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Ryuu96 on 20 August 2023
shikamaru317 said:
Ryuu96 said:

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.

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.



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VersusEvil on 20 August 2023

Star Citizen is the biggest longest running scam in gaming.



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Angelus on 20 August 2023

Y'all are giving this guy way too much time of day. Man said some dumbass shit. Man got clowned on for it. You reap what you sow. Beyond that, who gives a shit? We don't need to talk about it for days, and nobody needs to defend his honor. The man wanted your attention, and he's got it. So don't worry, you ain't gotta feel bad for him, cus he ain't feeling bad for himself.

His next game better have a bomb ass title screen tho



Ryuu96 on 20 August 2023
coolbeans said:
Ryuu96 said:

Actually calling it stupid is too light, it was incredibly insulting for Mark to say that the entire team doesn't care about their game because Mark doesn't like their wallpaper, Lol. This is a simple case of "Fuck Around and Find Out" and I won't tone police Pete Hines for biting back. Mark was (maybe) once a good developer 20 years ago but he sure as shit isn't anymore and doesn't know what he's talking about.

If Pete Hines was my boss, I would be proud to work under him, I like when developers call out bullshit in defence of each other, although having said that, I would also agree that maybe it wasn't the smart thing to do simply because Mark Kern ain't nothing but an attention farming troll now and he is getting what he wants, attention.

Quote: "Starfield's start screen either shows hasty shipping deadlines by a passionate team overworked, or a team that didn't care."

That doesn't change what I said really, he is implying either one of those is real, if Starfield wasn't rushed then he is implying that the team didn't care, since we know it absolutely wasn't rushed and was the first thing they settled on then we are only left with the latter part of his assumption, that the team didn't care.

The team who knows they weren't rushed would find that incredibly insulting.

Mark Kern leaves BOTH possibilities open for being true, therefore, he is being insulting regardless, and a dick.



shikamaru317 on 20 August 2023
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

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Ryuu96 on 20 August 2023
Angelus said:

Y'all are giving this guy way too much time of day. Man said some dumbass shit. Man got clowned on for it. You reap what you sow. Beyond that, who gives a shit? We don't need to talk about it for days, and nobody needs to defend his honor. The man wanted your attention, and he's got it. So don't worry, you ain't gotta feel bad for him, cus he ain't feeling bad for himself.

His next game better have a bomb ass title screen tho

You're right. He isn't worth the attention which is what he clearly wants. No point having a debate over Mark Kern of all developers. Like we don't debate about other washed up developers because they don't shit-post on Twitter. He's just attention seeking for his dying game and we're giving it him. So moving on

And I won't debate with my Empire peeps over Mark Kern 😁

Last edited by Ryuu96 - on 20 August 2023

Ryuu96 on 20 August 2023
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

Last edited by Ryuu96 - on 20 August 2023

coolbeans on 20 August 2023
Ryuu96 said:
coolbeans said:

Quote: "Starfield's start screen either shows hasty shipping deadlines by a passionate team overworked, or a team that didn't care."

That doesn't change what I said really, he is implying either one of those is real, if Starfield wasn't rushed then he is implying that the team didn't care, since we know it absolutely wasn't rushed and was the first thing they settled on then we are only left with the latter part of his assumption, that the team didn't care.

The team who knows they weren't rushed would find that incredibly insulting.

Mark Kern leaves BOTH possibilities open for being true, therefore, he is being insulting regardless, and a dick.

No, we technically can't know that.

This is what's lost in your interpretation: you're already presuming Kern's mindset based on your personal determination that Starfield's shipping deadlines weren't "hasty" by default.  Just b/c one of the biggest games of all time got ~10 months extra dev time doesn't translate the same between you, Bethesda, nor Kern himself.  He could have a different mindset of how Bethesda was still wrestling with long overtime hours, scores of new Q/A issues to work through, unexpected hiccups with their new engine, etc. and that can still fit the first part (through his viewpoint).  His bar for the "passionate team overworked" part could have a different threshold from yours.

Should he have avoided the "uncaring" portion in the either/or bit?  Absolutely!  



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shikamaru317 on 20 August 2023
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

Ryuu96 on 20 August 2023

As of December 31, 2021, Activision Blizzard had approximately 9,800 full-time and part-time employees, with approximately 68% in North America, approximately 25% in the Europe, Middle East, and Africa ("EMEA") region, and approximately 7% in the Asia Pacific region. Of these employees, approximately 68% either work directly on, or support, our game and technology development, which represents an approximate seven percentage point increase from 2020.

  • 6,664 Developers Across Activision, Blizzard and King when they were 9,800 Employees.
  • Over 3,000 of the 9,800 were on Call of Duty, but there's not a breakdown there for "developers/non-developers"
  • 6,800 left for Blizzard/King of the total employee size but again we don't have a breakdown between developers/non-developers or breakdown between teams.
  • 6,800 would have to be spread across King, World of Warcraft, Overwatch, New IP, Diablo IV, Hearthstone, Crash.

Feel like I'm missing some things...

Can also add on MLG, Lol.

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