Shakeup at Blizzard!

[Whiggles]

Folks over at Dii.net posted an update with a statement from Mike Morhaime, president and co-founder of Blizzard Entertainment:

"I speak for everyone in our company when I say how grateful we are to have had the opportunity to work closely with this group of individuals. Each one of them has made valuable contributions to many of our games, and we would like to thank them for all of their hard work over the years. We wish them nothing but the best and are confident that they will be successful in their future endeavors. At the same time, we want to convey that Blizzard's success has never been attributable to any one person or small group of individuals, and I am confident that we have the teams in place to continue creating some of the best games in the world."

I'm particularly intrigued by the last sentence.  Final jab at the departing crew?

That's the same statement, more or less, that they made back in 1998 when the designer of Starcraft, James Phinney, quite Blizzard, taking with him the webmaster (Jeff Vaughan) and several programmers. More or less the standard corporate mantra -- "Individuals don't make the company". To be honest I've never bought this in Blizzard's case. I find it hard to believe that everyone at Blizzard just throws in their ideas and they come out with an end product. Diablo II sure looks a bit like that, but all their other games have a reasonably unified feel, suggesting that there was some sort of a mastermind behind each one, deciding which ideas stayed and which went.