Your wasting your time with this particular bunch of serfs.
But would this make the game better?
Having a thousand extra devs?
Most of the criticisms of wow dev are down to ideas and their implementation. An idea doesn’t need 1000 people to be implemented. If anything having 1000 people involved in such creates way too much interference in the process.
Remember BFA when people complained that the alliance and horde stories didn’t match up? Brennadam? And the revelation that there were two seperate teams designing the questing experiences for each? That’s what you get if you just inflate the amount of people working on a project.
Imagine if you had a developer team of say 3 people for each spec for each class, all the cross-referencing and communication involved would make any changes subject to massive delays, and that’s assuming they even talk to each other in the first place.
Not to say having a smaller team is always better for sure, but the idea that throwing more staff at something = better is a gross oversimplification. If wow’s issues were due to sheer produce a la quantities, then sure, more people = more produce. But the issues aren’t of that nature. People are moaning about the shadowlands vision which is not something that is down to sheer production capacity. Having 1000 more devs won’t make the lead devs suddenly decide to make the gearing path more casual if they don’t want to.
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What would make the game better is not having a cash hungry CEO at the helm whose only objective is making more cash regardless of the state of the game. Remove Bottick and reinvest that cash into all of the games.
Whether Kottick’s bonus is good for the game or not is a completely different question.
I’m merely questioning the idea that taking his bonus and using it to hire developers will result in some guarantee of increased quality. It’s a pipe-dream type of logic. Reinvestment? absolutely, but that can mean way more than simply hiring more staff.
I need it. And even more.
I think you’re being silly…
Hiring new staff with 2 mil will 100% make the game better… how can it make it worse? The full reason we have bad balance and such can only be down to staff limits.
The full reason theres little content is due to them only being able to do so much at a time… more people will help.
Its not hard to work out throwing money at something speeds things up or helps it forward. This is the case in any company… we just got 3 new devs at our company and projects that were on hold have went live already due to mlre man power.
Give your head a wobble before posting please…
Give your head a wobble.
Hiring does not equal increased revenue. Hiring at base equals decreased revenue due to salary costs, it’s only profitable if a company can guarantee each employee produces more than their salary in profit.
Do you honestly think big business, which operates on a risk model, is going to have a board of directors agree with a CEO going “guys I’m gonna hire 2000 new developers to the tune of 100k salary, I promise each one will cause at least 120k revenue a year!”?
How would you prove that? How would you prove that any such revenue is down to each individual rather than say half of them working super hard and half underperforming? You can’t. It’s not easy to measure.
Because of this no BoD is going to sign off on spending 200mil on hires on a company that is already staffed, already generating revenue, and doing okay. It’s just a colossal waste of potential capital. Not to mention is there even work for 2000 developers??? A McDonald’s isn’t going to generate more profits just because you hire 100 more staff there if there’s no requirement for their work.
So it goes here, there is not an unlimited amount of work for WoW. There isn’t always “room for another dev” at least in respects to justify paying them a whopping salary.
If blizzard did make new hires, doubtful it’d be impacting wow. It’d be use to expand (new games, new platforms) as usually the case when a business makes big hires. You do it when you’re creating new work, you don’t do it when the work is already there, that just creates overheads with no guarantee of returns if the product is already in profit.
People here also don’t actually understand the actual bonus awarded either. Kotick got 200mil (in current value) of shares transferred from ACVI to himself. There was no creation of wealth given to him. The value was already in the company.
He cannot cash the shares so it isn’t a 200mil payout, it’s essentially an interest increase on his dividends.
Regarding the purported value increase of ACVI shares over the 5 year period to which his bonus pertains, the 200mil share bonus reflects 4% of the increase in overall share value.
To put it in context, he has met a 5 year target and for that he has received a 4% bonus in relation to the value he has purportedly generated, a bonus he can’t cash in on.
If you met a big long term project goal at work over 5 years and your boss said “your bonus for meeting this target is a 4% bonus from our profits, but you can’t actually use the money right away” would you consider that a fantastically brilliant bonus?
Not defending corporate structuring at all but people need to actually comprehend the situation as it is and not reduce or simplify the issue to make it an easy black and white thing.
Hires don’t equal profit unless you can guarantee both actual work and overproduction on that work.
Share bonuses do not equal cold cash rewards.
Share bonuses agreed well before layoffs have no impact on layoffs. The people trying to correlate them make no sense. Firing employees generally increases chance of company risk which can reduce share value. In no system ever does firing employees translate into share value increases, doubly so in this case because the bonus scheme was agreed several years ago. The announcement this target had been met was made like 3 weeks prior to layoff notification. How in earth could laying staff off cause it if that’s the case? Correlation does not imply causation.
