Blizz Personnel Changes

[pjnow]

So, Bill Roper, Max and Erich Schaefer and David Brevik are no longer with Blizzard as of today.

The following is pure speculation, a SWAG.

The quote from the Vivendi press release states: "resigned from the company to pursue other opportunities."

That's business code for "If they didn't quit they were going to be fired".

Roper was leading a Fansite chat just 2 weeks ago, it would seem that the parting of ways was not expected at that time. No company is going to let an imminently departing employee represent them at a puiblic forum, so we can assume that Roper and Co had not given their notice at that time. Also, it is somewhat reckless for a person to depart ways with an employer without providing at least two weeks notice, so let's also assume that Roper & Co did not expect to be leaving ( as of June 19 ).

I'm going to guess that something came to a head in the past week, something that one ( or more ) of the four did, or wanted to do, that senior management at Blizz could not live with.

The "Bill and Co are good guys" scenario - The execusphere told them that they were devoting too many resources to D2 1.10, that they had to hold off further work until well after TFT sales showed a trend. Bill and Co say, "No dammit!, our long suffering D2 fans want their patch now and we should give it to them without delay" The execs say no, Bill and Co do a Johnny Paycheck.

Liklihood - 20%

The "Bill and Co are bad guys" scenario. Exec: "Guys, we're taking some heat from the loyal fan base, and we're concerned that the negativity around D2 1.10 will have a spillover impact to sales of TFT and other titles, why has it taken so long to get this patch?" Bill and Co " Listen, we're tired of this product and it's whiny fans, we need to work on new stuff, if the fans can't wait then eff em" Exec: " Hmm, we want this D2 patch out by the beginning of July, or else...."

Liklihood - 20%

Reality is probably somewhere in the middle - Execs want happy customers, happy customers are repeat customers. However, Execs don't like giving stuff away - working on free stuff has very little cost recovery potential and while goodwill is positive ( as long as it doesn't cost too much ) I'd speculate that senior managment did not sign up to a patch the size and scope of 1.10 - putting the development team, and their management in the dog house. Creative people like to work on new stuff and don't like people criticizing their work - after 3 years of working on D2 and listening to the pissing and moaning of the customers dumping on their baby the creative team are probably ready to put D2 behind them and it wouldn't take much to make them walk.

Throw in the fact that Vivendi is trying to dump it's entertainment holdings and the speculation if rife that EA wants Blizz and you have the recipe for " I'm tired of this BS, nobody appreciates my work, all they do is whine and I'll be good and g*d-d@mned if I'll work for so and so".

All it takes at that point is one incident and the camel's back breaks.

Again, all of the above is pure speculation - feel free to add your own.

[Bolty]

So you're postulating that this could be part of why they were told to pack their bags?

Another thing to note is that, 3 years later, there are still NO announced new games for Blizzard North. Chances are they are *very* behind in their development, and looking at this patch, the senior management had to be wondering where the money was draining. Wham, bam, thank you ma'am...

But speculation is half the fun. In the end, only a few will ever know for sure, and there's very little likelihood that it'll get to us fanboys. Unless Roper pulls a John Romero and starts talking out his you-know-what.

-Bolty

[Arutha]

Why didn't they (Blizzard North) try to kill two birds with one stone: issue a new D2 X-pack ?

All right, that wasn't in their plans at first.

But somewhere along the way, considering the scope of 1.10 and its delays, and considering D2's long shelf life, wouldn't that have been a logical step ?

The creative team could have had a go while the company would have made money out of it.
And fans would have bought it.

Maybe, just maybe (wild speculation here) someone figured it out at Blizz, and someone else were told that they had made a major mistake.

[pjnow]

I'm inclined to agree with Bolty's rant. I cannot imagine a business case for 1.10.

I'd be willing to wager a very large sum of money that 1.10 got sold to the Execusphere ( for approval ) as a small patch that was needed for bugs ( not game play ) and would be limited in scope and cost.

Scope creep is a major peril on any project. From what I've seen from Blizzard over the years I would guess that project management is not a strong skillset among their leadership team. Software development/release management is especially vulnerable to scope creep. This is doubly so when the management team are developers/creative types and not managers per se. The 80/20 rule gets abused big time in software development.

"hey, we can add this cool feature, no it won't take much boss", "We're so close to this other feature , we really need to add it in" Go through a couple of iterations of this and pretty soon your small, low effort patch has grown intoa beast. Top it off, you've publicly stated many times that it will be released soon - it becomes a tyrant running your life and sucking resources away from more important projects ( things that might make money ).

At some point the Execusphere notices that other projects are suffering " HOW MANY PEOPLE DO YOU HAVE ON THIS????", Someone gets a strip torn up one side and down the other - and the project gets reprioritized.

So, it turns into a skunkworks project with people working on it in their spare time, except that it has grown much too large to manage that way so the Project leader swings a deal with the WC3 guys " When you're done with your patch can you float a couple of people over here to help us with D2 1.10, but keep it under your hat"

Problem is, someone who may not be sensitive to the delicate nature of skunkworks projects makes a post in the bnet forums that says "Hey guess what, D2 1.10 will be out after TFT and WC3 1.10 and we're getting help from those teams" This post inflames the fan base and somehow comes to the attention to the Execusphere.

