Blizzard's 'Secret Sauce' 330
hapwned writes "With interviews from David Brevik, Mark Kern, and Steig Hedlund (all of Blizzard Entertainment fame), Russ Pitts creates a most enlightening explanation of Blizzard's success in the latest edition of The Escapist." From the article: "So, how does a maker of B-quality DOS and console games go on to become the single most successful videogame company in the history of the world? Even accounting for good luck and talented employees, there has to be some other key ingredient in Blizzard's larder to account for their seemingly golden touch."
Impossible to Read (Score:5, Informative)
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To view the full text, click the tiny "text" link near the middle of the bottom nav bar.
Slashdot suicide. (Score:2)
Oops.
Forcing users away from a low-bandwidth version to the original, image-heavy article => brutal Slashdotting.
Sorry, The Escapist.
Not really (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Impossible to Read (Score:2)
Server checks referrer, making that link overrated (Score:2)
Re:Impossible to Read (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Impossible to Read (Score:3, Informative)
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Ironic that they completely ignore... (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes WOW is proof that blizzard can in fact milk the MMORPG crowd for more than any other company.
Yes, blizzard made online gaming practical many, many years ago. and yes, blizzard has made video games that are addictive. But the one thing they don't seem to relize is that not only do certain users crave hacks, but certain users who write said hacks use that craving for said hacks to simply exploit millions
Nintendo? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Nintendo? (Score:2, Informative)
The Ultimate History of Video Games [amazon.com]
I can really recommend it. It describes how everything got started, from pinball machines to arcade machines to the first home entertainment systems. Also very nice to read how all of the Atari developers where smoking drugs all day long, and how their annoyed managers hated that
Re:Nintendo? (Score:3, Informative)
Sony and Microsoft both bring in more money than Blizzard also.
Re:Nintendo? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Nintendo? (Score:2)
Re:Nintendo? (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe they meant, "So, how does a maker of B-quality DOS and console games go on to become the videogame company that made an MMOG with more players than ever in the history of the world?"
Re:Nintendo? (Score:2)
Here's how (Score:2, Funny)
By creating very unique, original gaming concepts, such as the "Role Playing Game," adding lots of custom content, including interesting levels, unique character types, and a wide range of items you can interact with... and putting it into a single package called "Diablo" then remove all of the complexities that would actually make the game interesting!
No, I'm
Re:Here's how (Score:3, Interesting)
From the article:
Blizzard has succeeded largely by consistently identifying what it is that makes gamers want to play a game, and then amplifying that all the way to 11.
I agree. If you look closely, all the really famous Blizzard games are really the same genre concepts as previous games -- but taken to a much greater level.
Picture Dune II, and the early C&C games. Great games, to be sure. Dune II really made a genre. But then look at Starcraft, and everything else that came later. SC has three com
Re:Here's how (Score:5, Funny)
"Lots" in a relatively loose sense of the word.
How truely different is a "Broad Sword" and a "King's Broad Sword" and a "King's Blue Broad Sword" and a "King's Blue Broad Sword of Fear" and a "King's Blue Broad Sword of Lots of Fear" and a... you get the idea.
Having several modifiers you can add to a weapon doesn't (in my opinion) make each possible variation of that weapon a unique special item.
Diablo's approach to weapon manufacturing reminds me of a simple BASIC program I thought was cool back in Jr. High I called 'insults'. "You $var1 $var2 of $var3 $var4!" where $var1 = adjective, $var2 = noun, $var3=adjective, $var4=noun. The number of possible insults is equal to the possible values of each multiplied together. Plug in 10 possible words into each place, and whoalla! 10,000 possible insults!
You smelly vat of retarted goat droppings!
You ugly pile of rotting worm guts!
You redundant naming scheme of silly weapons!
Full Text AC ftw (Score:4, Informative)
Russ Pitts
In 1991, the internet didn't exist.
That is to say, it did exist (and had for some time), but to the majority of Americans it might as well have been a huffalump until the creation of the World Wide Web in (approximately) 1992, when the internet would begin to become both widely understood, and easy-to-use (therefore "of interest" to most people).
