Why is blizzard not able to deliver?

[Deleted]

Thats what i ask myself and now the forum.

Why is the development output that much lower nowadays than what we were used to before? Why is that output steadily dropping?

Some facts:

- The WoW dev team is bigger than ever before. 250 people work for World of Warcraft. So infact they should be able to output content every month. Small indie companies are able to do exactly that on their games.
- There is no new MMO being developed. They have no replacement for WoW at any time soon, so they should focus on its evolution.
- Blizzard adds timewalker dungeons (which they already planned since MoP) and "mythic" dungeons, which are infact heroic dungeons based on ilvl 670. "Mythic" probably sounds like cynicism to those who actually expected very hard versions of dungeons.
- There will be one new raid (as like in patch 5.3)
- There will be one new questing region (as like in patch 5.3)
- There will be a shipyard for garrisons

It seems to me, blizzard tries to avoid to create effort for art and assets for anything else than raiding. It seems to me, they tried to move creating small group content to the open world with scenarios, which didnt work as people missed the traditional 5 man feeling. Blizzard is not actively investing any money into the evolution in the game, instead of that they even remove features (as like flying) or just rehash old content as like the 6.0 5 mans or the 5 mans from past expacs and vanilla.

For me it seems, blizzard tries everything to lower the development costs, while they have the largest development team ever. Where i just wonder: What are all those 250 people doing all day long? What are they up to, if the output of content is still as suboptimal as at the end of cataclysm and during MoP? Where is the bottleneck? Is it all about arts and is blizzard probably not having enough artists to actually create enough assets?

Will we ever get content as we got in WotLK? A lot of 5 mans. And a raid. And a daily quest region. And if not, why? Why is blizzard lowering their development effort, if the game is still what they want to sell in 10 years? If they are not able to deliver innovation?

[Khadgar]

Quality > Quanity

They replacement the skilled veteren dev's with younger cheaper version's with less ability.

[rda]

Mismanagement.

[Jester Joe]

Honestly, I'm kinda hoping that they're telling the truth when they said they're still training all the newcomers and that messed up more than they expected, and that the next expansion will blow us all away.

Otherwise, it just seems like they realized new expansions get the most amount of subs, so they'd rather just keep pumping out things at a fast rate.

[The3rdCatalyst]

snip

I have two guesses.
Either there will be a 6.3 or multiple additions to 6.2 all of which will not be revealed immediately because they are still testing the future design of it all.
Or they are going to have the next expansion out soon.
WoW subs have been falling quickly and I believe Blizz they up their sub counts with more expansions vs more updates to their. It would be great seeing more content in WoD, but I would not be surprised if we saw another expansion in 2016 and spend a year raiding the final content like we did in Wotlk, Cata and Mist.

[Rassium]

You're not going to get an official answer here, but here's some speculation:

Yes, the WoW team is larger than ever before. That's not necessarily a good thing, though. Something like a video game needs a cohesive vision to tie it together, otherwise you end up with a bunch of disjointed parts (you could argue aspects of WoW have been like this for a long time). Furthermore, rarely do you ever seen returns to scale when adding 150 people to a project. As you employ more people the overhead with managing them and keeping them all on the same page dramatically increases. I think you would be hard pressed to find indie development teams that are truly putting out significant content each month for their games at a sustainable pace.

Basically, what I think has happened or is currently happening at Blizzard is something similar to what we've seen at Square Enix. Back in the SNES and PS1 eras they were churning out high quality games all the time, but recently they've had a lot of trouble releasing 3 main series Final Fantasy games over the course of a decade. Simply put, their development cycle and techniques didn't scale with technology. I think Blizzard is going through a similar growing pains phase, at least with WoW. They're not putting in any less effort than before, they're just all running into each other and tripping and failing to put together something they can actually show off or release. Fixing this is going to require a huge restructuring (if this is actually what is happening), and since the clock is always ticking on new content, I don't know when they'll have the time to do it.

[lunchbox2042]

I think Blizzard realized that no matter how much content they throw at people, they'll still unsubscribe within a month or two. Look at all of the content we got between 5.0 and 5.2 and look at the subscription numbers for that timeframe.

[rda]

They're not putting in any less effort than before, they're just all running into each other and tripping and failing to put together something they can actually show off or release.

That's called mismanagement.

[Granyala]

Self quote from other thread:

Why make patches for free if you can make people pay and profit from resubscription surges every 12 months instead of every 24?

- - - Updated - - -

This is speculation, right?

Ofc speculation. Nothing wrong with a few tinfoil hat theories.

[Deleted]

I think the wow token is really good actually

[rda]

FWIW, I think half of the team increases they implied actually went to other projects (Overwatch + HotS) - they pretty much told that a lot of folks from Titan went that way in the later interviews, and it was previously assumed that the entire Titan team went to WoW.

[Jester Joe]

This is speculation, right? Or does anyone here work for Blizzard or even in anything remotely to the gaming industry to have a clue?

Oh wait, the "answers" are pouring already in...I keep forgetting that we don't need to have facts or a clue to answer questions these days

Is there any facts that point otherwise?

FWIW, I think half of the team increases they implied actually went to other projects (Overwatch + HotS) - they told as much in the later interviews.

I remember they said specifically somewhere like half went to WoW, the other half went to other projects.

[Rassium]

That's called mismanagement.

Yeah. I just wanted to go more in-depth because there's a lot more involved in game development and software development than most people on these boards seem to realize.

