News

Blizzard is at a "constant risk" after last 5 years "explosive growth"
Posted: 27.05.2010 13:44 by Simon Priest Comments: 4
Co-founder Frank Pearce of Blizzard has warned that they face "a constant struggle every day" to make sure they stay on track organisationally.

Such has been the success of World of Warcraft that Blizz finds itself with "lots of room for improvement." Has no "sense" of family anymore.

"It's a constant struggle every day to make sure we're doing the right things with the organisation," president Pearce told Eurogamer. "I don't think our on-boarding process is very smooth at all, especially considering our size and what we're trying to achieve."

"We have lots of room for improvement."

A mission statement for the developer and a set of core values has helped them through the growing pains of their huge expansion. It's been challenging for the big boys in charge to keep everything in line with so many teams and projects.

"Even when we had 500 people, it's very difficult to know who everyone was, and now we've got 4600 people, you just can't know who everyone is," he said. "There are many more people that you don't know than you do."

"On the development teams, they're very much like family. They know everyone on their team and they work together day in and day out."

"They have very distinct cultures, because there's the WOW team, and there's the StarCraft II team and the Diablo team. But we don't have that sense of small team and family as an organisation any more," explained Pearce.

"And it's OK, right? We made great games to get into the hands of our fans, and this is a side effect of that." StarCraft II releases exclusively on PC July 27th. Are you worried Blizzard might fall prey to its own mega success story?

Comments

By herodotus (SI Herodotus) on May 27, 2010
herodotus
Not too sure what Frank's babbling on about, complaining about how successful Blizz are. Why would a CEO with thousands of employees know each and every one? Rocking chair and pipe time Frank. Go get a mug of cocoa.
By benny180 (SI Core) on May 28, 2010
benny180
Yeah, it sounds to me like he misses the good old days of back room programing. However it also sounds like he cares a lot about his employees, which is very good thing and probably one of the reasons why they make great games.
By herodotus (SI Herodotus) on May 28, 2010
herodotus
Either that Benny, or he's just going senile.
By noobst3R (SI Core) on May 30, 2010
noobst3R
Yeah, he cares about employees, but not about customers. All the times that i needed a GM on Wow, or when i asked something on the forums about a serious issue lots of users had, all we got was this copy/paste saying we had to re-patch.