As you may recall, Rob Pardo was the keynote speaker at this week's GDC in Paris, only days before the Worldwide Invitational in the same city. He delivered a speech laden with a lot of insight into his and Blizzard's inner workings and philosophy, but not much in the way of new information about WoTLK, as Natalie reported yesterday.

However, Gamesindustry.biz is reporting that Pardo did let a rather major piece of information slip in the final Q&A session that wrapped up on the conference. It looks like there may be a new game announcement at the Invitational later this week after all. Someone asked Pardo to comment on the Diablo 3 rumors that have been whizzing around the net lately.

"So you want me to announce the game before our announcement?" he said. "No offense, but I think there's like 300 people here, and I'll be ripped apart by 8000 people there [at the Invitational] if I pre-announce it - but it's going to be really exciting. I think everybody here will be really excited about the announcement."

Luckily, among those 8000 people at the Worldwide Invitational will be three of our own, so you can expect WoW Insider will be on top of this announcement when it drops. In the meantime, be sure to check our in-depth analysis of the latest changes to Blizzard's splash screen, which is almost certainly a teaser for this announcement.

[Thanks for the forward, Centipede!]

• WoW was first conceived as free to play, being supported by advertising. However, the non-subscription business model couldn't support Blizzard's goals for the game.
• Pardo suggested that Blizzard approached the MMO genre "very naively, or else we might not have done it."
• He once hired a WoW player who sent him a 16-page diatribe about the game because, even though the guy was wrong, "he was passionate" about improving the game.

• Blizzard has no problem putting intellectual properties on hold for a while, hence the wait for a Starcraft game. Pardo says that they wanted to make a real-time strategy game but were "tired of green-skinned orcs" so they moved away from Warcraft to Starcraft.
• Starcraft 2 is at a playable stage in its development and he's having a lot of fun with it.