7 ms·

How Blizzard stayed focused on quality games

59 points by doppp 11y ago

melling 11y ago
"On graduating from UCLA in December 1990 with a computer science degree, Adham received $10,000 from his parents to go to Europe. But he loved video games, and he wanted to make a living making them. He used the money instead to start a video game company, Silicon & Synapse–the predecessor of Chaos."
- sanoli 11y ago
  I always hear about how american college students, upon graduating, take a year off to travel around. How common is this? 10k should be around 20k by now, how common is it in the US for parents to give 20 thousand in free travel money to a son who graduates?
  - marricks 11y ago
    As an US citizen I haven't heard or seen it directly ever. I always thought it was a British "gap year" thing.
    - ambicapter 11y ago
      The "gap year" is usually between high school and college though (using American terms).
  - eachro 11y ago
    A lot of fresh college graduates travel for a bit before starting their job. Anecdotally, all of friends used money from past internships/summer jobs and signing bonuses to pay for their trips. It really is not that expensive to travel if you choose the right places and purchase tickets well in advance.
    - lettergram 11y ago
      A bunch of people I went to school with teaveled independently through Asia on the cheap. Signing bonuses were enough to move and live in SF for 3-6 months prior to starting work, instead they traveled. I suspect it was roughly the same price
    - lfowles 11y ago
      This is unheard of among my friends (mostly engineering) and may just as well have been Hollywood myth.
    - gozur88 11y ago
      When I graduated everybody I knew went straight to work. That was awhile ago, though. These days it seems like people graduate with so much debt they might just shrug and think "what's another $10k?"
  - jonesb6 11y ago
    Students with an entirely subsidized tuition tend to do it, those with debt don't.
  - overcast 11y ago
    This is not common at all, sure some may do a little bit of travel. But the fact that we're all in debt to our eyeballs in school loans, means we are generally jumping into jobs as soon as we can. I was working full time before I even graduated, being hired out of my co-op/internship from RIT. It's certainly NOT common for parents to dump 10-20K on you, and say go have travel and have fun. That's laughable.
  - freyr 11y ago
    In my experience, it's more common for students to study abroad while enrolled in school, and only 1.5% of students do this [1]. [1] http://www.nafsa.org/explore_international_education/advocacy_and_public_policy/study_abroad/trends_in_u_s__study_abroad/ http://www.nafsa.org/explore_international_education/advocac...
  - eugenekolo2 11y ago
    I don't know where you're listening, because this is not a common thing. It's actually far more common to do this in Europe.
  - mmanfrin 11y ago
    I think it's more common among people who are from upper-middle to upper classes; so a big majority don't, but a socially-loud minority do.
    - pjlegato 11y ago
      This. Rich kids are also much better positioned in terms of parental funding and familial social connections to do things that bring them international acclaim afterwards. They then get a platform to tell a worldwide audience about their life story and their parent-subsidized gap year, creating a very distorted view of American culture abroad. In other words, only a tiny percentage of American kids get 10k from their parents to go on vacation in Europe. It's just that the international circulation of media that say "I had kids and worked two jobs to be able to pay the bills and never got to go anywhere" is far lower.
      - ktRolster 11y ago
