Blizzard senior VP Frank Pearce.

FEB. 17, 2010 • At DICE 2010, Blizzard Entertainment senior vice president Frank Pearce told G4TV that the developer would like Battle.net to evolve into the gaming space social equivalent of Facebook.

Impact: This helps explain the recent forced transition of World of Warcraft accounts into new Battle.net accounts. Of course, Blizzard is very successful, but even in the gaming space Battle.net’s numbers are somewhat limited for what is required for social networking because its questionable how many WoW users even think about Battle.net other to log onto the game.  There are all kinds of services in the game space that already seem to have more compelling hooks into becoming a Facebook like social network for games.  World of Warcraft is pushing the 12 million user level, but a large portion of those users are in Asian countries.  Services like Steam, Xfire, Xbox Live, the PlayStation Network already have more users in just English speaking countries.  Of course, this all assumes the market is demanding a centralized game social network.