Could the development team be bigger according to Blizzard’s profits? And in a way that doesn’t effect business profits and business growth?
If yes, then they’re simply relying on people’s expectations of MMO’s to be grindy and reliant on the skinner box psychology, in order to line their pockets, rather than help stave gameplay stagnation with a bigger team.
Shareholders and CEO’s don’t care if you enjoy the experience or not, as long as you’re paying up each month. They’ll sideline game design directors requests for a bigger team for as long as they can. CEO’s get nice bonuses each year for cutting down business overheads like staff. If they see high monthly subscribers, they’re happy and that is that, it’s also all that shareholders need to know as well.
1 Like
There’s quite a few major layoffs happening in IT and IT adjecent sectors right now.
Blizzard is a bargain hunter, they might get it if they chase it.
2 Likes
1/ Delete classic
2/ Merge retail+classic teams
3/ ??? (optional)
4/ Profit
3 Likes
I think you ought to watch less streamers.
Their QA / Testing team could do with be 3 or 4 times bigger…
Won’t happen.
Both those are costs that generates no profit, nobody actually care if the game have some bugs or is badly balanced. It’s the current game industry and it is what it is.
We went from having demos to pay for early access and do beta test for them in the span of 20 yrs.
1 Like
How come noone came up with an idea for the player base to start buying ATVI shares? You’re no kids anymore and i assume there’s some disposable income at 30 + yrs.
Form activist player investor club and take part (finally equally) in the way the game is designed and ran.
It’s probably the only way apart from voting with your wallet which you dont want (cant do) for various reasons.
1 Like
They’ve stated multiple times in the past that the WoW team got much bigger in recent years.
I think the development team is as big as Ion has said, which is the biggest it’s ever been.
What I think has changed with Dragonflight is that the WoW team works further ahead than before.
In the past they would release an expansion and devote themselves to content patches until they announced the next expansion, after which they would transition to work on that.
I think what they’re doing now is that after they release a new expansion (Dragonflight) they immediately begin working on the next one with as big a portion of the team as they can afford.
And then they use the minimum amount of resources for working on patches, especially when it comes to the cost-heavy areas like art and animation. The key focus with patch development is to rely on systems designs and reusing existing assets.
The goal is to get new expansions out faster whilst maintaining as many subscribers as possible through cost-efficient patches.
Going from a new expansion every 2 years to every 1.5 years is probably the target.
The quicker they can make expansions the fewer patches they have to make, and the quicker can they get those box sales revenues and boosts in subscribers that new expansions bring in.
And then they likely cut customer support, community management, and quality assurance to offset the growing development team.
1 Like
Everyone should.
People pay them to be spoon fed crap hot takes.
Mugs game
What do you mean? What I said is the truth. You wana lay off insulting for the sake of it?
I don’t watch twitch, I think for myself.
Do I really need to explain that there are exceptions? 
What are you on about? What is meant by your first comment? Stop being vague.
Right, so you insult and ignore the message just BECAUSE it sounds like something a streamer would say. Right, clever. Off you go. I think it’s you who needs to stop watching streamers.
yes but sane devs stay away from that twitter infested neon-color hair swamp called blizzard
Stop living in reality. Just stop it.
Well good. So it bloody should. As long as the ratio of profits to development ain’t totally tight on the development side then all is good isn’t it.
You’re aware my question is asking ABOUT the growth of the dev team? He doesn’t answer it in full regarding my question, so don’t get ahead of yourself with praying to blizz.
blizzard have more staff if they ever have.
u’re mixing intention and limitation up, Legion proved they can churn out content At a very fast rate. but the slow nature of DF is Deliberate. Over the past 8 years players have said they want a game which dont require them to log in every day. Dont Punish them for playing Alts etc etc.
and here we are, if u play 1 char and only 1 char, u’ll run dry of content extremely quick.
alot of its Content is built on the concept of having multiple alts and to stack not play Every day, so those that lgo on every day, arent going to have alot to do. but it is deliberate in nature im afraid.
if i remmeber correctly this was disproven.
As at the end BFA, Ion stated Saying the reason borrowed Power existed in BFA is because they were working on BFA From the start of Legion, where borrowed power had a far more positive reaction.
so they were cemented into the design by the time they had reliesed players Dont actually like borrowed power.
they’ve always been starting work on the new expansion the moment the current launchs, I think the idea is enough should be created to provide 2 years gameplay. i think DFs just wasnt designed to be large. or Massively time consuming built on the feedback by SLs Launch.
Oh yeah I’m not disputing that.
They definitely lock down the concept and scope and features of a new expansion even before the current one is out.
And they will also work on that new expansion constantly, parallel to the current one and its patches.
My point is just that the focus of the development team has always been the current expansion until they get to the final patch, after which they switch to the expansion fully.
That’s evident whenever they announce a new expansion and show footage of it. It’s always fairly early in development – zones, features, etc… It’s afterward that the production really starts to ramp up.
What I think they do differently now is that they ramp up the production sooner. Not to 100%, but more than they’ve previously done pre-announcement. Because their goal has to be to get new expansions out sooner.
And I think we’ll see that in November with Blizzcon. They’ll announce the next expansion then, and it’ll be further along in development than we’re used to seeing from an expansion announcement.
Whether there could be more based on comfortable allocation of profits is my resting point on the matter. Business is a numbers game.