Pet battles and tablet-based gaming

With tablets and smartphones being so popular nowadays and only growing in popularity in the future, it seems like blizzard has their eyes set on expanding in this market. That is what pet battles are for. They are to set the foundation for the future of tablet based MMO features. I am sure there will be a pet battle mobile application coming soon. This will require a subscription of cores, an additional fee.

I think this is a smart move for blizzard, because pet battles are relatively easy to implement, and it gives something for people to do which is another reason to keep their subscription. Implementing pet battles takes a lot less work than implementing dungeons and raids, and as the blizzard workforce moves on to tighten rather than World of Warcraft, the developers can simply turn out content for pet battles rather than more meaningful content for it dungeons and raids. And yet people will still be happy because they are so into the pet battles.

This is a smart move on blizzard's part, but for how long will it last? Will people see through the superficiality of the strategy? We all started playing WoW because there was no other game like it that contains such immersive worlds for characters to explore. But these big worlds take a lot of time and resources to develop and those resources could be allocated to people developing type. In the meantime to keep the World of Warcraft player base from subscribing to other games and unsubscribing from wow, that the blizzard developers came up with the pet battle system to buy them time. Not only that but it also generates revenue because people will buy items from the online store.