Blizzard’s Perfect Storm

An editorial from GameIndustry.biz looks at how Blizzard Entertainment manages to be so successful, contending that the company’s success can’t just be shoved aside as “they’re special” but is more clearly visible for those willing to look.

The causes, however, are a little more subtle – sufficiently so that many other developers and publishers consider Blizzard to be some kind of “special case”, a company which lies outside the rules of the industry in some unique manner and whose success simply cannot be emulated.

This is patent nonsense. Blizzard is stuffed with stunningly talented people, from the management level right down to the most junior development positions, of that there can be no doubt – but there are many talented people working in the videogames sector. The only “magic” thing about Blizzard is how well they manage and focus that talent into creating some of the world’s best games, time and time again.

For those who care to look, Blizzard actually put much of that mechanism on display in Paris last weekend. Look around the coverage of the event that’s gone online in the past few days, and you see a company baring its development soul in front of thousands of its toughest critics – the fans who actually pay for its products.

That, in itself, is symptomatic of the firm’s approach. It’s astonishingly transparent, to an extent which would give most developers cold sweats. With WoW expansion Wrath of the Lich King and new RTS title StarCraft II still months away, the designers of both games took the stage in front of packed audiences to discuss intimate details of the creative process for both games – warts and all. Tricky questions about unit balancing and design changes were aired and discussed in a frank, honest way.