Shakeup at Blizzard!

[kandrathe]

I'll have to disagree with Mike Morhaime. IMO, it is creative and inspirational leaders that make good software. Many things can make a game bad, but it takes the right kind of visionaries to get it all right. You need amoungst other things, good artists, good play concepts, good game theory, good software, and good testing. Now, just try to make a profit. I think like many things in the software world, the business people believe that you can just turn a crank and lots of good stuff will pour out of your development groups. To them, it's like printing money. All you sell is the same intellectual property, over and over , and over. If you read Vivendi's corporate documents to the SEC, etc., you see that they are trying to sell the idea that the conglomeration of music, movies, and software makes sense. I think they probably wanted Blizzard North to do some schlocky game based on a Universal movie title (i.e. Jurassic Park - Operation Genesis).

It is quite a different view from the trenches. The developers fall in love with their work, they internalize it, and it becomes a part of their lives. Intuitively these high performance teams begin to exist in harmony with the market and know what the game buying public wants. The live it, they love it, they play it daily. Most of the great projects (and profitable ones) I've worked on began in one of these high performance teams as a beloved skunk works project that eventually was revealed, polished up, and then marketed. There are very few successful companies that allow leadership from the bottom, and I suspect that Vivendi is not one of them. No, I think it was probably a mandate from the top for another game like Rock-n-Roll racing, or Lost Vikings that sent those guys running from the building. I'm thinking we should probably get ready for an exodus of the sensible developers from BN, and then the announcement of their next big project, a big stinky flop.