World of Warcraft's success is 'exhausting' for Blizzard

by Michael Zenke Sep 2nd 2008 at 1:30PM

Filed under: World of Warcraft, Fantasy, Interviews

Frank Pearce, co-founder of Blizzard Entertainment, sat down with GamesIndustry.biz for an interview during Games Convention a few weeks ago. He had a number of interesting things to say, with the piece's discussion ranging from StarCraft II's progress to the challenges of jugglng three successful franchises. In a comment that World of Warcraft players might be particuarly interested to hear, Pearce describes the success of their incredibly popular MMO as 'exhausting' more than anything else.

If you've ever wondered why there aren't more patches, more often, to World of Warcraft, Pearce answers your mental query: "We've got almost 3000 employees worldwide now, and the majority of that growth is due to the success of World of Warcraft. As a company we've found ourselves spread very, very thin - because the World of Warcraft community has a voracious appetite for content. That development team is 130 people, they're working on content patches, they're working on an expansion set, they've got their hands full - and then we've got the other development teams that we need to continue to support as well." Be sure to read the full interview for more on Pearce's view of their runaway mega giant.

One of Azeroth's millions of citizens? Check out our ongoing coverage of the World of Warcraft, and be sure to touch base with our sister site WoW Insider for all your Lich King needs!

Tags: blizzard, frank-pearce, opinion, world-of-warcraft, wow

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Liz said on 2:36PM 9-02-2008

Maybe they should hire more people? It's not like money is an issue...

tanknspank said on 6:09PM 9-02-2008

The problem is communication Liz, you see, the bigger the team gets, the more disconnected they can become from each other. Suddenly adding 50 people to a team could cause major differences within the team as a whole in terms of direction.

Pzychotix said on 6:26PM 9-03-2008

Let me introduce you to the Mythical Man-Month.

Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.

fajitapita said on 4:59PM 9-02-2008

Why do I have the feeling than an announcement is comming that WotLK is being delayed untill next year. No official relase date has been announced yet has it???? hmmmm....

Lemons said on 9:29PM 9-03-2008

Judging by all the content they are releasing (interactive maps, new talents, new models, screenshots) it seems like wotlk's release is pretty close on the horizon.

Not to mention the fact that patch 3.0 is going to be released soon.

Cameron Sorden said on 5:30PM 9-02-2008

Please. It's not like it would be that hard to pad out their development team.

They don't need to have one huge, unwieldy team. They could whip out a series of small, tightly-focused teams with specific content goals and a management crew that understands the overall vision and continuity.

Communication can be hard but you can't tell me that Blizzard doesn't have the resources to make it work.

Wjowski said on 12:25AM 9-03-2008

It's not as simple as just 'padding' the development team with more people. Programmers, artists and such are hard to come by, and competent ones even moreso. Taking this into consideration alongside the fact that MMOs (especially the anomaly that is WoW) are even more intricate and difficult to work on and require quite a bit more training than a standard computer game and it's not that hard to see why Blizzard's having a hard time.

Andy said on 8:07PM 9-02-2008

Heh. Has to make me laugh when a company like Blizzard--which could probably use dollar bills as toilet paper and paper towels in their company restrooms--runs a barebone staff. (Well, it's a barebone staff to THEM, considering how much work there is to be done.)

That's just Corporate America mentality for you. Keep the overhead costs down (in this case, staff salary) to maximize profit.

PeterD said on 7:36PM 9-03-2008

They have 130 people working on WoW development and they can barely push out 1-2 patches a year with any meaningful content? What are all those people doing, exactly? If the answer is "working on the expansion", then Blizzard should be slapped. Ongoing content support and expansion content development should not be handled by the same team.

Most companies do more with less, but Blizzard manages to do less with more (130 is a LOT more people than most game companies have to work on content).

I'm sure after an exhausting day of being the #1 MMO on the planet going home to bathe in buckets of money must help relax poor Frank.

dpak said on 3:03PM 9-20-2008

To let those of you who do not work with large scale projects, the progress blizzard DOES make is amazing.

I work on projects ranging from small scale to billions of dollars, and blizz is ahead of the curve.

My job is to help those companies get those projects done faster, and as others point out, it is not always about how many bodies/how much money is thrown at it.

While personally, as a player, I find many things about the game I DO NOT like about wow, I am very impressed with their ability to execute such a project as successfully as they do.

Trust me, it could be a LOT worse....

Cray said on 6:11AM 9-04-2008

Its not an issue of manpower. If it takes a crew of 20 people to support a racecar driver and he's been successful. Adding more crewmen isn't going to make the driver more successful.

World Of Warcraft has exceeded its expectations beyond the imagination of anyone who works in the MMO field. How do you make something that is already a giant, bigger and better without toppling itself to the point where Blizzard can lose money on their biggest money-maker? This is what makes it so exhausting, not the shortage, not the lack of expertise or the motivation.

What they can do is make a new MMO and hope that WoW users flock to the new one. Thus they can focus on making the new game bigger and better in hopes of making it just as successful as WoW. To do this would require managing personnel, not necessarily adding more manpower but knowing where to put the focus on WoW, while building a new MMO.

Wardoc said on 7:42AM 9-04-2008

I have been saying this for years now blizz is cheap!
The most successful MMO ever making close to $13,000,000 + a month in gross revenue and they have a team of 130 to do all the development for the whole game and a total of only 3000 employees worldwide give me a break,that is crazy.I often wonder why I continue to play this game,Hopefully something bigger n better will come along and then poor Franky won't have to be exhasted by the millloins & millions he is making anymore.