        Though let's be honest, $10k is hardly out of reach for.....anyone. If that's something you really want, you can get it.
        pjlegato 11y ago
        I'm not sure if this is a troll, or just someone who is massively out of touch with how most people live. Median household (not individual) income in the US was 51k in 2013.[1] A 10k vacation to Europe is indeed out of reach for most of the population of the US. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United...
        ktRolster 11y ago
        If you can't save $10k while on a $51k income, you have serious money issues.
        11y ago
  - stanmancan 11y ago
    I have always loved travelling so when my daughter was 5 I started a travel fund for her. I should have about $15k saved up for her by the time she's 18. It's completely separate from her education savings. I personally consider it equally as important though.
  - nerfhammer 11y ago
    Not at all common, American students more typically graduate with enormous debt, which precludes this sort of thing.
rnernento 11y ago
Misleading title, should read "How Blizzard stayed focused on quality games for 17 years" It's been all downhill since the Activision purchase...
- grillvogel 11y ago
  thats like your opinion man
- dang 11y ago
  Alright, we took the number out of the title since it arguably goes against the HN guidelines anyway.
- eugenekolo2 11y ago
  HOTS is good. Just hasn't taken off. Hearthstone is an amazing success and very fun. Overwatch looks very promising. WoW is just old now, and it's still an alright game, but it's been out for too long. I believe TBC and WOTLK came out after Activision purchase and those expansions were great. Starcraft 2 is okay. They messed up a lot with trying to be social allstars with bnet2.0. Diablo 3 kind of missed the mark, can maybe blame Activision here. As the real money auction house wasn't that great of a success, and it seems Activisiony to me.
  - dexwiz 11y ago
    D3 is a completely different game than on release. On release it was all about maxing a few stats (main stat, attack speed, crit chance, crit hit). The differences between one piece of the gear and the next was just a few points. Also gear was almost 100% random drops. This made the AH better, as you could never be expected to find a full set of top tier gear. Now it's much more based around set bonuses and builds. No more AH, so all gear is self found. But now you have random drops, rift drops, blood shards, cube upgrades, rerolls. So multiple ways to acquire and improve existing gear.
    - toast42 11y ago
      I'm fairly certain that D3 was originally built around the auction house. They started with a solid stream of monetization and then built a game around that.
pjlegato 11y ago
How can they fail to even mention Warcraft III, an epic multiyear development effort and one of the most commercially successful video games of all time? Its debut was an epic win for Blizzard. It made more money the year it came out than any Hollywood movie. WC3 also set the stage for World of Warcraft, which would not have experienced nearly the same uptake without it. Truly a glaring omission in an otherwise interesting article.
- mylons 11y ago
  and spawned dota -- which more or less propelled mobas into the forefront of gaming.
- sidusknight 11y ago
  Hell, there are probably some people here who's first programming experience was JASS for WC3 modding.
  - Rumudiez 11y ago
    You figured me out!
- douche 11y ago
