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October 10 - October 27, 2024
Blizzard canceled around 50 percent of its projects because it would rather lose money than release subpar products.
One of the secrets behind Blizzard’s success was an ample, almost excessive amount of playtesting,
“He who shouted loudest and most frequently often got heard,” said designer Stefan Scandizzo.
“You get the fans you go after,”
In 1984, 37 percent of computer science majors were women, but by 1995, that percentage had plunged to nearly 25 percent.
Nobody really knows who first came up with the name World of Warcraft. It just seemed like a natural fit—one of those titles that emerged organically from the creative morass of game development.
Long hours were one thing; spending evenings and weekends at the office for months on end was quite another.
“This is kind of a slap in the face,” Beardslee recalled saying. “‘You could potentially lose a lot of people over this.’ Frank’s response was: ‘You should be happy you work for Blizzard. You should be doing it out of pride, not for money.’”
granting some $100 million in judgments and leading top Nintendo executive Howard Lincoln to grumble in one 1989 interview that “Magnavox isn’t in the business of making video games. They’re just in the business of suing people.”
In contrast to Blizzard, Activision’s executives weren’t video game fans—they were businessmen who had worked for companies like Procter & Gamble and knew how to sell chocolate and laundry detergent.
World of Warcraft was a path to what Kotick appeared to value dearly: steady, predictable revenue growth.
If you were a geek who had grown up in the twentieth century, when comic books and video games were associated with misfits and social outcasts, working at Blizzard was like finding your tribe—a place where you didn’t have to hide your nerdy pastimes to maintain your place in the social hierarchy.
But this dedication to the brand could also be weaponized, and new employees were expected to put up with practices that they might not have accepted at other shops.
“An effective caste system emerged,” said business manager Vlad Coho. “It was a real division between developers and everyone else.”
had to develop the confidence to say, ‘No, this sucks, I’m going to start over,’” Huck said. “It’s easy to get really attached to something, to guard it until it’s perfect… It’s more important to get your ideas out quick, iterate. That’s really how you refine stuff to the quality level we were aspiring for.”
Experienced computer programmers often said the hardest part of writing code wasn’t figuring out solutions—it was identifying the problems.
“I think Hearthstone’s story is a microcosm of Blizzard’s story,” said Jay Baxter. “We went from creating to churning.”
“I think when you want to lead something, you have a responsibility to lead,” said Connie Griffith, who worked as an assistant to Pardo. “And if you are not able to give it your full attention, you need to relinquish control.”
If you polled a random group of enthusiasts and asked their favorite video game company, the most common answer would be Nintendo—but Blizzard would be second or third.
Most people who worked at Blizzard, especially those who had been there for decades, felt like there was something special about the place, and it was impossible to know which Jenga pieces they could remove without destroying the whole tower.
“There is a breaking point, or at least a bending point, where if you continue to extract as much revenue out of players in the short-term, that has an effect on the long-term retention,”
“Once you train people to look for price discounts, bundles, they’re trapped on that,” said Bankard. “It’s like K-Mart vs. Costco. You feel good at Costco because it feels like they price everything fairly—they don’t need to put specials on.”
Kotick’s compensation had swelled to $30.8 million, or about 319 times more than the median employee salary at Activision Blizzard,
perhaps because real-time strategy games weren’t as popular in the 2010s as they had been in the 1990s. The genre that Blizzard had once dominated now felt twitchy and complicated, requiring a level of multitasking that wasn’t amenable to many casual players.
Stack ranking only exacerbated the problem, forcing developers to eye one another with suspicion and QA testers to battle over who found the most bugs.
In the company’s thirty-year history there had been no female executive producers or game directors, which made it difficult for women to see a path to long-term success.