Yet in 1991, the internet (such as it was) was neither widely understood nor easy-to-use, which is why the prospect of playing games on the internet may have seemed like a good and bad idea simultaneously. On one hand, nobody was doing it yet - it was a virgin market; on the other, nobody was doing it yet - the risks were terrible.
In 1991, videogame industry leader Sierra launched the Sierra Network (later called the ImagiNation Network). It was geared more-or-less toward children, with cartoon-ish art and themes, but it allowed users to play a variety of games and chat with friends in online chat rooms - all for an hourly fee, of course. It was, in every way, ahead of its time.
Particularly in terms of what users were willing to pay. At one point, the hourly rate for access to Sierra's network had climbed as high as $6 per hour. This was in addition to the subscription fees users were already paying for dial-up access to the internet itself and (in some extreme cases) long distance telephone charges levied by the telephone company. By contrast, many telephone sex chat services charged less than half that amount.
The Sierra Network, not surprisingly, failed and was shut down in 1996 by AOL, who had acquired it from AT&T. Ironically, this was not too long after the internet had become both widely understood and easy-to-use, and right around the same time that several other online gaming services had begun to flourish. Among them, an exciting new service offered by a company called Blizzard.
The Sleeper Has Awakened
In 1992, a revolutionary videogame was released that captured the imaginations of gamers the world over, almost immediately selling half a million copies. One of the first "real- time strategy" games ever made, it tasked the player with building a virtual army by collecting resources and then constructing buildings that would produce their machines of war - all in "real time." While the player was at it, their "enemy" was doing the same, building up to an eventual showdown between the competing armies, after which one side would claim total victory. Whoever had the most machines or the best strategy would win the day. It was like chess combined with backgammon wrapped up in an erector set, and gamers loved it.
That game was not Warcraft.
Westwood Studios' Dune II, predating Warcraft by at least two years, was based on the science fiction books by Frank Herbert, and cast the player as one of three races bent on controlling the spice-infested planet of Arrakis. It has been described as among the best PC games ever made, and many still consider it the best example of its genre ever made. Yet, it was not without its share of problems.
As with any game based on a license, Dune II relied on the players' familiarity with the premise of the original works. The Dune series had sold millions of copies of books world-wide, and had been made into a feature-length film in 1984, but to many people, the story was simply too dense to get their heads around. Case in point: The resource Dune II players were tasked with mining, the spice "Melange," took Herbert an entire novel to attempt to explain. Called "the spice of spices" in his appendices, the fictional Melange has been attributed with prolonging life, allowing users to foresee the future, astrally project objects through time and space, turn people's eyes blue and make giant worms try to kill you. "Catchy" is not the first word which comes to mind here.
Still, the game was among the first of its kind, and as such is fondly remembered and universally considered the grandfather of the RTS genre. The cri
Re:Full Text AC ftw (Score:4, Informative)
As of 1999, Battle.net was "the only profitable online gaming service in existence," according to Greg Costikyan in an article for Salon.com. "How? Advertising. 30+ million ad impressions in one month alone."
The Internet Chess Club [wikipedia.org] was founded in 1995 and (I understand) has been profitable pretty much all the time since then. It also gets its money directly from subscribers and not advertisements, which seems more impressive to me.
Disclaimer: I'm an ICC admin (although a reasonably recent one).
Warcraft (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Warcraft (Score:5, Insightful)
There was NOTHING in there about what has made Blizzard successful. It was a collection of one-line quotes from former Blizzard team members, strung together with some vague industry history that you could get from Wikipedia. And the omissions! No examination of internal structure, no dissection of ownership/development/publishing models, no description of team culture, nada. FFS, 90% of the article was about Condor/Blizzard North -- not Blizzard -- but then the article didn't even mention that Blizzard North GOT SHUT DOWN. And not a SINGLE reference to Starcraft, just the most popular online game in the history of the world.
Jesus, that was shit.
Personally.... (Score:5, Insightful)
When World of Warcraft came out, for example, a *lot* of Mac owners bought it and gave it a try, simply because the number of games written to run well on new Mac hardware with OS X is pretty limited. (If you're a Mac gamer and you want to play an MMORPG, how many choices do you really have besides WOW? I guess there's Shadowbane... but you have to skip Star Wars: Galaxies and most others.)