  Really the last Blizzard game that I enjoyed. I'm not really into the cartoony look that WoW has gone for, particularly compared to the old Metzen concept art that was included in the Warcraft 1/2/Starcraft manuals http://www.scribd.com/doc/3914674/Warcraft-Orcs-Humans-Manual#scribd http://www.scribd.com/doc/3914674/Warcraft-Orcs-Humans-Manua... http://ftp.blizzard.com/pub/misc/StarCraft.PDF http://ftp.blizzard.com/pub/misc/StarCraft.PDF http://ftp.blizzard.com/pub/misc/Warcraft%202%20Battlenet%20edition.PDF http://ftp.blizzard.com/pub/misc/Warcraft%202%20Battlenet%20... Those were some beautiful manuals. Once upon a time, kids would spend the entire afternoon reading the manual of a game, waiting in the car while their mothers finished up the grocery shopping, before they could get home and pop the massive pile of floppies or CD in and try to get the game installed/get autoexec.bat tuned right...
  - 11y ago
J0-onas 11y ago
From my perspective the quality of their games is declining. Rapidly. I don't know the author and his gaming background but he certainly hasn't spent much time playing blizzard games. At least he isn't a 'hardcore' gamer. Truth is, if you are a casual gamer you probably won't notice how dumb their current development is. In short: WoW: Numbers don't lie. People would still play mmos if there werent any worth playing. http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/5063-WoW-Down-to-5-6-Million-Subscribers http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/5063-WoW-Down-to-5-6-Mil... Diablo: Current content is shit, multiple design failes that needed to be corrected. Both D3 and the addon weren't ready on release, needed patches to correct the bad quality. Hots/Hearthstone/Overwatch: Knockoffs of Dota/LoL, Magic, Team Fortress. I don't think a knockoff should be called a quality game. Also, both Hots and Hearthstone have/has horrible balancing issues => bad quality considering being balanced is the core content of the game. Not to mention that Hots was really shitty from a technical pov (after beta).
- nightski 11y ago
  Regardless of your personal opinion on the design of their games, one thing they retain is their quality. Blizzard games are some of the most polished bug free experiences available (especially given their scope/size). You are never going to have a poor experience with a Blizzard game. You might not enjoy the game, but it will not be because of game breaking bugs, poorly translated ports, low art quality, or unpolished game systems. Blizzard takes these things very seriously. If something is broken they often fix it.
exar0815 11y ago
One of the few other companies that made games of similar quality for me was Bioware. The critically acclaimed Star Wars RPGs, the Mass Effect and DragonAge franchises started as something new and special, with MassEffects focusing on epic interactive storytelling and DA on complex yet accessible RPG. Sadly, after EA (the dev killer) bought them, DA turned into a hack n slay, and ME into a CoD in space. With a VERY bad ending.
ionised 11y ago
Can't say I've enjoyed much of Blizzard's work to be honest. They're style has always turned me off somewhat. I really liked the Warcraft I, II and III games but beyond that there's nothing that ever really grabbed me. I gave World of Warcraft a go for around two weeks because my friends were playing it religiously but I just couldn't get into it. MMOs in general don't do it for me though. I mean I loved Diablo 1 and 2 but they were developed by Condor (later became Blizzard North), Diablo 3 became something other than what I wanted from a sequel to that series. It was full of World of Warcraft's cartoonish art style, complete with huge shoulder pads on armour and massively oversaturated colours and terrible Blizzard-standard writing. They even managed to make Diablo himself completely unintimidating as a character due to how shitty his lines of dialogue were. They should have kept him a silent antagonist as in previous games and stuck with the dark gothic-horror aesthetic that made D1 and D2 so memorable.

