why Blizzard will NOT hire new or more devs

[Deleted]

every week or so, i read a couple topics about people complaining that Blizzard doesn't have enough devs, or that it has bad devs. in both cases, those people suggest Blizzard should hire new devs. this is totally counterproductive.

a bit about myself in the hopes i give the impression what i'm talking about: i recently graduated from an IT college. i got education in at least 15 programming or software "languages", depending on what you call a different language. i have created 5 distinct projects for different classes, both alone and in group. i've had several 12-24 week courses on fringe matters related to software development and IT best practices, including moral issues, project management, IT service management and system development (deciding what to add to the system with the customer). i don't want to say that i'm the best man to explain this, but i think that compared to about half of the posters on this site (who have no IT background at all and don't even know Java from .net, and more importantly have not had to deal with a group IT project before) i at least have a reasonable understanding this.

now, there are a number of reasons why blizzard can't add extra devs that easily. i'll highlight the biggest here. the main background for this is a book titled "The mythical man-month", written by Fred Brooks. Brooks was a project manager at IBM and, through experience, laid the groundwork for software project management in his book. the book is known mainly for 3 main points, and a half dozen smaller ones. the biggest one of these main points, though, was what would be known as Brooks law: "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later".

this law might seem strange, but it basically is true because a project is often not easily dividable in separate parts. teams need to coordinate their efforts, and communicate with each other. this communication takes up time, and at a certain point, extra manpower means that the time saved by faster development is counteracted by the extra overhead from communication.

a quick napkin math example. suppose you got a game with 10 worlds and 5 levels per world, but a storyline like the witcher 2, where nearly every level effects each other. each level takes 5 days to design and code. if you got 10 designers on the game who each take 1 world (so 5 levels), each designer can work on the effect in their own world, and communicates with the other 9 designers for the effects. that's 45 channels in total. if every channel also takes half a day per level to discuss the effects of that level on the levels of the other person (so 5 levels per channel, since reverse effects would be nearly pointless), that's 25 days from developing the worlds (since all 10 developers can work alongside eachother), and 112 days from the communication overhead, or 137 days (4 months and 17 days).

now, if you get 50 developers who each take 1 level, you only need 5 days to code it. however, 50 people means 1225 couples of people who need to communicate. again, if each level takes half a day to discuss (1 level per person), that's 612 days of overhead, for a total of 617 days of work (20 months and 17 days).

now, if you look at it from a blizzard point of view, it holds very much true. consider a fight like the Lich king in ICC:

1) art designers for the mobs (lich king, val'kyr, ghouls, horrors, spirits, terenas, spirit warden. that's 7 mobs to design).
2) animation designers for each of these mobs. again, 7 mobs to design animations for. you also notice that each of these mobs needs communication between the art and animation designers, because things like clipping are ugly.
3) spell effect designers for each mob. each spell needs discussion with the art designers and the animation designers. also, some spells need discussions between multiple designers (like the ghoul and horror summoning). i've counted 24 spells in the fight.
4) environment design. environment needs to be to scale with the mobs and the spells, and things like remorseless winter effect the environment (exploding pillars).
5) doodad design. stuff like the disappearing platforms.
6) encounter design. calculating numbers and such.
7) scripting of encounter, mobs and spells.

so you got 7 aspects, taken by at least 7 developers. that's 21 channels. if you got separate designers for each mob or spell for the first 3 categories, and separate designers for each type of scripting for the last category, that's 44 people, with worst case scenario of 946 channels. i'm not going to perform math on this, but you see that's it's pretty similar to the 10 worlds example of earlier.

now, i simplified this a lot. also, there's the conception that it's not just the quantity but also the quality of content that is under dispute. that's not something that will be solved by a simple changing of the guards. the people at the top have an idea of how this game should progress, and they won't easily be swayed to change that. new developers won't magically change that.

[Seolla]

They ARE hiring, if you check their recruiting page

The thing is, with how high the standards are (pretty much the best games in the world), it is very hard to find people good enough. You're making it sound like these talents come out of thin air.

[Deleted]

They ARE hiring, if you check their recruiting page

The thing is, with how high the standards are (pretty much the best games in the world), it is very hard to find people good enough. You're making it sound like these talents come out of thin air.

yeah, i know i should have named it differently. however, i'm addressing the point many people make that blizzard should hire more developers so content can come out faster.

edit: also, wow, you read almost 15 paragraphs in 2 minutes. you sure read fast.

[Buryit]

My napkin math says less employees = more profit in the eyes of cap'n failovision. They have been making sure to simplify items etc etc for a long time to cut down on expenses IMO.

[Deleted]

Because WoW has lived it's time. At this point it's easier to make a new game than to change and fix the old. The old WoW engine is probably from 2002 or something when it was functioning in beta or maybe even earlier. Of course shutting it down would be stupid as it still has lots of players but they will milk it as much as they can before it's completely dead and focus on Titan.

[Immamoonkin]

They're not going to hire just anyone. They want the best of the best... That said...

They're flying my husband out there on the 23rd for an interview for a position with the Next Gen MMO.

[cfmcghee]

The only fault to your logic, and it's not a very big one, is that often groups of people perform the tasks, and all people do not need to be in the discussions. A New developer is hired, and (s)he takes care of simple stuff - first QA, basic artwork (take texture X and change the base color from brown to blue)...stuff like that. So in certain situations, more people CAN speed up the process.

