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shikamaru317 on 20 August 2023
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Ryuu96 said:
shikamaru317 said:

Yeah, the over 9,000 number is definitely overinflated, special thanks to family members and friends, the development babies list (babies born during the games development), the Blizzard 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. 

The thing is, if Blizzard is crediting absolutely everyone at Blizzard then that includes developers NOT working on Diablo IV as well. Such as the teams on Overwatch, WoW and their New IP. It's really muddying how many actually worked on Diablo IV but I do find it sort of sweet that they're crediting everyone, Lol.

Activision-Blizzard as a whole is 13,000 employees.

We do actually know what portion of Activision's employees were developers and which aren't developers because Activision actually gave that breakdown recently during a fiscal report! I'll have to see if I can find it but I'm about 90% sure that when Activision-Blizzard was around 10k employees in total, they listed around 5,000-6,000 developers across the entire business.

Soooo Idk...I find it hard to believe that Diablo IV had 4,500+ employees when we also have to account for CoD, Crash/Spyro, Overwatch, New IP, WoW, Candy Crush, etc. Let me see if I can find it because this is an interesting subject. xD

Honestly, it's entirely possible that nearly every developer did work on Diablo 4 at some point. It's not unheard of for a multi-team studio like Blizzard to pull just about everyone onto a single game during crunch, even if only for a few weeks. 

The core dev team is certainly alot smaller than that of course. It would take too long for me to go through the Moby credits and add them all up, but I did take the time to add up all of listed Art department employees and got about 200 there. So 200 on Art, and there are 6 other core development departments alongside art, those being design, story, audio, QA, Engineering, and Production. Overall it seems likely that the core dev team for Diablo 4 was about 900-1,000 people. 

Last edited by shikamaru317 - on 20 August 2023