59 points by doppp 11y ago

"On graduating from UCLA in December 1990 with a computer science degree, Adham received $10,000 from his parents to go to Europe. But he loved video games, and he wanted to make a living making them. He used the money instead to start a video game company, Silicon & Synapse–the predecessor of Chaos."

sanoli 11y ago
I always hear about how american college students, upon graduating, take a year off to travel around. How common is this? 10k should be around 20k by now, how common is it in the US for parents to give 20 thousand in free travel money to a son who graduates?
- marricks 11y ago
  As an US citizen I haven't heard or seen it directly ever. I always thought it was a British "gap year" thing.
  - ambicapter 11y ago
    The "gap year" is usually between high school and college though (using American terms).
- eachro 11y ago
  A lot of fresh college graduates travel for a bit before starting their job. Anecdotally, all of friends used money from past internships/summer jobs and signing bonuses to pay for their trips. It really is not that expensive to travel if you choose the right places and purchase tickets well in advance.
  - lettergram 11y ago
    A bunch of people I went to school with teaveled independently through Asia on the cheap. Signing bonuses were enough to move and live in SF for 3-6 months prior to starting work, instead they traveled. I suspect it was roughly the same price
  - lfowles 11y ago
    This is unheard of among my friends (mostly engineering) and may just as well have been Hollywood myth.
  - gozur88 11y ago
    When I graduated everybody I knew went straight to work. That was awhile ago, though. These days it seems like people graduate with so much debt they might just shrug and think "what's another $10k?"
- jonesb6 11y ago
  Students with an entirely subsidized tuition tend to do it, those with debt don't.
- overcast 11y ago
  This is not common at all, sure some may do a little bit of travel. But the fact that we're all in debt to our eyeballs in school loans, means we are generally jumping into jobs as soon as we can. I was working full time before I even graduated, being hired out of my co-op/internship from RIT. It's certainly NOT common for parents to dump 10-20K on you, and say go have travel and have fun. That's laughable.
- freyr 11y ago
  In my experience, it's more common for students to study abroad while enrolled in school, and only 1.5% of students do this [1]. [1] http://www.nafsa.org/explore_international_education/advocacy_and_public_policy/study_abroad/trends_in_u_s__study_abroad/ http://www.nafsa.org/explore_international_education/advocac...
- eugenekolo2 11y ago
  I don't know where you're listening, because this is not a common thing. It's actually far more common to do this in Europe.
- mmanfrin 11y ago
  I think it's more common among people who are from upper-middle to upper classes; so a big majority don't, but a socially-loud minority do.
  - pjlegato 11y ago
    This. Rich kids are also much better positioned in terms of parental funding and familial social connections to do things that bring them international acclaim afterwards. They then get a platform to tell a worldwide audience about their life story and their parent-subsidized gap year, creating a very distorted view of American culture abroad. In other words, only a tiny percentage of American kids get 10k from their parents to go on vacation in Europe. It's just that the international circulation of media that say "I had kids and worked two jobs to be able to pay the bills and never got to go anywhere" is far lower.
    - ktRolster 11y ago
      Though let's be honest, $10k is hardly out of reach for.....anyone. If that's something you really want, you can get it.
      - pjlegato 11y ago
        I'm not sure if this is a troll, or just someone who is massively out of touch with how most people live. Median household (not individual) income in the US was 51k in 2013.[1] A 10k vacation to Europe is indeed out of reach for most of the population of the US. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United...
        ktRolster 11y ago
        If you can't save $10k while on a $51k income, you have serious money issues.
        11y ago
- stanmancan 11y ago
  I have always loved travelling so when my daughter was 5 I started a travel fund for her. I should have about $15k saved up for her by the time she's 18. It's completely separate from her education savings. I personally consider it equally as important though.
- nerfhammer 11y ago
  Not at all common, American students more typically graduate with enormous debt, which precludes this sort of thing.

rnernento 11y ago

Misleading title, should read "How Blizzard stayed focused on quality games for 17 years" It's been all downhill since the Activision purchase...

grillvogel 11y ago
thats like your opinion man
dang 11y ago
Alright, we took the number out of the title since it arguably goes against the HN guidelines anyway.
eugenekolo2 11y ago
HOTS is good. Just hasn't taken off. Hearthstone is an amazing success and very fun. Overwatch looks very promising. WoW is just old now, and it's still an alright game, but it's been out for too long. I believe TBC and WOTLK came out after Activision purchase and those expansions were great. Starcraft 2 is okay. They messed up a lot with trying to be social allstars with bnet2.0. Diablo 3 kind of missed the mark, can maybe blame Activision here. As the real money auction house wasn't that great of a success, and it seems Activisiony to me.
- dexwiz 11y ago
  D3 is a completely different game than on release. On release it was all about maxing a few stats (main stat, attack speed, crit chance, crit hit). The differences between one piece of the gear and the next was just a few points. Also gear was almost 100% random drops. This made the AH better, as you could never be expected to find a full set of top tier gear. Now it's much more based around set bonuses and builds. No more AH, so all gear is self found. But now you have random drops, rift drops, blood shards, cube upgrades, rerolls. So multiple ways to acquire and improve existing gear.
  - toast42 11y ago
    I'm fairly certain that D3 was originally built around the auction house. They started with a solid stream of monetization and then built a game around that.

pjlegato 11y ago

How can they fail to even mention Warcraft III, an epic multiyear development effort and one of the most commercially successful video games of all time? Its debut was an epic win for Blizzard. It made more money the year it came out than any Hollywood movie. WC3 also set the stage for World of Warcraft, which would not have experienced nearly the same uptake without it. Truly a glaring omission in an otherwise interesting article.