By the same token, how many copies of Diablo, Warcraft and Starcraft were sold to Mac owners over the years who bought them largely because they were about the only Mac compatible games you could find at the local superstore or discount store?
Re:Personally.... (Score:2)
Re:Personally.... (Score:5, Insightful)
How many copies were sold to PC gamers because it was the common ground for LAN parties with mac gamers? It only takes one mac gamer to motivate the sale of a lot of PC games, and since you can usually use one purchase for everyone to try it out, it makes for great free advertising.
Re:Personally.... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Personally.... (Score:2)
Of the 40 or so hard core MMPORPG players I know, about a third play on Linux. The demographic of hardcore raiders and Linux users must overlap pretty well.
Re:Personally.... (Score:2)
*Depends on
Re:Personally.... (Score:5, Interesting)
The drawback is that this would require a reboot of your system - but many high-end games are the solitary program you want running while you're playing them anyhow - and besides, chat and browsing could still be included on the distro with the game.
I think this would be a deal-killer for me. I don't want to reboot my machine. Heck I don't even want to shut down my running applications. On OS X, the multitasking and resource management is usually good enough that I can leave resource hungry Adobe applications sitting idle while I play a game and not have it affect the performance. That is important to me. I usually have a dozen or more applications open, excluding all my terminals and I don't want to have to reopen all of them and find the files I'm working on again.
Here's another idea. Get your game working in stripped down environment and provide it in a different VM for each platform. Heck, you can build it to run in the JVM if you want. Better yet though, I'd like to see some company spearhead the development of a gaming specific environment that takes care of 75% percent of the coding needed for a given game style. Make it cross platform and sell smaller, cheaper "content" packages for it. The game is a file paradigm (an open standard format). Get a few different gaming houses on board and one or two companies can start selling dev tools that make games for it. You could undercut everyone since the cost of adding new features would be shared by all partners and the open source community and it would let you sell cheaper than anyone not on board. Companies could focus on content, with only a few coders to that are more than scripters to add new features and fix bugs. Tied into a P2P service or centralized server with advertising it would provide a way for people buy new games as well. Think of gamers booting up their favorite game and having a "buy other games" option including sequels, add ons, and similar games.
Instead of $60 titles you could sell $20 titles and still make just as much profit and have more variety and not have to worry about platforms. Heck, port it to the consoles too and watch your possible market balloon.
I'd be much happier to see this, than to see a bootCD game that makes it harder for me to play games.
Re:Personally.... (Score:2)
Re:Personally.... (Score:2)
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Re:Personally.... (Score:2)
Re:Windows/Mac combo CDs (Score:2)
My copy of Diablo II that I got back before the expansion to that game came out was Mac/Windows compatible. It was built for Mac OS 8.5 if I remember correctly. At that time, I bought the game intending to use it on my PC, and used it that way for a long time, and now I'm using it on Mac OS X! Blizzard built up a lot of good will from me by doing that. Not to mention they patch their games for a long time after they
The wait is what I forget (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps Blizzard has lost less customers because of buggy early releases.
Borrowed from Tolkien? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Borrowed from Tolkien? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Borrowed from Tolkien? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's just funny looking at screenshots of the new Warhammer games and trying to fight the urge to exclaim "That looks just like Warcraft!", especially since I actually know better. I don't play the miniatures game, but I'm involved in a regular WFRP group, so I know the art style well
I think Warcraft takes a fair bit of inspiration from D&D too, if only because their world is a lot more light-hearted and high-fantasy than the Old World. Yes, even with all the demons and undead, Azeroth is still less grim and dirty than the average gutter in Altdorf. Probably less smelly too.
Re:Borrowed from Tolkien? (Score:2)
Or like anyone else with an ounce of sense, he completely ignored shysters who want to sell pewter figurines for real money.
Re:Borrowed from Tolkien? (Score:5, Insightful)
But that doesn't make them bad. I happen to hate what Games Workshop has done to itself. In 1989 they had the most fun tabletop games in existence, the best gaming magazin,e and the best roleplaying game I had ever played. They abandoned the latter and dumbed down both of the former in order to sell overpriced hunks of metal (I was particularly distressed at what happened to WH40K). I'm glad that Blizzard came along and took some of these ideas and made them into great games, since GW doesn't have a hope in hell of doing so (I predict WAR will suck).
