Blizzard President Offers Development Advice

Gamasutra has posted an overview of the keynote speech given by Blizzard Entertainment president Michael Morhaime at this week’s Austin Game Developers Conference. In it, Michael talks about the steps the company takes to achieve success with their games.

Next, Morhaime said the company always resists the pressure to ship early. Pressure, he said, comes from all around to ship the game as soon as possible, something Blizzard tries to resist as shipping early is “very risky,” and, referring to the last point, “shipping a game early can do tremendous damage to a brand or a franchise.”

He pleaded that the industry “think long term” and said “shipping early and losing players is very short term mentality.” The company fought this battle in 1996 when Diablo missed its holiday release schedule, which, in the end, perhaps impacted day one sales, but went on to sell well throughout 1997.

“Nobody looks back at Diablo and says ‘if only they’d released it 3 weeks earlier’,” said Morhaime, and through that experience the company was able to educate its parent company that it’s quality that matters — something Blizzard had to deal with again as Burning Crusade missed its own holiday deadline.

Publishers and developers, take note. Nothing irritates me more than firing up a “finished” game only to find that it needs a couple of patches to really be playable.