“We wanted to have the capability to start doing some smaller, more experimental games,” said Pardo. “At Blizzard, each team has gotten bigger and bigger, and our dev cycles have gotten longer and longer, and the industry moves much faster than that. Even though we still are going to keep doing large games because that’s what we’re great at, we still wanted to build some new capability and experiment with some games that might turn into the next big thing.”

Hearthstone is a collectible card game that will appear on Mac and PC, and then on iPad, and it’ll be free to play, with additional content available either by earning it in-game or purchasing it. It’s the first brand-new property for Blizzard in quite some time, and quite a departure.

Blizzard’s chief creative officer Rob Pardo talks about the small team that’s working on the game, and how its development made Blizzard look very differently at creating a new property.