What is different about how Blizzard Entertainment develops games?
I read the article (link at bottom) shortly before I joined Blizzard. There are many lessons but one in particular inspires me each day at work. Demand Excellence or You’ll Get Mediocrity We are fortunate to have a creative environment with the best developers from around the world who have come to Blizzard to make the best games they can possibly make. At our company meetings, the primary focus is to talk about how to make our games better and our players happier. Little time is spent on fiscal quarter reports, GAAP estimates, analyst forecasts, and other business topics. We’re gamers and we’re here to make games. It’s not uncommon to hear of developers who have spent a decade or more preparing themselves to work at Blizzard (myself included). A communal culture focused on quality leads to longer game development cycles. Each project represents a significant percentage of our lifetime contribution to the world – we have to make them count. Blizzard’s company values are engraved in a c
In general, good games come from player-focused companies. I would say that Blizzard is player focused, much like we at Riot are. Sometimes people call this ‘design-centric’, but I really think it’s just player-centric. Being player-centric is more commonly a requirement in design hiring in the industry than in other departments, even though I feel that all departments should be player-centric. Some other differences: 1) Blizzard developers have a lot of distributed authority to make things good. While they have a hierarchy, they empower individual developers to arbitrate quality in a localized setting. 2) Their designers are skilled. Many designers in the industry have a very minimal understanding of design and have a good gut-check on fun vs not fun, but not a very evolved understanding of how to design a great game. In the industry, there are a lot of competent engineering and art and production teams, but very few competent design teams. There are a good number of competent designe