Exec: "Bill, remember that patch I told you not to have anyone working on? Well it seems that you've told the public that it is 1 - a Virtually a free expansion and 2 - You're going to have the WC3 team help you QA it"
Would you care to explain why you are spending budget on a project that has no hope of any cost recovery?, What's that, you can't? " and the rest is history

Edited for spelling

[CelticHound]

I'm inclined to agree with Bolty's rant.  I cannot imagine a business case for 1.10.

It depends on how you look at it. Rather than repeat myself, though, I'll just point to the last time I wrote about it.

On the other hand, what's the fully burdened cost for a developer for a year? Once you add in payroll taxes, insurance and other overhead, it might cost a couple hundred thousand to have just one man-year of Isolde's time working on the patch. (Perhaps less, since I think that games developers work at a discount.) And how long has 1.10 been in the works and what other people have also worked on it? All told, it could total several hundred thousand dollars. Maybe someone decided that this wasn't a good investment.

-- CH

[pjnow]

In a former life when I was budgeting for in house resources to work on a project the loaded labor rate we used was $150k/yr. Resources in California are expensive, so $200k/yr might be fairly close. If the resources are contract it might be a bit cheaper.

No matter what commitment you might make to the boss, there is never only one peson working on a patch.

Let's say you've only got the one guy actually working on the code, fine. You'll still need people to QA it, documentation, IT support and so on.

The cost for "small patch" adds up pretty quickly if you're wroking on it for any length of time. Several hundred thousand is not beyond the pale for a patch of this size that has taken this long.

I forget the formula for translating sales dollars needed to support the cost of a project, I think it was on the order of 10 to 1, $10 in sales to cover $1 expense. So, let's assume that 1.10 uses $500k of resources - that would mean $5 million in sales to cover that cost - they're not selling anything for 1.10, so it would be eating into revenues from other projects.

Long and the short - goodwill, PR, customer relations are one thing, but you cannot make a reasonable business case for a small company like Blizz to invest big bucks in a patch for a game that works and has been on the market for 2 plus years. The game buying public are fickle, very tolerant of crap and have a short memory - there is no business driver for Blizz to devote any resources to 1.10.

Don't get me wrong, I want to see 1.10 released, I just wont be surprised if it got sh*tcanned and that was the reason for the sudden departures today.

[kandrathe]

I doubt it would neccesarily get axed outright, but it might not be free. The winds of change just might be that from now on, upgrades like this one are gonna cost. In fact, they might just want to get rid of that money sucking hole called battle.net. That might become a fee for service venture as well. It's speculation, just idle speculation. We could get ourselves into quite a tizzy over this one.

[LavCat]

If the patch is truly an expansion, I for one would gladly pay for it. Multiple copies.

On the other hand -- if Blizzard decides to charge a fee for battle.net, I think I would find another pastime. Like writing email, painting my toes, and Wasteland.

[WarBlade]

On the other hand -- if Blizzard decides to charge a fee for battle.net, I think I would find another pastime.  Like writing email, painting my toes, and Wasteland.

Personally, I think they would have done much better by including some kind of 'Realm Lite' software with the product. Allow people the ability to run their own servers easily and cut down on BattleNet's bandwidth and storage costs. :unsure:

[BEEFMOTRTON]

You know something? I really doubt it had much of anything to do with Diablo 2.

More likely it's something to do with the project that 80+% of their company has been working on for the last few years that they haven't announced yet.

We can only speculate what it is, except that they were hiring programmers for a "3D RPG Environment".

Could very well be that Vivendi wanted Diablo 3, while those guys wanted to make something new.

[CelticHound]

Yeah, those numbers pretty much tally with what I was thinking.

Long and the short - goodwill, PR, customer relations are one thing, but you cannot make a reasonable business case for a small company like Blizz to invest big bucks in a patch for a game that works and has been on the market for 2 plus years.  The game buying public are fickle, very tolerant of crap and have a short memory - there is no business driver for Blizz to devote any resources to 1.10.

That is a typical answer from a business perspective. I think it's a bit myopic though.

It seems a lot of companies treat employees as fungible (interchangeable) capital. (Actually, that's not true. From my work experiences, too many companies act as if the employees were liablilities - annoying expense centers they'd be better off without. But those are stories for another time.)

The trouble is that the creation of intellectual property doesn't work that way. If Vivendi fired the lot of them and then hired a fresh group of people - essentially building a new company - would you expect them to capture the magic that made for successful games?

Argh - I never thought I'd do this, but I'll quote Bill Roper from the CNN interview:

Roper was humble when I asked him about analyst speculation that Monday's departures will result in a lower sale price for Vivendi Universal Games, saying that wasn't the intent of the Monday's action. Still, he said, if that does prove true, he hopes it will underline the importance of the development community.

"Hopefully, what that will point out to the industry is the fact that the success of games isn't just the name on the box, the franchise or that sort of thing - it's the people who make the games," he said. "Just like you want Arnold Schwarzenegger to do your film, just like you want Steven King or J.K. Rowling to be writing your book, you want the best possible people making a game for you. ... People are important."

That ties in with the post I'd linked to in my previous message. Doing 1.10 might have been worth the cost if it kept the team together.

-- CH