EPTFaith in Blizzard - Page 3
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imre
France9263 Posts
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DidYuhim
Ukraine1905 Posts
Looking back makes me feel old for no reason, although I do agree with the topic, blizzard is way worse as company players rather than it was a decade ago. Pity. | ||
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Lysenko
Iceland2128 Posts
First, while there has been some turnover among game designers, as you'd expect over fifteen years in any company, a healthy number of the people who worked on any Blizzard title you want to pick still work there in key roles. Taking D3 as an example, the lead software engineer, Jason Regier, who was about as central to that game's design team as anyone, also worked as a developer on D2. Chris Sigaty worked on both Starcraft and Starcraft 2. Sam Didier has been involved in just about every game Blizzard has made. Those are just three examples but there are many more. Across all their job categories, art, production management, game design, support, Blizzard has retained a large number of the people who worked there in the 90s. They're still the same people and they still have the same motivations. Yes, some of their designers have left, but not all of them, and it's not as though the "bad" ones have stayed while the "good" ones have left. Second -- On August 02 2012 01:06 Barrin wrote: Money? The idea that the RMAH is going to be some huge (or even a net profitable) moneymaker for Blizzard is something everyone slings around but nobody's really thought through. Except for the people at Blizzard -- I guarantee you they've thought it through, and they quite certainly realized before they committed to it that there's zero chance that the RMAH will make any substantial amount of money for Blizzard. Blizzard's revenue is in the $100 million a month range, and to make even 1% of that, the RMAH would require that they have 100,000 crazy D3 players spending $70 EVERY MONTH on items (because remember, they only get 15%.) It just isn't going to happen. Why did they add the RMAH? Conveniently, they came out and said why: because they expected the real money trade to be important to the game as it was for D2, and they wanted to offer a trustworthy alternative to 3rd party sites. Of course most of the people I see talk about this issue on the Internet assume that's a lie and that it really was meant to be some great moneymaking scheme driven by (literally) millions of people willing to spend more than their cable bill on imaginary items every month. Like I say, that simply will never happen. So what has changed about Blizzard? The thing that actually has changed for Blizzard, along with the rest of the game industry, is that the scale of a top-quality title has increased enormously. Crew sizes have increased, costs have increased, technical complexity has gone nuts, and expectations for the technical quality (excluding how entertaining the game itself is) have increased. In big and small ways, this makes people play it safe with design choices, even when they don't realize they're doing it. Despite Blizzard's approach of implementing a game a certain way, trying it out, then chucking it when it doesn't work, the greatly increased costs allow fewer iterations and developers gravitate toward choices that are seen as less technically or creatively risky. Despite that Blizzard has done quite well at retaining their core team from long ago, this change, plus the huge influx of revenue from World of Warcraft, which was the kind of unpredictable event for which nobody can ever plan, has allowed and encouraged Blizzard to grow enormously, bringing in (literally) thousands of additional employees. Managing this kind of growth and ensuring that the culture remains recognizable is a mind-boggling task. I know from friends who have worked there and have seen this growth arc with their own eyes that the huge influx of people necessarily altered how people interacted and how work gets done. In a small team, 20 or 30 people, everyone can know everyone else and everyone can be involved in every major discussion. When the team pushes a few hundred, that just can't happen. Work gets divided up and the few people who can touch all of it only get to scratch the surface. Why do you think that SC2's game director Dustin Browder sometimes sounds like he's a little out of touch to the professional players and engaged fans who have committed their lives to SC2? The guy's clearly brilliant but being responsible for the entire game means that he can't have comprehensive, deep knowledge of every little aspect of it. Other people dig deep into one problem or another while someone in his position, necessarily, has to put in a little time here, a little time there, so while he's involved, and consulted, he's never going to be THE expert on any one aspect of their game. So, the biggest challenge Blizzard faces today that didn't exist 15 years ago for them is one of diffusion of responsibility and product "ownership" by their development teams. How do they try to make a top-quality product when no one person can keep all the issues and technical details in their head at once, unlike before? It's a huge challenge. And yeah, if something has changed with Blizzard's products, if they seem somehow a little more generic, a little more designed by committee, a little more averaged-out, well, yeah, of course they are. But, that's not the result of incompetence, avarice, or a change in the audience they'd like to target. Instead, it's been forced upon them by how the game development world has changed. It's been an accident of their success and a side effect of the ability that success has given them to reach for something much larger in scale (technically and artistically, if not from a player experience standpoint) than what they did before. And, when you get right down to it, it's never going to be 1998 again, not for Blizzard or for anyone else in the game industry. | ||
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Djzapz
Canada10681 Posts
In the world of gaming, we oftentimes hear about the "vocal minority" that whines about games - but the people who think D3 is crap is not merely a vocal minority. So what's your angle really? Those products suck but it's ok because that's how it is now? Because that's what it looks like you're saying to me. Also note that every sale gives Blizzard $1+15% and not just 15%, and a large portion of the sales stays in Battle.net currency which Blizzard technically keeps in their coffers. While it's not theirs per se, it's good liquidity. | ||
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Djzapz
Canada10681 Posts
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/6080179368?page=9#166 This guy had something interesting to say: Player: "look here is a fire" CM: please report all fires. Player: *points to the fire* "its right here" CM: we respect your concerns for fires. Please report all fires. | ||
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StarStruck
25339 Posts
On August 01 2012 03:42 Salv wrote: Some people argue that D3 is still the best dungeon crawl, Starcraft II is still the best RTS amazing despite it's massive flaws, WOW is still the best MMO. That's all probably (or close enough to being) true, but relative to what we expect out of Blizzard, these games are disappointments (less so WOW, this new one is par for the course). People expect a lot from Blizzard, and they shit the bed a bit on SC2 with their awful replay system, no chat channels, no LAN, etc; however they really fucked up with Diablo III, I don't know anyone who is still playing it besides a couple people who are making some money off the RMAH - but even they admit they don't enjoy it. Some people? Good thing it's only some people right and I would assume many of them don't know any better because all they do is spend time playing Blizzard titles. Guess what? I've played my fair share of Blizzard titles too and you probably could say I'm a Blizzard loyalist but that doesn't mean I don't check out what else is out there too and I disagree when it comes down to their products getting better and what you think their best titles are. Completely subjective. Just like mine and you know what? There is no majority. As for Barrin, Not like this is anything new man. It really goes back to like 2007. Remember that thread? I know there were a lot of guys going "Oh crap, here comes the Activision machine. | ||
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