failed, primarily by a dogged insistence towards maintaining quality ahead of all else. Morhaime describes this philosophy best: "Two of our core values are 'Gameplay First' and 'Commit to Quality', and I think those really speak to our desire that every game we make lives up to the Blizzard level of quality that people expect from our games.

"It's a very iterative process, we don't get it right the first time a lot, and we'll go back and fix things, change things, redesign things. I think the talent and commitment from our development teams is very important, it's not something that just magically happens, it takes a lot of work, a lot of commitment and at the end of the day if it's not there, we continue iterating to get it right. I think all of those things are very important.

"If you don't have the right people and you don't have the right talent, and you don't have the right passion, then all the iterating in the world isn't necessarily going to get you there. You have to have all of those things in place, and then you have to understand what the path to get there is."

Click here to read the full transcript of our interview with Mike Morhaime.