TFA is right in that Blizzard is just good at making extremely playable games. World of Warcraft is the best game I have ever played. I have spent more time on it than any other game, even the original Civilization, and I still have tons of stuff to do. Sure, there are lots of bad things about it, like the daft emphasis on 40 man raids, but it's still a cracking game and well worth the money.
And I love Blizzard for one additional reason. Their Mac support is by far the best of any gaming company. The WoW Mac Tech forum has the highest CM response of any forum and the responses are always useful and honest. Blizzard go out of their way to make Mac users feel like first class citizens in their games and it is much appreciated.
A flawed article the slashdot link is pointing to (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A flawed article the slashdot link is pointing (Score:3, Interesting)
Blizzard hasn't got a cent from me since then.
Re:A flawed article the slashdot link is pointing (Score:2)
See, starcraft is a big game in worldwide gaming championships.
It has been balanced, patched so much that it is now almost the most delicately tended game in history.
In korea, its a national sport, even.
The secret? They aren't sharing... (Score:3, Insightful)
B-Grade? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:B-Grade? (Score:2)
Blizzard Entertainment (Score:2, Insightful)
My Explanation (Score:3, Insightful)
The secret? (Score:5, Insightful)
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Profit!
Re:The secret? (Score:2)
Re:The secret? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The secret? (Score:2)
I don't think it's any big secret that there will be a starcraft 2 in the not too distant future.
Re:The secret? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
B-rate games? Rock & Roll Racing anyone? (Score:5, Informative)
Not so secret sauce (Score:2, Insightful)
First off, Blizzard was a household name for gamers well before World of Warcraft thanks to the Warcraft, Diablo, and Starcraft franchises.
Second, this game was hyped for almost 4 years before actually being released. That is a lot of time for both marketing and word of mouth to build consumers into a buying frenzy.
Lastly, and I believe the most important single factor, was
Re:Not so secret sauce (Score:2)
The game is heavy on PvP, heavy on Instancing (a halfway house between single player and multiplayer), and light on storyline. It appeals to the 13 year old gamer in a way that a traditional MMORPG never would.
This is what made them their millions..
Yes they lost people like me (who like to spend time with their RPGs and play over a period of years) but I'm probably in the minority.
How's about years of support? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How's about years of support? (Score:2)
Re:How's about years of support? (Score:2)
Well, 3D Realms/Apogee released a patch [3drealms.com] for a 14 year old game (version 1.0 released in 1991, patched to 1.0a in 2005). It's just a small bugfix, but it must be some kind of record.
Re:How's about years of support? (Score:4, Funny)
Win98? That game sucked.
/me ducks!
Diablo "instantly clicked"... (Score:5, Funny)
Confessions of a WarCrack addict (Score:3, Interesting)
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Re:Confessions of a WarCrack addict (Score:2)
Which college? I suddenly feel like broadening my education...
(Unless it was this one [penny-arcade.com].)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
flawed (Score:2)
The webmaster should be Fired! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The webmaster should be Fired! (Score:2)
If you don't know how to set up typographically correct layouts, don't even try.
Its not up to users to make your content readable, its up to your layout people. You don't see newspapers telling people to buy magnifying glasses, or change the font. They work with the best layout they can and fit as much text at a readable size as possible on a page to both be prof
Modem Wars (Score:5, Informative)
Bruce
"enlightening explanation"? (Score:2)
B Quality!? Lost vikings B Quality?! (Score:2)
So, how does one go about considering Lord of The Rings (the old game) and Lost Vikings B Quality?
Now this was the Lord of the Rings way back when when it was cool... I used to wear the ring and sneak past the guards at the mill and blow up the machines at the get go and it kept pretty much to the books are at least in plot.
