Even senior devs leaving blizzard

[Belloc]

Guys, your "people leave companies all the time" & "he was there x amount of years" would made sense if he left for another big company, but nope he left for a start up. Major difference

He left for a "start up" comprised of major talent sourced from his current employer, which is one of the biggest names in the business. He gets to work with his old friends, his old bosses, and probably gets higher pay. In the event that this studio ends up being wildly successful, he also gets to essentially be a founding-level employee. This is the dream for a game dev.

- - - Updated - - -

It.. did? Then why is Classic BC becoming a thing then lol?

TBC was the first major expansion, the first time the game had a ton of major improvements, and far more popular than Vanilla. It's going to draw a lot of people back for at least a short while. The same thing is going to happen with WotLK classic.

Current Classic may very well be a flop. It is, after all, Vanilla WoW. Vanilla's main pull was nostalgia and that only carries you so far.

[willtron]

Sometimes i wonder what people, who make this kind of threads, do in their real lives...
They might be employed, but definately not as anything important. Much less so within IT.

Senior devs leave companies; that's just the reality of things.
Younger ones leave for a bigger paycheck, older ones for a start-up.

They dont have jobs. Normally these posts are by kids or degenerates that don't understand how the working world actually works.

[MrLachyG]

Blizzard as a company sucks now, even senior employees are leaving for a start up company, i am so glad I am not playing and supporting blizzard anymore

Liar, you’re still playing Classic; your posts support that. Also do people seriously not understand how rare it is to stay in the same place of employment for that long? Back between 1950 and 1980 yeah sure people stayed in the same job forever but times have changed

[huth]

It has lost a huge percentage of their playerbase. It was booming the first month or two then people started leaving, then they had to disable the layering system on the servers because players were no longer filling up the layers, then the servers stopped having queues and if you log in today on most servers you'll see a handful of people in orgrimmar/stormwind.

It didn't have the staying power that many of its competitors had, staying power that the private server community guaranteed would be there.

So exactly as they expected it to happen since well before release? That's not exactly what i'd call a flop. In fact, that's perfectly normal for a video game.

The layering system was always intended to eventually be disabled. The entire reason it was even introduced was so the servers wouldn't die off to quickly and avoid merges.

[Asrialol]

People change jobs all the time. This is no different than any other person swapping a job in any business, in any country - ever.

[Spikeychris]

“Flopped” wot?

- - - Updated - - -

I don’t mean to sound like that guy, but people are more excited for Classic TBC than they are retail atm.

The Classic playerbase is around 350k people and the retail playerbase is significantly bigger (in the millions). Shadowlands was the fastest selling PC game of all time (for a week lol) and sold the most units in the first 24 hours of ANY expansion. Now shadowlands pop has gone down (numbers thrown around is by 60%) but 40% of 3.7 million is still bigger than the classic pop (and the total number of copies sold is likely in excess of 5 million as not everyone will buy it in the first 24 hours).

Did classic have an enormous playerbase at launch - yes. Is the current population a fraction of the launch months - yes. Is that a failure - No imo it was pretty much what was expected with huge interest at first dropping off to eventually stabalise with a few hundred thousands players.

TBC classic is an interesting one though because I wonder how quickly the population will fall off this time and it also splits the classic playerbase. I suspect it will do well when it launches but will fall off a cliff even faster when the people who came back for classic and left within a few months realise TBC isn't THAT different to vanilla.

[Redroniksre]

I am actually a little worried for Dreamhaven. He most likely left for them because there is more creative freedom with smaller companies. So far it is looking like another case of Obsidian Entertainment. "Bethesda was the reason they couldn't make a good game reeee" then when they do, oh look, the game is not nearly as good as people hyped it to be. If Dreamhavens first game isn't a smashing success, people will either A) ignore it and continue to spout Blizz bad, or B) jump down their throats.

[rrayy]

Blizzard as a company sucks now, even senior employees are leaving for a start up company, i am so glad I am not playing and supporting blizzard anymore

People don't stay at one job their entire life. Welcome to the real world.

[aceperson]

In the hopes of salvaging some actual discussion out of this thread, it's interesting to see how many long runners at Blizzard ended up joining Dreamhaven and its two development studios. A lot of the people generally credited with putting Blizzard on the map, or enabling some of their more popular side projects like Classic, as well as some promising up-and-comers seem to be signing on with Dreamhaven. It's going to at least be interesting to see what comes out of their approach to game design and if they nail down an in-house visual aesthetic or if they'll change things up between franchises.

maybe i'm just very bias and refuse to see beyond black and white but i don't think there is a meaningful discussion here. the exact same thing (minus the devs going to a company owned by their former boss) happened with bioware during anthems development. this just screams that things are horrible at blizzard and the company is crashing. it's successful for now but they've lost ben brode, chris metzen, and numerous other senior devs.

as much as i wish it wasn't true, we are either close to the end of blizzard as a company or perhaps even a rebranding.