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Even if those 200M would have been invested in games (shocker, the bonus didn’t change anything in that way), WoW would prob have received barely a million.
WoW for Acti Blizz is quite a small game, in pure profit. So eh, these comments are useless. They’d prob have invested more in King.
Exactly!
IF and it’s a big if the bonus could be reinvested into production (it can’t) there is no freaking way a board of directors is going to green light you throwing that money into a game that is already profitable, hiring new people for it to “tinker with it” as opposed to recommending you reinvest the money into games needing to reach profit thresholds or invest in new products.
I can’t believe people actually think simply hiring more people for a company means it becomes more profitable, as if employees automatically generate profit by being in payroll.
Capitalism is about expansion and investing capitol, it isn’t about milking a single golden cow forever and throwing money at it and hoping the milk “gets better”. You buy new cows and turn them into golden cows as well to sell more golden milk. That’s how it works.
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Im not gonna read that because its ridiculous how much youve posted…
All im going to say is noone said hiring new people will mean a profit or anything… what we said was 2 mil converted into extra staff will help the game…
That analogy doesn’t really apply here. Bit unfeasible, but they could very much hire a person for each spec in the game to work on and keep balanced while a manager dictates the thresholds.
So 36 developers working on specs + 1 manager, for a total of 37 developers?
A full time employee whose job is “feral druid tuning”? I never worked in the game industry, but I don’t think that would work.
Very well, but don’t you dare take the “what are you even on about” stance if you can’t even be bothered to actually read my reply.
And yes people in this thread have suggested exactly that. How else do you invest money in people? Are you suggesting giving everyone payrises will somehow make the game better?
Surely that encourages them to keep doing what they’re doing (game direction) rather than change it? How does this even work lol.
Mate more people = more work. Dunno whats so hard to understand about that???
No it doesn’t.
Let’s say I sell hamburgers for 1 dollar.
Let’s say I hire a guy for 8 dollars an hour, to make burgers.
Let’s say it takes an average of 30 minutes for one person to prepare a batch of burgers from raw materials to being ready to serve (15 burgers) so about 1 burger per 2 minutes
If this person works 10 hours a day, they will make approximately 300 dollars worth of burgers whilst costing themselves 80 dollars. 220 profit.
If I hire another dude to make burgers I MUST have facilities and resources to allow him to make burgers too, otherwise all he is doing it taking work from the other guy and making the burgers he would make normally, but I’m paying both of them.
So no, hiring new people does not create work. Work is created by demand (for product) which has nothing to do with your staff. You do however make hires to meet demand, but the idea hiring new people makes demand is absolute nonsense for most lines of work. It only holds true in a marketplace with unlimited customers with constant demand for your product.
Let me be clear, by work I mean “activity which meets demand, which generates revenue”. I can make up a position for a new hire, sure, and give them tasks to do. But if these tasks do not create new revenue (without taking it from anyone else in the company) I have not created new work in doing this.
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Hotahk gave you a good example already. So I will also make it a simple counter example.
Hire 5 new developers. But we only got 1 workshop with 1 computer for them to actually “work at”. So. Is there more work done now if 1 guy is actually working while other 4 are just sitting next to him and waiting for his turn?
Now imagine you have to pay that guy to help you so that your expense for shopping doubles. Would you still do it?
Are you serious.
In both situations (taking the food home) you end up with the same profit (supplies), you have made the profit quicker but you have not generated a new revenue stream, have you? That’s my point.
Hence reliance on unlimited customers. Do you honestly think if 2 Devs take 2 months to roll out a new patch for a class it will take 2000 Devs half an hour to roll out new patches for each class? That isn’t how it works. Even if it were possible to do that, will the sand keep up with the rate you’re setting? No.
Demand sets the tone for work first and foremost. You are excluding one part of the equation in your analogy: the customer. If my customer wants their shopping in 1 hour, and pays me on that basis, delivering it to them quicker doesn’t generate me additional money unless I use the increased speed to attend more customers (they have to exist for this to be true, and be interested in my product) else I’m paying more people to generate no extra profit.
He’s good CEO tho, blizzard stonks keep growing, thats why he gets money.
Not everything can be done parallelly, endlessly at least. There are practical limits. This example is nice for your groceries, but it doesn’t mean it works the same for developers.
Heck, in your example it would be faster till you have 5 others to help you. Beyond that is a pure waste. But perhaps one person can carry three or four bags and another only one…end of the line more hands != Better products.