The State of Blizzard's Union

Gamasutra has an extensive interview with Senior Vice President Frank Pearce (one of the company's original founders), and Starcraft II producer Chris Sigaty. They discuss some elements of the the company's future. They discuss their expectations for Starcraft II, some hints of what's to come in World of Warcraft, and word that 50 people are working on the mysterious 'Team 3' game. "Pearce: Our global headcount is like, 2700. Most of that is customer service for World of Warcraft. I mean in terms of development staff... it's probably around 350. For all of Blizzard. World of Warcraft development team is about 135 people...40 for you [indicates Chris' Starcraft 2 team], 50 for ... Team 3 ... Gamasutra: Team 3? What's Team 3 working on? Pearce: Team 3 is working on something really awesome. I will totally tell you, it's really awesome ... Nope, can't give you any hints. Gamasutra: Well, as long as it's awesome."

Team 3 project:

[spocksbrain]

"World of Warcraft 2: The Search for More Money."

Other developers should take note.

[Shivetya]

The first page is where I noticed the biggest difference between Blizzard and "the other mmorpg" studios. This representative wasn't dismissing his competition or making disparaging remarks about it. He was playing nice. I figure down deep they know that these two games are not real threats to WOW... too many have been given that title only to falter.

I did appreciate his comments on developers. The job is pretty much thankless when everything is going right. Do your job right and most people don't care. Have problems creep up and your the center of some not so good attention.

It was also interesting to see how many people they "admit" to working on WOW and Starcraft 2. I assume the other is D3. 2000+ others? Most support. I can see that considering they are selling a service when it comes to the numbers WOW has.

The rule is, always talk nice about your competition. Then again when your at the top you don't have a reason to trash talk

Re:Couldn't ... care ... less

[Anonymous Coward]

Blizzard lost all credibility as far as I am concerned with bnetd.

Yes, how dare they try to stop people from pirating their games!

Sorry, but sometimes things cost money.

The "everything should be free" crowd will mod me down, I'm sure, so posting anonymously.

Re:Diablo 3

[LocoMan]

To be fair, Blizzard has never been known to make new and different games... so far their strenght has been to take existing ideas genres and ideas, then improve and polish them. At least that's how it was with Diablo, War/Starcraft and WoW. The 3rd person hack and slash RPG, RTS and MMORPG genres already existed, they just polished them better than anyone at the time (heck, you could even say the same with the puzzle platform genre with Lost Vikings)

Re:Diablo 3

[king-manic]

BTW, all the good artists and devs in from the Diablo days are making Hellgate: London so uhh, the jury is still out on Diablo 3, if it ever even gets off the drawing board.

True enough, but a game takes a team. It's difficult to say what D1 or D2 would have been if Blizzard proper didn't have some influence on it. Being the mother studio/publisher they had a lot of influence. Many thought John Romero was the messiah of gaming and that he alone could inspire and design a awesome game. We got Daikatana. Turns out the other people at ID pushed and conspired with Romero into making the games they did. After he left ID games felt a little more shallow while Everything Romero did after felt slipshod and tacky. Sometimes no individual member or subset of a team can recreate what the team was in total. Who knows hellgate might be D3 on steroids. Or it might be Ropers, Schaefer, Schaefer and Breviks Daikatana.

Re:Couldn't ... care ... less

[brkello]

Ok, if you are going to have to have this discussion AGAIN, let's at least discuss it honestly. Yes, bnetd was a server. No argument there. But for you to say that it had absolutely nothing to do with piracy is a flat out lie. bnetd did enable piracy because it allowed people who did not buy the game to play each other online (no cd key check). The primary users of bnetd were people who did not buy a copy of the game. I have absolutely zero sympathy for bnetd because of this...plus the fact that Blizzard does not charge for their battle.net service and that it is still running today...after all these years. Blizzard is about the least evil large company you are going to find. If you aren't going to support them over bnetd, then you have either never written software or lack the ability to understand the situation that Blizzard was in.