Why Bill Roper Left Blizzard

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."

Comments

A bit old...

[Jugalator]

That's news that surfaced pretty much at the moment they left, back in 2003. It wasn't exactly shrouded in secrecy, and Roper briefly mentioned their dissatisfaction and lack of direct communication channels with Vivendi it in interviews, sometimes citing that they only received major news as it was announced by Vivendi for public knowledge. I think that's understandably a tough situation to be in as a game developer.

They left mostly to form new game companies:
- Flagship Studios
- Castaway Entertainment
- Hyboreal Games, that later became U.I. Pacific Games Inc.

Note that ArenaNet (behind Guild Wars) was not among those despite also with significant staff from Blizzard Entertainment, because those formed the company before the "exodus" and were not primarly from Blizzard North either, but e.g. their Warcraft III 3D engine developer, Battle.net lead designer, and the World of Warcraft lead programmer. (this must have been turbulent times at Blizzard, and interestingly, we have not had a new product from them since) Of the companies above, it seems like only Flagship Studios has anything more than something suspiciously vapor-ish going on. :-/