[Viikkis]

It has lost a huge percentage of their playerbase. It was booming the first month or two then people started leaving, then they had to disable the layering system on the servers because players were no longer filling up the layers, then the servers stopped having queues and if you log in today on most servers you'll see a handful of people in orgrimmar/stormwind.

They were going to remove layering in any case.

Servers don't need to be overcrowded to the point of queues to be alive lol.

Also my classic server is very much alive with lots of players around in cities and the world.

Now I'm not saying that classic is bigger than retail, no way, but it wasn't a flop...

[Alatie]

I’m looking forward to whatever Dreamhaven makes so we can datamine and meta the fuck out of it as soon as possible and then post on their forums how bored we are.

Dam man you have to much free time if that is what you are doing with it.

[rrayy]

Oh yeah, I understand that, but he is an experienced senior developer, I would as many others join a well established game company, not a start up founded by Mike ex CEO of Blizzard.

Kinda seems like Mike is stealing ex blizzard employees, judging how many left to join Dreamhaven.

So? You aren't him. HE wants a challenge. A start up gives him that challenge. There are many others that aren't you as well.

[Neuroticaine]

Guys, your "people leave companies all the time" & "he was there x amount of years" would made sense if he left for another big company, but nope he left for a start up. Major difference

"I've accomplished my goals with my career and I have the money to do whatever I think is fun."

[Queen of Hamsters]

I can't wait until people, once again, get a shower of reality after hyping yet another new game company up for years in their desperation to have something live up to their nostalgia-smothered memories of tHe GoOD OlD DaYs.

[Spikeychris]

maybe i'm just very bias and refuse to see beyond black and white but i don't think there is a meaningful discussion here. the exact same thing (minus the devs going to a company owned by their former boss) happened with bioware during anthems development. this just screams that things are horrible at blizzard and the company is crashing. it's successful for now but they've lost ben brode, chris metzen, and numerous other senior devs.

as much as i wish it wasn't true, we are either close to the end of blizzard as a company or perhaps even a rebranding.

Sorry but to compare the current state of WoW to anthems development... what? Lets take stock and look at WoW. In the past year and a bit we have had Classic launch, which brought back a huge amount of players, and we had the largest amount of pre expansion engagement in retail in a decade. Shadowlands was the fastest selling expansion of all time (and PC game for about a week lol) and has been an overwhelming success.

Ben Brode left blizzard 3 years ago. Metzen left 5 years ago and guess what the sky still isn't falling. Developers come and go if anything Blizzard is an anomoly for just how long it manages to hold onto it's senior developers. Nothing that is currently happening at blizzard is remotely close to the shitshow that was Anthem.

[Queen of Hamsters]

I read on Twitter he was responsible for a lot connected to WoW Classic. In that light it makes sense they let him go after Classic flopped.

... Flopped?

Did Classic really flop?

[Seranthor]

Blizzard as a company sucks now, even senior employees are leaving for a start up company, i am so glad I am not playing and supporting blizzard anymore

Are you working at the same job you were at 12-15 years ago? If not, why not?

[Ludvig]

The Classic playerbase is around 350k people and the retail playerbase is significantly bigger (in the millions).

There are over 500k people every week on warcraftlogs for naxx in classic and literally less people raiding castle nathria across all difficulties

[Soon-TM]

Guys, your "people leave companies all the time" & "he was there x amount of years" would made sense if he left for another big company, but nope he left for a start up. Major difference

While I largely share your sentiment, it would have been useful if your OP included some press article or something, so we all can know what is exactly your point, because otherwise the brain drain that Blizzard has been going through (whatever the reasons) are old news by now.

[Queen of Hamsters]

There are over 500k people every week on warcraftlogs for naxx in classic and literally less people raiding castle nathria across all difficulties

And literally a ton of different content, huge amount of different level raiding teams + LFR (where close to none log) on Retail.

Your point?

Classic's raiding having lots of participants when it's the only endgame content is like comparing oranges to apples.

I don't agree that Classic was a flop (TBC wouldn't be coming if it were) but using raid participation via a 3rd party tool as any kind of metric always has and always will be, moronic.

Chances are that if Classic had flopped, they wouldn't be pouring more money into it and would stick to retail only. Furthermore, as of now there are more people raiding Naxx in Classic than in all four difficulties of CN put together, according to Warcraftlogs.

I direct you to above ^

Not getting into another bickering about these 3rd party sources as it always boils down to "Warcraftlogs/Whatever is legit when it says things I agree with!"... Which I wholeheartedly disagree with.