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Blizzard North Co-Founders Leave Company
Thanks to several readers for pointing out a Reuters/Yahoo story discussing the departure of four key employees from Warcraft and Diablo developers Blizzard Entertainment. The article elaborates: "In a statement, Blizzard Entertainment said Blizzard North co-founders Erich Schaefer, Max Schaefer and David Brevik, along with a fourth employee, Bill Roper, 'resigned from the company to pursue other opportunities.'" With Bill Roper often the public face of Blizzard, and the Blizzard North co-founders being the original Diablo developers, this is a big deal for Blizzard owners Vivendi, as well as gamers everywhere, especially as Blizzard "is widely seen in the games industry as one of the most attractive assets of VU Games, which has been languishing on the auction block for months."
How will this affect the development of Word of Warcraft? Were these guys a part of those teams?
Far more important that the fact that the left is the REASON that they left. Have they become dissatisfied with their corporate parent? Are they going to found a new studio (and with that number of key folks that sounds likely to me)? Are they being acquired/courted by someone else (the real challenge of companies these days is not to protect the brands, but to keep the people who make these brands)? And most importantly, does Vivendi consider their gaming assets so invaluable that they wouldn't fight to keep these folks under their wing?
When high level folks like this leave, its usually because someone is giving them money to go off and do their own thing under a different banner/console.
...And FOUR of their key game developers have now LEFT. Who cares what they've done before, they won't be repeating it.
I sort of suspect this might have been motivated (at least in part) by Viviendi-forced actions Blizzard has taken in the last year. I wish those four guys all the best, and I hope they remain out of reach of the Big Evils of the industry.
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
World of Warcraft is, in the words of babylon 5, the last, best hope for MMORPGs.
SW:G overpromised, underdelivered. AC2 was crap. Shadowsbane was buggy trash. WoW sounds and looks great and I have yet to read a bad slant on it from anyone's whos played it.
MMORPG Game developers are allowed to release complete shit and promise that it'll be fixed on the backs of the monthly fees people are forced to pay to fund the game to a fun/playable state if it ever gets there.
I hope and pray that WoW can be the game that all of us old school players have been waiting for since this drought of lousy 2nd generation games. I want WoW to be the game I can point to and say "See, that's the way you do it" and blizzard is the one company I know of that has never failed to deliver a great, fun game.
I know Roper was a lead on the management of WoW. I hope he's not leaving because of an imminent M$ buyout or something along those lines that might totally corrupt Blizzard.
Here's hoping.
... who's to make them sign NCA's?
I don't know of anyone in the gaming industry that has ever signed a non-competition agreement. Imagine, let's say, a 3D engine programmer, that has been doing that for the last 5 years. His skills would not be that useful for a CAD/Rendering company, since outside of the basic math behind it, he'd have to learn plenty of new skills. Thus, the only major options are another gaming company and NVIDIA/ATI. Who'd be crazy enough to sign an agreement that said that you can only work for less than a handful of companies if you ever quit? Certainly no game programmer I know.
Hasn't been for a long time. My guess is that Blizzard North didn't wanna do a third Diablo, or at least these gentlemen didn't want to, and VU told them that it was one of their few franchises in the black, and that they had to. Anyhow, Blizzard has yet to produce a quality in a long time. Warcraft 3 as much as people rave about it, it moved 800,000 copies, not the "millions" quoted elsewhere. To put that number in perspective GTA: VC has moved 8.5 MILLION. And to be fair to the PC market which over the last several years has floundered behind the PS2, the Sims has moved 20 million. Prior to the announcement of the frozen throne there were more people online playing Starcraft at a given time than there were playing Warcraft 3. Yes, Starcraft, several years old and covered in hackers (though the best RTS of all time) had more people playing than the six month old "brilliant" War3. As for World of Warcraft, all hype, they have yet to show anything besides a nice art style. Technically its very sub-par, and on a gameplay level at E3 they showed they do a damn fine impersonation of Everquest.