mylons 11y ago
and spawned dota -- which more or less propelled mobas into the forefront of gaming.
sidusknight 11y ago
Hell, there are probably some people here who's first programming experience was JASS for WC3 modding.
- Rumudiez 11y ago
  You figured me out!
douche 11y ago
Really the last Blizzard game that I enjoyed. I'm not really into the cartoony look that WoW has gone for, particularly compared to the old Metzen concept art that was included in the Warcraft 1/2/Starcraft manuals http://www.scribd.com/doc/3914674/Warcraft-Orcs-Humans-Manual#scribd http://www.scribd.com/doc/3914674/Warcraft-Orcs-Humans-Manua... http://ftp.blizzard.com/pub/misc/StarCraft.PDF http://ftp.blizzard.com/pub/misc/StarCraft.PDF http://ftp.blizzard.com/pub/misc/Warcraft%202%20Battlenet%20edition.PDF http://ftp.blizzard.com/pub/misc/Warcraft%202%20Battlenet%20... Those were some beautiful manuals. Once upon a time, kids would spend the entire afternoon reading the manual of a game, waiting in the car while their mothers finished up the grocery shopping, before they could get home and pop the massive pile of floppies or CD in and try to get the game installed/get autoexec.bat tuned right...
- 11y ago

J0-onas 11y ago

From my perspective the quality of their games is declining. Rapidly. I don't know the author and his gaming background but he certainly hasn't spent much time playing blizzard games. At least he isn't a 'hardcore' gamer. Truth is, if you are a casual gamer you probably won't notice how dumb their current development is. In short: WoW: Numbers don't lie. People would still play mmos if there werent any worth playing. http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/5063-WoW-Down-to-5-6-Million-Subscribers http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/5063-WoW-Down-to-5-6-Mil... Diablo: Current content is shit, multiple design failes that needed to be corrected. Both D3 and the addon weren't ready on release, needed patches to correct the bad quality. Hots/Hearthstone/Overwatch: Knockoffs of Dota/LoL, Magic, Team Fortress. I don't think a knockoff should be called a quality game. Also, both Hots and Hearthstone have/has horrible balancing issues => bad quality considering being balanced is the core content of the game. Not to mention that Hots was really shitty from a technical pov (after beta).

nightski 11y ago
Regardless of your personal opinion on the design of their games, one thing they retain is their quality. Blizzard games are some of the most polished bug free experiences available (especially given their scope/size). You are never going to have a poor experience with a Blizzard game. You might not enjoy the game, but it will not be because of game breaking bugs, poorly translated ports, low art quality, or unpolished game systems. Blizzard takes these things very seriously. If something is broken they often fix it.

exar0815 11y ago

One of the few other companies that made games of similar quality for me was Bioware. The critically acclaimed Star Wars RPGs, the Mass Effect and DragonAge franchises started as something new and special, with MassEffects focusing on epic interactive storytelling and DA on complex yet accessible RPG. Sadly, after EA (the dev killer) bought them, DA turned into a hack n slay, and ME into a CoD in space. With a VERY bad ending.

ionised 11y ago

Can't say I've enjoyed much of Blizzard's work to be honest. They're style has always turned me off somewhat. I really liked the Warcraft I, II and III games but beyond that there's nothing that ever really grabbed me. I gave World of Warcraft a go for around two weeks because my friends were playing it religiously but I just couldn't get into it. MMOs in general don't do it for me though. I mean I loved Diablo 1 and 2 but they were developed by Condor (later became Blizzard North), Diablo 3 became something other than what I wanted from a sequel to that series. It was full of World of Warcraft's cartoonish art style, complete with huge shoulder pads on armour and massively oversaturated colours and terrible Blizzard-standard writing. They even managed to make Diablo himself completely unintimidating as a character due to how shitty his lines of dialogue were. They should have kept him a silent antagonist as in previous games and stuck with the dark gothic-horror aesthetic that made D1 and D2 so memorable.