[SlippyCheeze]

Why is the development output that much lower nowadays than what we were used to before? Why is that output steadily dropping?

It seems to me, blizzard tries to avoid to create effort for art and assets for anything else than raiding. It seems to me, they tried to move creating small group content to the open world with scenarios, which didnt work as people missed the traditional 5 man feeling. Blizzard is not actively investing any money into the evolution in the game, instead of that they even remove features (as like flying) or just rehash old content as like the 6.0 5 mans or the 5 mans from past expacs and vanilla.

For me it seems, blizzard tries everything to lower the development costs, while they have the largest development team ever. Where i just wonder: What are all those 250 people doing all day long? What are they up to, if the output of content is still as suboptimal as at the end of cataclysm and during MoP? Where is the bottleneck? Is it all about arts and is blizzard probably not having enough artists to actually create enough assets?

Is it really lower output, or is that just your perception? I would love to see how you measured that, especially in terms of steadily dropping output rate.

That said ... you mention 250 people, right? I hope you are not making the n00b mistake of thinking that WoW has 250 completely fungible developers, each of whom could be literally anything -- build a raid, create art, design quests, balance classes, etc. I mean, that's the sort of thing that shithouse managers do, assuming that people are nothing but replaceable parts.

The smart money might have noticed the dev comments a while back that said, oh, "we restructured our processes to let us outsource more art development, which has been the bottleneck in new content" a month or two ago. Because, at a guess, that was the bottleneck in getting new content out.

It doesn't matter how many expert software developers, quest designers, or dungeon/raid designer you have if you can't produce enough art to put in new stuff. You could have a literal million software developers sitting around and, unless you want "stick figure theater", the raid, that won't get you a new raid any faster.

Interestingly, if you were to take a look at where new features have shown up they are heavy on technical and engine improvements, and lighter on new art assets, over the life of this xpac. Almost as if they had all those extra devs, but were still bottlenecked on art...

[Sweetpeaz]

The answer to this question is they are in business to make money. They can deliver a crappy product because so many people will continue to subscribe and then complain about it.

If you or anybody else doesn't like it, stop paying them. It's the only thing that will get their attention. I assure you, if you were in business and cut costs and still had the same drop in subs as every other expansion, you'd do the same. Hell....I know I would.

Noise is noise. Speak with your wallet.

[Skul]

This is speculation, right? Or does anyone here work for Blizzard or even in anything remotely to the gaming industry to have a clue?

Oh wait, the "answers" are pouring already in...I keep forgetting that we don't need to have facts or a clue to answer questions these days

Obvious speculation.

Why bother posting in a thread just to bash it? If you do not enjoy it, see yourself out and don't respond.

[SlippyCheeze]

This is speculation, right? Or does anyone here work for Blizzard or even in anything remotely to the gaming industry to have a clue?
Oh wait, the "answers" are pouring already in...I keep forgetting that we don't need to have facts or a clue to answer questions these days

I'm pretty sure these threads issue you a free tinfoil hat when you read the first post.

- - - Updated - - -

Why bother posting in a thread just to bash it? If you do not enjoy it, see yourself out and don't respond.

I don't know about det, but I occasionally wonder why people bother with threads where they hate on the game, and nothing else, instead of the same. Maybe it's the exact same motivation?

[darklogrus]

Quality > Quanity

They replacement the skilled veteren dev's with younger cheaper version's with less ability.

Outside of raiding one can argue that WoD has neither Quality nor Quantity.

I think Blizzard realized that no matter how much content they throw at people, they'll still unsubscribe within a month or two. Look at all of the content we got between 5.0 and 5.2 and look at the subscription numbers for that timeframe.

More like from SoO til now proved that Blizzard could do next to nothing an 7mil would still happily pay for it.

[clevin]

There are a few things that could be responsible for reduced content delivery speed:

1) Tools. It could be that the tools that they use to create things (dungeons, quests, zones, etc) are inefficient and hold them back a lot.

2) Art. Linked with tools, it could be that the way of creating art assets and embedding them in the world is inefficient. For example, if an artist needs to create and place a small stand of trees it's far more efficient to say have a tool that lets you create a stand all at once, tweaking some variables ("Create and place a stand of between 6 and 10 leafy trees of Type 2") vs placing each tree by hand. Simplistic example, but...

3) Subpar people. Sure, there's a learning curve but at some point a developer hits their skill cap (more or less). If that skill cap is low, you have a productivity issue.

4) Mismanagement. "Do this. No, wait, I need you for a month to do that. Then this." Management direction can break a good team with good tools. It can also make it. If you look at sites like Glassdoor, a common comment among people who've worked at Blizzard is that longevity at the company seems to mean a lot in terms of getting things done. That kind of atmosphere can kill things. Similarly, an overly consensus driven design process can make a design take a long time (and how many great works have ever been designed by committee?)

5) Some combination of the above.

- - - Updated - - -

I don't know about det, but I occasionally wonder why people bother with threads where they hate on the game, and nothing else, instead of the same. Maybe it's the exact same motivation?

Criticism isn't necessarily hate. Life isn't black OR white.

[Deleted]

My complete guess is:

> The best and original developers have moved to other Blizzard projects (would explain why HOTS have such amazing art design compared to WoW)

> The WoW engine is out of date and holding them back.

> They have exhausted their ideas and creative motivation they once had when they started WoW.