Ryuu96 said:
shikamaru317 said:
Yeah, same here. Kern's tweet was stupid, and it's pretty obvious that it is motivated purely by a personal dislike of Microsoft, but the man is still a game dev, putting it in quotations seems unnecessarily rude. Yes, his next game (Em-8er) is taking awhile to release, but he is still a game developer, a rather legendary one who directed vanilla WoW and was head producer on Diablo 2. He is also a man who chose morals over money, deciding to leave when he learned that Activision intended to buy out Blizzard because he knew that Activision's ownership would destroy the culture at Blizzard, and his prediction proved accurate, they transformed from a legendary developer into what they are now, a rather soulless company that injects microtransactions and battlepasses into everything, one that has over time driven away many other classic Blizzard devs including Chris Metzen and Overwatch creator Jeff Kaplan.
I think it is pretty obvious that the reason Mark Kern is angry about the ABK buyout and now attacking Xbox every chance he gets is because he personally sees some parallels between Microsoft buying ABK, and the original Activision-Blizzard merger that prompted him to leave the company. He clearly still cares for Blizzards IP's and what remain of his old friends that still work there, and is worried that Microsoft will do even more damage to them than Activision did, via even higher levels of monetization to go alongside day one Gamepass releases. I personally think he is wrong, I think Microsoft ownership of Blizzard will be a boon for the Blizzard developers and their IP's, but I understand why he is worried, because Microsoft could very easily decide to take the greed route at some point in the future. I just wish he would stick to those talking points instead of finding increasingly stupid things to criticize Microsoft/Xbox over, like a title screen being too static and simple for his liking.
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I don't think it's a dislike of Microsoft, the dude is just a prick, Lol.
He did not "Direct" World of Warcraft, he is listed as "Team Lead" The Director was Chris Metzen. He was also not the "Head Producer" on Diablo 2, he was a Producer (alongside Kenneth Williams) the "Lead Producers" were Matthew Householder, Bill Roper and Michael Morhaime.
Mark E. Kern - Video Game Credits - MobyGames
This dude really can't talk about "Activision" destroying the culture of Blizzard when you look at this shit.
r/PCGaming
r/Firefall
Mark ain't angry. I didn't actually know he was still working on a game, now I know why he's being such a prick on Twitter every chance he gets, because he's grifting to get attention for his dying game. The dude is worried about monetisation? He has $40 to $1,500 packages for his game AND a subscription plan, Lmao. He is just as greedy.
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My understanding is that Metzen was the creative director while Kern was the game director (just with a different title of team lead). 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 1200 I believe) and localization teams and QA teams and voice casts in each language 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 has 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 personally not a fan of that monetization model for indie games, but Star Citizen proved that it can work, and any form of crowdfunding always has risks (just ask the people that crowdfunded those Peter Molyneux games xD).
Last edited by shikamaru317 - on 20 August 2023
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