Eurogamer recently had a chat with Blizzard vice president of game design Rob Pardo where he revealed that development of Starcraft II was delayed by about a year in the early 00s as Blizzard focused its development muscle on World of Warcraft.

While this is hardly news at this point with World of Warcraft well into its fifth year and third expansion and Starcraft II finally slated for release later this year, it does give gamers a rare look at the inner workings and decision making process at Blizzard. In the past decade Blizzard has gained notoriety, respect, and frustration in equal measure from gamers and industry analysts for their willingness to delay games indefinitely or even cancel them in the name of getting everything just right.

Diverting resources also makes sense. While they probably had no idea that World of Warcraft would snowball into a cultural institution, Blizzard still had a good chunk of the gaming community frothing at the mouth waiting for a chance to try out WoW in the 2003-2004 runup to the game’s release. Focusing on the game that was announced, almost ready for retail, and highly anticipated makes more sense than working on a game that was nothing more than a pipe dream, albeit a pipe dream on many gamer’s wish list.

Ultimately I have yet to play a Bluzzard game that has suffered from their policy of cooking to perfection. If an extra year was what it took to get WoW and Starcraft II right then I’d say it was time well spent.