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Why Bill Roper Left Blizzard

Posted by Zonk on from the too-many-murlocs dept.

Last week Gamasutra put up an interview with Bill Roper all about Flagship Studios' projects and history. Along with some details on their Massive game Mythos and a reiteration of the Hellgate pricing scheme, Roper talks about the reasons he left Blizzard in the first place: "Our original intention back in 2003 was not to leave Blizzard. We wanted some level of participation and direct communication with Vivendi's home office in order to offer our insight, knowledge and desires as to their plans at the time in terms of a possible sale or IPO of the games unit. The level of uncertainty back then made it extremely difficult to plan for our futures, as well as the futures of our team members. And with no long-term compensation or employment contracts in place, we wanted to be able to interact directly with the people making the key decisions that could drastically affect our lives and workplace. In the end, Vivendi chose not to make that opportunity available and accepted our resignations over the matter. The next day, David Brevik, Erich Schaefer, Max Schaefer and I started Flagship Studios."

3 of 38 comments (clear)

  1. Good Choice... by morari · · Score: 2, Funny

    Better than sticking around and being associated with abysmal titles like World of Warcraft.

    --
    "He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
    1. Re:Good Choice... by SatanicPuppy · · Score: 4, Funny

      Yea, boy I'd hate to have that on my resume. Who would ever hire anyone who had "I was on the WoW development team" on their resume? Might as well say, "Head of iPhone graphical interface development team" or "Lead designer for Google search algorithms."

      --
      ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
  2. Stop poking me! by kerohazel · · Score: 5, Funny

    I think it's fairly obvious he left because his bosses kept touching him.
    (Bill Roper did all the voices, or almost all of them at least, of the early Warcraft titles.)

    --
    Skype is too convoluted... Now I'm reverse-engineering the Kyoto Protocol.