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shikamaru317 on 20 August 2023
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Ryuu96 said:
shikamaru317 said:

My understanding is that Metzen was the creative director while Kern was the game director. On some games those are a shared role, on others, they are separate. On games where it is split, the creative director handles the more creative aspects of development, such as designing the game world, while the game director is a more managerial position, Kern's job would have been keeping the team on task, keeping development on schedule, keeping the overall dev machine running smoothly. That is a big part of why he left Blizzard in 2006, when he first heard that there were Activision buyout discussions taking place (the buyout would eventually close 2 years later in 2008). He knew that the work culture at Blizzard would be damaged, he knew that they would grow too large to properly manage, those were both predictions that turned out accurate.

For instance we recently learned that over 8,600 people worked on Diablo 4 in some capacity between the core team (of over 1500 I believe) and localization teams and QA teams and contract workers and such (making it the game with the largest dev team of all-time if I'm not mistaken, beating out RDR2 with 4,100 people who worked on the game in 2nd place), compared to the Vanilla WoW team that Kern lead being just 40 developers for about 80% of it's dev cycle, growing to 80 developers as launch neared and more devs were needed for crunch. Mark knew that when a team grows to a huge size it becomes horribly inefficient, it's the same issue that Ubisoft had with growing too big, when you grow that big you are wasting a ton of money on extra payroll for developers who are only operating at like 20% of the efficiency of developers on a smaller team. It's because Blizzard has grown to that unmanageable size of over 6,000 employees that they now have to inject monetization into everything just to make back their huge budgets.

EM8ER is a crowdfunded space game much like Star Citizen, he is selling those expensive ships and such for the game to cover the development costs because he doesn't want to go to a large publisher for funding. I'm not a fan of that monetization model, but crowdfunding always has risks, just ask the people that crowdfunded those Peter Molyneux games xD

Metzen is Creative Director but sometimes Creative Director/Game Director are used interchangeably between studios, some studios will only have a Creative Director, some will only have a Game Director. It varies from studio to studio but they often mean basically the same thing, my understanding. Like there is no "Creative Director" for Pentiment, only a "Game Director" and there is no "Game Director" for Forza Horizon 5, only a "Creative Director"

Kern is only listed as "Team Lead" by Mobygames and they take credits from the games themselves so I don't believe he had any "Creative/Game Directing" roles but a team management role, closer to a Producer I would guess which would be making sure the team is on schedule, things are running smoothly, budget is maintained, etc. As you said, I would guess anyway. I've never really seen a "Team Lead" credit, Lol. Since his previous roles were in Producing, I think it's even more likely that is what he did.

But then my question would be, given the recent reports of how shitty of a leader he was, is WoW good because of Kern or in spite of Kern? Was Kern a good "Team Leader" or did he succeed thanks to his team? There are plenty of people in all industries who are terrible leaders and only succeed because the brilliant team beneath them holding them up. Maybe Kern was a great team leader but that was 20 years ago, he is now as washed up as Peter Molyneux with the exception that Peter wasn't a massive dick, Lol.

That Diablo IV credits is misleading as well.

Blizzard credits absolutely everyone at Blizzard even if they didn't work on Diablo IV, Lol. It's kind of nice...

I mean yeah, EM8ER can be compared to Star Citizen, which I also consider a scam, haha.

Yeah, the over 9,000 number is definitely overinflated, that includes special thanks to family members and friends, the development babies list (babies born during the game's development), the IT team, the finance team, the human resources team, the customer service team, the security team, etc. If you weed out all of those and only count up the core development team, the localization teams, the QA team, the voice casts for each language, the contract workers and other external development partners, there are still over 4,500 people I believe, which still puts it ahead of RDR2 for the game with the largest development team to date, RDR2 is sitting at 4,130 professional roles on MobyGames. 

Mark has made the argument that development on this scale is untenable, that payrolls this large are driving game budgets through the roof and are making it necessary for Blizzard to inject monetization into all of their games moving forward. He may have a point there. 

Last edited by shikamaru317 - on 20 August 2023