Why Bill Roper Left Blizzard 38
Last week Gamasutra put up an interview with Bill Roper all about Flagship Studios' projects and history. Along with some details on their Massive game Mythos and a reiteration of the Hellgate pricing scheme, Roper talks about the reasons he left Blizzard in the first place: "Our original intention back in 2003 was not to leave Blizzard. We wanted some level of participation and direct communication with Vivendi's home office in order to offer our insight, knowledge and desires as to their plans at the time in terms of a possible sale or IPO of the games unit. The level of uncertainty back then made it extremely difficult to plan for our futures, as well as the futures of our team members. And with no long-term compensation or employment contracts in place, we wanted to be able to interact directly with the people making the key decisions that could drastically affect our lives and workplace. In the end, Vivendi chose not to make that opportunity available and accepted our resignations over the matter. The next day, David Brevik, Erich Schaefer, Max Schaefer and I started Flagship Studios."
Boils Down To.. . (Score:3, Insightful)
Really the problem was they weren't bargaining from a position of strength... Diablo 3 wasn't screaming right a long or anything.
Not everything boils down to money (Score:5, Interesting)
The only thing which would come even close is the talk of long term contracts and compensations, but he _does_ spell out that they wanted to know how to plan their future, so it doesn't necessarily come out as greed. It doesn't say they went and demanded contracts for life, it says they went and asked for a communication channel. There's a big difference.
It may come as a surprise, but some people do actually like to know what happens next. You know, game is finished now, what happens next? Do we stick around and make an expansion pack? Extra content? A new game? Should we start sending out resumes now? Uncertainty about that can bring morale downwards quite a bit.
As for position of strength, I beg to differ. World Of Warcraft turned out to be a bigger money printing machine than anyone expected, Vivendi included. People thought the old Everquest was a money printing license, and is what got half the developpers and publisher in a frenzy to try to make yet another MMO. And most attempts to imitate it failed pretty badly. Well, WoW overtook it by a whole freakin' order of magnitude. It has some 95% of the MMO market IIRC.
Basically, as dev team achievements go, these guys pulled an _amazing_ achievement. I don't know what happened there, but that team had some incredible talent and worked surprisingly well. Design talent, programming talent (considering almost every MMO before was traditionally a _horribly_ buggy mess, and would spend eternity creating two new bugs for each one fixed... and some got into a dead end and got cancelled), etc.
It takes a pretty brain-damaged PHB to just squander such an asset over something as petty and trivial as being asked to have an official communication channel. Whatever happened to transparency and communication? Because the way I read it, that's really all they were asking for.
I know it's all the rage to treat employees as dime-a-dozen expendable, replaceable peons, but sometimes it comes out as particularly retarded. We're not talking pizza-delivery kind of expendable, but a team which was one of the legends in their field, and head over shoulders over most of the rest. They're not _that_ easily replaced. Not considering them even important enough to be informed what next, before they read the press release, seems kinda extreme, as low opinions go.
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Hmm... now I didn't RTFA, but the summary doesn't mention anything even remotely equivalent to "we wanted more money". So do you have any other information you base that on, or is it just pulled out of the ass? Especially given that I suspect they were better paid at Blizzard than at some startup company noone heard about yet, that assumption seems somewhat fragile.
Give me a break, what else is it about? They wanted open communication to what know about their future, which means money. Considering the people we are talking about, it was all about money. You think Roper feared for his job security? Please. Also, they were better paid at Blizzard? That was the problem for them, they were being paid. They wanted a part of the action and they deserved it for sure. Vivindi was in a pinch something fierce in 2003 and Blizzard was its most valuable piece that could be offlo
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You're confusing money with power which are not the same, but do share similarities.
From the summary (I didn't RTFA), it sounds like he was more concerned about his influence than his paycheck. Which, as the GP pointed out, makes sense given the left a good paying job to start his own company. It sounds like he's also unhappy that the fact that, after being bought out, he had very l
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Uhm, no.
