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It is crazy how Blizzard was a few hundred employees when they released Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo over a couple years. Now with 50X as many employees and 2

It is crazy how Blizzard was a few hundred employees when they released Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo over a couple years. Now with 50X as many employees and 23 years of effort they have done nothing but coast off their original hits. I don't know why this happens but it seems to occur again and again in gaming with indie studios that get acquired.

rightbyte 4y ago
I got a feeling developers nowadays are so much less efficient than 10-20 years ago. The tools are so bloated and arcane compared to the can-do approach. Also agile messes up productivity alot due to its inflexible and process heavy nature.
- ErneX 4y ago
  Producing game assets of the quality expected nowadays takes a lot of time.
  - danbolt 4y ago
    I think that's a big element of this. The sort of quality bar we see in StarCraft or WarCraft III would come across as kit-bashing or stylized low-budget indie today. Shipping a AAA-style game in a timely fashion needs a larger production process than earlier works. The sort of issues around engineering and linked-lists[1] in the original StarCraft wouldn't really be an issue today. Teams are operating in a very different way. [1] https://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/tough-times-on-the-road-to-starcraft https://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/tough-times-on-the-road-to-...
  - rightbyte 4y ago
    Ye that's true.
mritchie712 4y ago
* Success often brings bureaucracy to protect against losing what you've got going for you * The bureaucracy drives away the types of misfit maniacs that build incredible and unique products. * You're left with people more worried about fucking up then they are about building something awesome.
- beebmam 4y ago
  How do you reconcile this belief with big tech companies being some of the largest bureaucracies on Earth, yet they continually build incredible and unique products?
  - mritchie712 4y ago
    What big tech company built a unique product well after they were big? * Google is still mostly search * Amazon is still mostly an online store (small exception with AWS, but that was charcoal[0]) * Meta is still mostly facebook (unique products were acquired) etc. 0 - https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/digital-collections/expert-sets/101417/ https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/digita...
    - SeanAnderson 4y ago
      > Amazon is still mostly an online store (small exception with AWS, but that was charcoal[0]) What? I would express the opposite of this sentiment. Amazon is mostly AWS. Their online store's profit pales in comparison to AWS. https://www.fool.com/investing/2022/07/07/aws-chief-says-amazons-most-profitable-segment-is/ https://www.fool.com/investing/2022/07/07/aws-chief-says-ama... > Amazon overall generated $24.8 billion in operating profits in 2021, and AWS was responsible for $18.5 billion (or 74%) of it. Basically, a business segment that contributes 14% of overall revenue is generating roughly three-quarters of Amazon's total operating profits.
      - mritchie712 4y ago
        Right, I'm saying AWS is an outlier.
      - cma 4y ago
        Doesn't Amazon bucket their store ads (sponsored listings) under AWS?
      - hbrn 4y ago
        That's because Amazon's strategy was to not focus on profits in the first place. https://s2.q4cdn.com/299287126/files/doc_financials/annual/2004_shareholderLetter.pdf https://s2.q4cdn.com/299287126/files/doc_financials/annual/2...
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4y ago
When I consider that this turnaround seems to have happened right after they were acquired by Activision, it becomes less of a mystery. I suspect many of those original few hundred employees didn't stick around after their employer suddenly changed and those who left would have primarily been the most influential Blizzard people. There really is no "Blizzard" anymore except as it's tacked on to "Activision-".
doikor 4y ago
Modern games are just way more complicated and all the assets have to be a lot higher quality. The assets especially just take a lot more work to do. A single character model can have more polygons then a whole game back in the day. The textures are also way more detailed, animations are more fluid/realistic, etc. This is why a lot of effort is being put into helping developers to make content faster with things like automatically generating large parts of levels/worlds (basically a developer puts in the important parts manually and some system fills in the rest) and automatically generating and animating humanoid models (MetaHuman), etc. For example here is nice video about using MetaHuman with basically just a phone for face capture as input https://youtu.be/pnaKyc3mQVk?t=72 https://youtu.be/pnaKyc3mQVk?t=72 UE5 procedural generation stuff https://youtu.be/akIqVM0gh4w?t=435 https://youtu.be/akIqVM0gh4w?t=435
- enraged_camel 4y ago
  >> Modern games are just way more complicated and all the assets have to be a lot higher quality. The assets especially just take a lot more work to do. I mean… if this is the case, how did Vampire Survivors become a huge hit and win multiple game of the year awards, and result in countless clones?
  - seventhtiger 4y ago
    I call this "throwing cards in a hat phenomena". Even if we have brain-interface full immersion virtual reality, you can still have fun throwing cards into a hat. In fact you will prefer it. Games are like food rather than cars. In food, high quality food doesn't really push out low quality food. Even a billionaire will want a grilled cheese sandwich sometime. While in cars, you can say that in general people would like the more expensive cars rather than cheaper ones. To me this puts a hard limit on upside of quality for games. It doesn't matter how many thousands of hours of dialogue you have voiced and motion captured if a vampire survivors could always eat your lunch.
  - doikor 4y ago
    Problem with something like Vampire Survivors is that the quality of game you make has very little to do with its popularity. Even poncle (the guy who made VS) admits this as there were many very similar games before VS and many after it. Some of those are objectively better video games but just never got popular. VS is basically an indie movie becoming a mainstream hit equivalent of video games. This is very different to something like Call of Duty, Diablo, The Last of Us, etc where you put a lot more money into the game and if you actually make a good game (and fund a large marketing budget) it will most likely sell well. Same recipe works for Disney and other large movie studios. Basically if you went to watch the next Marvel movie and you were greeted with $50 000 budged indie movie special effects and the no big name cast it gets you would you be a satisfied customer? (and you were expecting Marvel movie special effects and big star actors) And something like Call of Duty makes more money every month then Vampire Survivors has made in the ~1 year it has existed.

rightbyte 4y ago

I got a feeling developers nowadays are so much less efficient than 10-20 years ago. The tools are so bloated and arcane compared to the can-do approach. Also agile messes up productivity alot due to its inflexible and process heavy nature.

