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Rumor Control On Blizzard Defections
Gamespot's weekly rumour control column discusses the rumor from back in April on Grimwell detailing a mass defection from Blizzard to NCSoft. From the article: "However, seeing how internal NCsoft studio ArenaNet was founded by a group of former Blizzard-ians--the creators of Battle.net, no less--it would come as little surprise if more WOW developers had signed up with the rising publisher." Their final verdict: "Some Blizzard developers have joined NCsoft? Not bogus. But droves? That's not so certain." This week's rumor control also discusses the raise in prices for Xbox 360 Games and the possibility of a no-frills PSP pack.
A lot of people are leaving, mainly because they feel their hands were tied over WoW. Corporate refuses to put much money into the WoW project, and it frustrates us as much as the customers. When Vivendi forced the game out in November, we literally spent weeks stuck in the office because the servers were constantly crashing. Some co-workers didn't see their families for a week, sleeping on the floors and couches in the break room. Management was bitching all the time about how much money "we're" losing.
Many desks are empty now, more and more co-workers are leaving, rumor is NCSoft is promising faster release schedules, and Vivendi not breathing down our necks. The morale is awful, mainly the long cycles for each project, working 4..5 years on something takes a lot out of you, then the massive rewrites because another company came out with a feature we planned to use, or the hardware changed, it erodes you. Ghost won't be out by christmas, expect it delayed again until summer 06, and the next pipeline project isn't due out until 2008. It's expected that WoW will keep the company in enough funds to remain solvent until then. I'll probably be looking somewhere else, I pity the kids they end up hiring.
Moving between companies is a great way to promote your career.
Consider that a huge team of people worked on WoW. Now, Blizzard is quite happy, and probably wants to keep the lead designer, producer, etc. to keep working on the live team, the next expansion, etc.
But what if you're one of the assistant designer? Well, unless Blizard decides to start making another MMOG, you're probably out of luck getting promoted to a lead design position. But other companies will have lots of MMOGs in development and need lots of lead designers. Same goes for producers, QA, writers... the list goes on and on.
Blizzard, meanwhile, will probably put a lot of the money it makes from WoW into more non-MMOG titles. Okay if that's what you want to do, but some people want to work on MMOGs specifically.
Bruce