Lineage has 2 million people, so even if you exclude everyone else, 8 million / 10 million is only 80%.
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A bit old... (Score:5, Informative)
They left mostly to form new game companies:
- Flagship Studios
- Castaway Entertainment
- Hyboreal Games, that later became U.I. Pacific Games Inc.
Note that ArenaNet (behind Guild Wars) was not among those despite also with significant staff from Blizzard Entertainment, because those formed the company before the "exodus" and were not primarly from Blizzard North either, but e.g. their Warcraft III 3D engine developer, Battle.net lead designer, and the World of Warcraft lead programmer. (this must have been turbulent times at Blizzard, and interestingly, we have not had a new product from them since) Of the companies above, it seems like only Flagship Studios has anything more than something suspiciously vapor-ish going on.
Re:A bit old... (Score:4, Interesting)
Also, Blizzard has done fine since the people left. WoW changes a ton in alpha/beta and much of its success can be attributed to those changes. Same with War3, the expansion was nothing spectacular, but the improvements to Battle.net were. Plus, Ghost was in production, but axed because of the timing of the product. Starcraft 2 looks more than promising as well.
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And while that was cool and all, I don't know if I really want to play it again. There has got to be more to a game than "I got super ultra mega rare item X." I've played so many games that were like that, it's just paled.
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Diablo 1 was originally turn based till someone from Bliz Central looked at it and basically forced Blizz North to try making the game real time. Also the reason Diablo 2 was purportedly late wasn't that Blizzard was doing their usual
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Warcraft 4, WoW 2, Starcraft 3, Diablo 3...
Good Choice... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Good Choice... (Score:5, Funny)
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Just because a game has sold lots of copies doesn't mean it is a great game. The other que
Re:Good Choice... (Score:5, Insightful)
In fact, the chart at mmorpg.com exists soely for the purpose of ballot box stuffing by various smaller game communities. It means even less then your typical Internet poll (which means nothing).
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Rack'em.
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As far as I know, every game you mention or refer to is Windows-only. Which is, I suspect, a big part of why they're all less successful than WoW.
Th
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1) You are using a much stricter definition of running the game well than I think is appropriate from a market-analysis standpoint. People with a few-years-old machine are likely not the type to define their self-worth by their framerates, so pretty much anything that isn't actively swapping or crashing will allow them to enjoy the game.
2) That 2.5% share that you cite presumably includes office machines, which are pretty much outside the scope of a discussion of the market for games. If we ass
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WoW is flawed to be sure, but 95% percent of game developers, myself included, will likely never work on a game that works so well on so many levels.
Works well on so many levels?! I really hope that not all "game developers" are thinking that way. MMOs are a plague within the gaming industry. I vote that we begin referring to them as MMTS instead; Massive Money and Time Sinks. They hardly exist to be entertaining, just addictive enough for people with nothing better to do in life to spend some more and click some more. Above any other video game formula, MMTSs stand out as the most haphazardly money driven. But hey, maybe Blizzard will put all of that
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Wrong. Then begins the leveling grind, and the item grind, and the gem grind, and the rune grind.
The only difference is a persistent world, better bosses, and 15 bucks a month.
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A lot of the core stuff in WoW is an outgrowth of Blizz's experience with D2. Hell, one of the big things that was released in the second expansion was gems and socketed items, just like in D2.
I understand that you want somet
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I would however agree that a lot of said core
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Pricing (Score:3, Insightful)
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I have to admit that I was rather interested in Hellgate: London until they came up with that nonsense, and the more marketing blurb they spin on it to make it sound decent the less interested I become. This is obvioussly guessing, but I think there is a real risk that you would end up paying more for less through a subscription system like this compared to regular expansions - at the same time having less knowledge about excatly what it is you're paying for because things are added gradually.
I'm
Stop poking me! (Score:5, Funny)
(Bill Roper did all the voices, or almost all of them at least, of the early Warcraft titles.)