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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."
...wanted more money, did not get it.
Really the problem was they weren't bargaining from a position of strength... Diablo 3 wasn't screaming right a long or anything.
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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.
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Better than sticking around and being associated with abysmal titles like World of Warcraft.
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I haven't been following the development of Hellgate all that closely, aside from playing the Mythos alpha a bit, but I can't help but think that the "elite" pricing is a terrible idea. $10/month for updates and a few small bonuses is crazy. The pricing model that Guild Wars uses would have made a lot more sense, and given them an excuse to announce a new expansion every few months, rather than a vague promise to add new content. Not to mention that people who join up a year after release will presumably get all the same content as those who have been paying for a year ($120). When you give people who have paid for the game second-class status, it's bound to cause resentment.
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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.)
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Hmm... now I didn't RTFA, but the summary doesn't mention anything even remotely equivalent to "we wanted more money". So do you have any other information you base that on, or is it just pulled out of the ass? Especially given that I suspect they were better paid at Blizzard than at some startup company noone heard about yet, that assumption seems somewhat fragile.
The only thing which would come even close is the talk of long term contracts and compensations, but he _does_ spell out that they wanted to know how to plan their future, so it doesn't necessarily come out as greed. It doesn't say they went and demanded contracts for life, it says they went and asked for a communication channel. There's a big difference.
It may come as a surprise, but some people do actually like to know what happens next. You know, game is finished now, what happens next? Do we stick around and make an expansion pack? Extra content? A new game? Should we start sending out resumes now? Uncertainty about that can bring morale downwards quite a bit.
As for position of strength, I beg to differ. World Of Warcraft turned out to be a bigger money printing machine than anyone expected, Vivendi included. People thought the old Everquest was a money printing license, and is what got half the developpers and publisher in a frenzy to try to make yet another MMO. And most attempts to imitate it failed pretty badly. Well, WoW overtook it by a whole freakin' order of magnitude. It has some 95% of the MMO market IIRC.
Basically, as dev team achievements go, these guys pulled an _amazing_ achievement. I don't know what happened there, but that team had some incredible talent and worked surprisingly well. Design talent, programming talent (considering almost every MMO before was traditionally a _horribly_ buggy mess, and would spend eternity creating two new bugs for each one fixed... and some got into a dead end and got cancelled), etc.
It takes a pretty brain-damaged PHB to just squander such an asset over something as petty and trivial as being asked to have an official communication channel. Whatever happened to transparency and communication? Because the way I read it, that's really all they were asking for.
I know it's all the rage to treat employees as dime-a-dozen expendable, replaceable peons, but sometimes it comes out as particularly retarded. We're not talking pizza-delivery kind of expendable, but a team which was one of the legends in their field, and head over shoulders over most of the rest. They're not _that_ easily replaced. Not considering them even important enough to be informed what next, before they read the press release, seems kinda extreme, as low opinions go.
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