As for Blizzard, I would assume that they have already gotten their groups set up pretty darn efficient, and as such your original assertion would hold true.

[Buryit]

They're not going to hire just anyone. They want the best of the best... That said...

They're flying my husband out there on the 23rd for a position with the Next Gen MMO.

Whoa nice! I wish you/him the best of luck

Sorry for being off topic

[Karoht]

Yes, of course they are still hiring. They don't stop taking talent.
But understand that any new hire they get today, probably won't be even useful in producing content until 6 months from now. MoP changes notwithstanding.

[Immamoonkin]

Whoa nice! I wish you/him the best of luck

Sorry for being off topic

I wouldn't say it's too off topic. The reason I posted that is because I wanted to prove they are still very much trying to hire people.

[Posid]

I thought Brook's law only pertained to late projects? From my understanding patches usually always arrives when internally scheduled (+- 2 weeks depending on ptr), now I can't be sure of this obviously but it seems like it.

I'm fairly sure it would be possible to churn out content faster than they are doing, but it's not worth it to hire more people because of the Diminishing returns. Somewhere a cost-benefit analysis was made that decided how many developers should be on staff, but it wouldn't surprise me if that number fluctuates quite a lot because of people quitting and what not.

As for a company as big as blizzard, they are always looking for people, and considering the quality of their releases, always keeping an eye out for talent.

[namelessone]

People don't realize that # of devs =/= development speed. Hiring more developers might not increase, but in fact REDUCE productivity, as with each additional person one extra communication channel is added to the system. At some point the losses from communication are going to start cancelling out the gains from number.

Two people will clean the house faster than one, but twenty people will quite possibly take longer than two.

[painweaver]

I think the main issue is quality. Hiring more people won't work, you've proven that- quite well I might add. Blizz is constantly turning over their wow dev-staff, and quality has been suffering because of lack of experience (my theory). Look at their hiring page and who started on wow but was turned over to another project in the past 3-4 years.

At this point in the game's life, the wow-devs have been reduced to a couple of *vets* (GC, etc.) leading new hires and interns. It seems that anyone who does something "good" for the game long enough gets moved to another project.

Wow is on the backburner, as far as getting Blizz's undivided attention. It is now being used to fund other projects.

[iceberg265]

The thing is, with how high the standards are (pretty much the best games in the world), it is very hard to find people good enough. You're making it sound like these talents come out of thin air.

I lol'd.

Honestly, the OP may be correct, but the way Blizzard answers the posts just makes it sound like they are too cheap to fix things. Putting in that extra work would be too much like...work.

[mittacc]

they should just hire a few teams. if they have every patch, additions etc on paper, they could have each team work on their own patch at the same time, since patches differ so much this won't make it noticable that there are different teams working with it(maybe mechanic wise but not story). And if they require special connections/hidden messages they will talk about it before they start.

This way you could lanch and expac then if you want to, realease the patches like 1,2,3,4 on the second day if oyu wanted to(obviously you don't want to, but you could) and these teams could head right on working on the next expac while a ''perfection team'' does everything on the alpha, beta etc. And finally a bug/glitch fixing team.


here's the promised faster content guys and gals

[relaxok]

Because WoW has lived it's time. At this point it's easier to make a new game than to change and fix the old. The old WoW engine is probably from 2002 or something when it was functioning in beta or maybe even earlier. Of course shutting it down would be stupid as it still has lots of players but they will milk it as much as they can before it's completely dead and focus on Titan.

I hate when people say this.. I work in AAA game development and the way people talk about 'engines' is so weird. The game is not based on a third party engine like a game written around some specific version of say the Unreal engine would be. I'd bet almost all of the code has been substantially rewritten since the beta, and very little of that code still exists. Id also guarantee many core ststems have been remade to accomodate updates to the game as far as database usage, graphics, art data formats, server code, etc.

I think what people are meaning to say when they are talking about this is the basic design of the game is outdated. But don't confuse matters by implying the game can't move forward because it is based on an old 'engine' which isn't the reality... Helll the whole graphics side of the game has been completely redone since launch, you can trap/analyze the vanilla client and compare... It was all fixed function pipeline and is now all shaders.. And gets better looking all the time. And that's just the graphics side.

[Slavemaker]

A lot of people don't seem to understand this honestly, you can't just put an endless amount of people on one project thinking "Oh it'll surely make it faster the more people there are on that project!" no, it does not work that way, you need an efficient number and team to do it quickly and efficiently, you can't just put X number of people on it and when it isn't coming around faster enough just put more on it, it does not work that way, there is a certain formula for this (not that I know it) which I assume varies by company.

Point is, they will eventually add more people, more developers and all that business (probably are as we speak) but that doesn't mean they're all going to work on the same thing nor make production faster.

Title could use a change though, as you said.

[Metallikiddd]

fire tom chilton and replace him.

[Rixis]

ancient chinese proverb (well, maybe not)

too many cooks spoil the broth

[Dariela]

yeah, i know i should have named it differently. however, i'm addressing the point many people make that blizzard should hire more developers so content can come out faster.

edit: also, wow, you read almost 15 paragraphs in 2 minutes. you sure read fast.

I read it faster then 2 minutes. I figure anybody who plays MMO's has to have developed some quick reading skills, or else catching things in that tiny chat window would be damn near impossible at times.