ErneX 4y ago
Producing game assets of the quality expected nowadays takes a lot of time.
- danbolt 4y ago
  I think that's a big element of this. The sort of quality bar we see in StarCraft or WarCraft III would come across as kit-bashing or stylized low-budget indie today. Shipping a AAA-style game in a timely fashion needs a larger production process than earlier works. The sort of issues around engineering and linked-lists[1] in the original StarCraft wouldn't really be an issue today. Teams are operating in a very different way. [1] https://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/tough-times-on-the-road-to-starcraft https://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/tough-times-on-the-road-to-...
- rightbyte 4y ago
  Ye that's true.

mritchie712 4y ago

* Success often brings bureaucracy to protect against losing what you've got going for you * The bureaucracy drives away the types of misfit maniacs that build incredible and unique products. * You're left with people more worried about fucking up then they are about building something awesome.

beebmam 4y ago
How do you reconcile this belief with big tech companies being some of the largest bureaucracies on Earth, yet they continually build incredible and unique products?
- mritchie712 4y ago
  What big tech company built a unique product well after they were big? * Google is still mostly search * Amazon is still mostly an online store (small exception with AWS, but that was charcoal[0]) * Meta is still mostly facebook (unique products were acquired) etc. 0 - https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/digital-collections/expert-sets/101417/ https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/digita...
  - SeanAnderson 4y ago
    > Amazon is still mostly an online store (small exception with AWS, but that was charcoal[0]) What? I would express the opposite of this sentiment. Amazon is mostly AWS. Their online store's profit pales in comparison to AWS. https://www.fool.com/investing/2022/07/07/aws-chief-says-amazons-most-profitable-segment-is/ https://www.fool.com/investing/2022/07/07/aws-chief-says-ama... > Amazon overall generated $24.8 billion in operating profits in 2021, and AWS was responsible for $18.5 billion (or 74%) of it. Basically, a business segment that contributes 14% of overall revenue is generating roughly three-quarters of Amazon's total operating profits.
    - mritchie712 4y ago
      Right, I'm saying AWS is an outlier.
    - cma 4y ago
      Doesn't Amazon bucket their store ads (sponsored listings) under AWS?
    - hbrn 4y ago
      That's because Amazon's strategy was to not focus on profits in the first place. https://s2.q4cdn.com/299287126/files/doc_financials/annual/2004_shareholderLetter.pdf https://s2.q4cdn.com/299287126/files/doc_financials/annual/2...

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4y ago

When I consider that this turnaround seems to have happened right after they were acquired by Activision, it becomes less of a mystery. I suspect many of those original few hundred employees didn't stick around after their employer suddenly changed and those who left would have primarily been the most influential Blizzard people. There really is no "Blizzard" anymore except as it's tacked on to "Activision-".

doikor 4y ago

Modern games are just way more complicated and all the assets have to be a lot higher quality. The assets especially just take a lot more work to do. A single character model can have more polygons then a whole game back in the day. The textures are also way more detailed, animations are more fluid/realistic, etc. This is why a lot of effort is being put into helping developers to make content faster with things like automatically generating large parts of levels/worlds (basically a developer puts in the important parts manually and some system fills in the rest) and automatically generating and animating humanoid models (MetaHuman), etc. For example here is nice video about using MetaHuman with basically just a phone for face capture as input https://youtu.be/pnaKyc3mQVk?t=72 https://youtu.be/pnaKyc3mQVk?t=72 UE5 procedural generation stuff https://youtu.be/akIqVM0gh4w?t=435 https://youtu.be/akIqVM0gh4w?t=435

enraged_camel 4y ago
>> Modern games are just way more complicated and all the assets have to be a lot higher quality. The assets especially just take a lot more work to do. I mean… if this is the case, how did Vampire Survivors become a huge hit and win multiple game of the year awards, and result in countless clones?
- seventhtiger 4y ago
  I call this "throwing cards in a hat phenomena". Even if we have brain-interface full immersion virtual reality, you can still have fun throwing cards into a hat. In fact you will prefer it. Games are like food rather than cars. In food, high quality food doesn't really push out low quality food. Even a billionaire will want a grilled cheese sandwich sometime. While in cars, you can say that in general people would like the more expensive cars rather than cheaper ones. To me this puts a hard limit on upside of quality for games. It doesn't matter how many thousands of hours of dialogue you have voiced and motion captured if a vampire survivors could always eat your lunch.
- doikor 4y ago
  Problem with something like Vampire Survivors is that the quality of game you make has very little to do with its popularity. Even poncle (the guy who made VS) admits this as there were many very similar games before VS and many after it. Some of those are objectively better video games but just never got popular. VS is basically an indie movie becoming a mainstream hit equivalent of video games. This is very different to something like Call of Duty, Diablo, The Last of Us, etc where you put a lot more money into the game and if you actually make a good game (and fund a large marketing budget) it will most likely sell well. Same recipe works for Disney and other large movie studios. Basically if you went to watch the next Marvel movie and you were greeted with $50 000 budged indie movie special effects and the no big name cast it gets you would you be a satisfied customer? (and you were expecting Marvel movie special effects and big star actors) And something like Call of Duty makes more money every month then Vampire Survivors has made in the ~1 year it has existed.