Secret Sauce (Score:5, Interesting)
In the mid-nineties, Blizzard was purchased by Jan and Bob Davidson, the founders of the Math Blaster line of educational CD-ROM titles. Jan and Bob treated Blizzard well. When Blizzard said they wanted to take extra time to polish a game, Jan and Bob let them have the time they need. Each new wave of corporate acquisitions - CUC / Cendant / Havas / Vivendi - has tried to force Blizzard to push out titles early to meet release dates and profit targets, but each time Blizzard has been able to put in a phonecall to key shareholders to get the time they need to make things right.
If you combine this type of financial and moral support with the dedication and perfectionism of the employees of Blizzard, you get good games.
Next time you scroll through a Blizzard title, look at the names in the "Special Thanks" section.
Phone sex? (Score:2, Funny)
Ideas on "Secret Sauce" (Score:2, Insightful)
1. Support - Blizzard supports both PC and Mac gamers, bridging the gap between the two platforms and allowing both groups to kill the everloving frag out of each other. Combine this with extensive bug testing and game balancing, and you have a game that the company continues to support on a long-term basis.
2. Stability - For the most part, Blizzard games
did anyone else notice... (Score:3, Insightful)
What a worthless waste of 10 minutes of my life. It was nothing but an overview of Blizzard's history, with a meaningless soundbite question at the very end.
Pathetic.
-stormin
Re:Innovation (Score:2)
Re:Innovation (Score:2)
Warcraft 2 was only slightly better, mostly in the graphics and storyline areas.
Starcraft was their first truly great game.
Re:Innovation (Score:4, Insightful)
Ahh, not quite. Herzog Zwei [wikipedia.org] predates Dune 2 by three years. Also a very enjoyable game.
Re:Innovation (Score:5, Funny)
Everyone knows that all genres are ultimately just a ripoff of Pong.
Re:Innovation (Score:2)
Re:Innovation (Score:2)
Re:Innovation (Score:2)
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Re:Innovation (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Innovation (Score:2)
Being balanced is not the same thing as being better either. Its all about preferences. I preferred the huge array of unit choices and complementing strategies available in TA to the simplified and strictly balanced units of W2. With W2, after a while it felt like you were just playing the same games over and over again, at least IMO.
Re:Innovation (Score:2)
The UI in Total Annihilation is all about minimizing mouse clicks, allowing the player to queue up orders for various key units beforehand and then let them handle things on their own.
That lets the player concentrate on higher-level strategy rather than having to tell every unit what to do every single damn time.
Not only can almost very type of action (build, move, attack, guard, start patrol route, e
Re:Innovation (Score:2)
Chalk me up as another huge fan of TA. Man, I played the hell out of that game back in the day. Me and a couple buddies would frequently spend 4-5 hours playing each other. Definately some pretty intense games there.
However, outside of our subgroup, most everyone else on the RTS scene was in love with Warcraft 2. Which I admit was a very good game, but I still enjoyed my playtime with TA more. I think it comes down the fact that the sheer number of unit choices you had in TA was staggering, while W2 it was
Re:Innovation (Score:5, Informative)
Blizzard has *never* made games that created genres. Their genius
has always been to come to genres than already exist and perfectly
distill what has been successful in what came before, and then
polish with some of the best development processes in the industry.
Re:Innovation (Score:2)
Sauce (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Sauce (Score:2)
That's because the #1 reason Blizzard kicks ass is, they play-balance the shit out of their games.
I'm not much of a gamer... (Score:4, Insightful)
Can someone confirm this is the same Blizzard that hawks DRM crippleware?
The degree of DRM crippleware in their products vary. I'm pretty sure they've never used Starforce. Several require a CD; while the usual pirate NOCD patches exist, the NOCD versions can't be used to play via the Blizard.Net servers.
More complaints come about Blizzard's "Warden Client" anti-cheating package, since it's arguably a form of spyware, and the methods have some false positive potential. I thought I remembered it also had some limited copy-protection stuff, too (IE, complaining about Alcohol 120%), but I find no on-line confirmation.
There are certainly other makers that are have both more hostile [glop.org] and more friendly [slashdot.org] DRM attitudes; Blizzard seems about middle-of-the-road for the Games industry, as far as protection systems go.
Don't like DRM? Keep trying for that Amulet of Yendor.
Re:I'm not much of a gamer... (Score:2)
Yes they can. You just need a legitimate CD key.