Greg Canessa is a former VP of PopCap Games and the project manager for Xbox Live Arcade. However, he left the most recent of these prestegious posts when he was offered to head up Blizzard's popular online service, Battle.net. Canessa has headed up the casual gamer base with Microsoft and has made a formidable name out of the Xbox 360's community. Thus, it would only seem natural that a pioneer in the world of inclusive online gaming would work for a publisher that is known for easy learning but difficult mastery.

At this year's BlizzCon, many fans were given a brief look at the upcoming layout of Battle.net 2.0, which was included in StarCraft II's loading screen. In an exclusive interview with Gamasutra on September 4th, Canessa explained some of his ideas for the future version of Battle.net, which will be launched simultaneously with StarCraft II's supposed launch next year.

In regards to Xbox Live and Steam, Canessa explained, "We feel like those are just scratching the surface of what a company like Blizzard -- with the critical mass of community, brands, and marketing position -- could do in building an online game service."

"The set of online game services we provided over there, whether it was GamerScore or TrueSkill matchmaking or achievements or any of those systems, had to be build with the fact that they were a platform in mind. Call of Duty and Lego Star Wars and Bejeweled all had to sit on that platform," Canessa commented. "To a certain extent, that drives how deeply or not deep you can integrate those game services with specific gaming scenarios. We were bound by that constraint. At Blizzard, we are not bound by that constraint, and that's actually one of the key aspects of the vision that attracted me to the company when Rob called."

"If you look at NPD with its old PC retail data -- yeah, it doesn't look good," he continued. "But it doesn't take into account the casual industry like non-retail revenue produced from digital distribution, casual games like PopCap, or revenue from massively multiplayer games like World of Warcraft."

Source: Gamasutra